Putting off bedtime for one more boxset episode, or some ‘me time’? You may be a sleep procrastinator – and doing yourself serious harm
The hour is late, and I am tired. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to do the sensible thing and go to bed. This is the first time today that no one has needed anything from me. The first time I haven’t been expected to be working, cooking, tidying, fetching, managing, delivering, caring or doing any of the other panoply of tasks most working-age adults seem to face on any given day. It’s just me, being me, in the quiet. Why would I cut this precious moment short?
I have always been a night owl – our owlish (night-time) or larkish (morning) chronotypes are set by our genetics – but in recent years I’ve become a “revenge sleep procrastinator”, too. This clunky translation of the Chinese term bàofùxìng áoyè became popular on social media during the pandemic. In China, most sleep or bedtime procrastinators are workers on the soul-sapping and horribly common 9-9-6 schedule (9am-9pm, six days a week) who, despite being exhausted, use their late-night, post-work hours to claw back some sense of self, even when they know they should be sleeping. My situation – two small children plus full-time job – is embarrassingly far from their experience, and yet many of us in the west find ourselves doing the same things. The revenge bit – which might be better translated as “retaliatory” – is that we are avenging ourselves against our busy lives, either by staying up too late or by not going to sleep once in bed, often because we’re on our screens.
