Revenge bedtime procrastination
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Revenge bedtime procrastination
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Re: Revenge bedtime procrastination
#2Thanks for putting a name on this.
I’ve been suffering from this for a long time(and occasionally still do), but have started leaving my phone farther away and it has significantly improved.
A part of me still feels that the sense of control and freedom which you get during the night is unparalleled.
Re: Revenge bedtime procrastination
#3> However, note that the activities that people engage in during revenge bedtime procrastination aren’t necessarily enjoyable, and the procrastinator may engage with them simply out of a desire to feel in control.
These attempts are an instance of the neurotic paradox[1], and keep repeating themselves because the desire to feel in control is never completely fulfilled. A repetition compulsion happens when unresolved conflicts continue to generate attempts at solutions which do not really work ... until a genuine solution is found. [2]
[1] When an individual's way of coping with unconscious concerns creates even more problems in that individual's life.
Re: Revenge bedtime procrastination
#4I’ve had a bad habit of doing this for years. I’ve recently tried to fix it but am struggling to let myself sleep & ‘waste’ the rest of the night. It’s exactly as the article suggests, I do it because I feel like my life has no personal time/privacy otherwise.
Re: Revenge bedtime procrastination
#5I’ve had a bad habit of doing this for years. I’ve recently tried to fix it but am struggling to let myself sleep & ‘waste’ the rest of the night. It’s exactly as the article suggests, I do it because I feel like my life has no personal time/privacy otherwise.
Exactly the same, and "wasting" the time is the same sentiment I have. It means I get ~5h of sleep normally, and most of the activities I do in that time are what Tim Urban (in TED talk, "Inside the mind of a procrastinator", which is excellent) calls "Dark Playground" - something I next morning feel at least a bit guilty for spending time on.
For the last couple of days, during some workshops, I've slept for ~9h a day, and difference in my mential acuity today vs otherwise is impossible to deny / wave away...
Re: Revenge bedtime procrastination
#6Charitable take:
Revenge procrastination is, as the article says, a symptom of poor emotional regulation. Our emotions push us towards having leisure/entertainment 24/7 but that is obviously not healthy even for the financially independent. Simultaneously, there is an ever-expanding universe of things to experience/study/engage with so there will always be reasons to feel that your obligations are causing you to miss out on life. So the emotional regulation is about accepting that you won't be able to do everything in life and making conscious decisions and sacrifices about what is important to you.
Uncharitable take:
Any article about revenge procrastination that doesn't include a call to action about legislating massive PTO minimums or a 30-hour workweek is an element of the ongoing class war. Convince labor that their struggles are internal and they'll never organize against you. That there is little political will to expand workers' rights or benefits suggests that capital is in a dominating position in the battlefield of public opinion.
>How to avoid revenge bedtime procrastination
>...
>Think about—and potentially write down—how this behavior harms you.
As always, the truth is somewhere in-between.
Re: Revenge bedtime procrastination
#7I did this a lot this year, usually until 3am every night.
I’m a remote worker who works and games at the same desk and chair.
Often I would lie to myself about being productive and then quit a tutorial after a few minutes and load up a game instead.
I found I stopped since about September, mainly by telling myself nothing really productive happens after 11pm and to just go to bed.
Re: Revenge bedtime procrastination
#8I’ve had a bad habit of doing this for years. I’ve recently tried to fix it but am struggling to let myself sleep & ‘waste’ the rest of the night. It’s exactly as the article suggests, I do it because I feel like my life has no personal time/privacy otherwise.
Exactly the same for me. I subconsciously try to fight the sleep from my eyes while trying to do any activity that won't make me feel like I wasted the evening. And sometimes I have to yell at myself in my head just to go to bed when my eyes are already half closed.
I don't know how to stop this habit. Maybe knowing there's a name and that it happens to other people might help me catch myself.
Re: Revenge bedtime procrastination
#9Framing it is a revenge doesn't make sense for me. It's more like I'm asserting myself as a real person with interests, not just obligation fulfillment machine.
Re: Revenge bedtime procrastination
#10I take some issue with the "revenge" terminology, as it implies an unhealthy adversarial framing of the problem. Whenever I have had to deal with this myself, I've always chosen to view it as my subconscious prioritizing some kind of emotional need over my need for sleep.
Viewed that way, the solution is obvious: Identify the emotional need that I've been neglecting and figure out how to satisfy it during the normal course of my day/week. Like most simple and obvious solutions, however, putting it into practice can sometimes be quite difficult.