I have another name for that: Refusal to Concede. Before fall asleep, I still have a chance to do something great with my life. After, it's officially another wasted day.
Revenge bedtime procrastination
61–70 of 89 posts
Re: Revenge bedtime procrastination
#62This behavior is probably pretty normal for anyone with a job, family and kids. I wouldn't associate it with 'revenge' though.
For me 2 things help with the sleep deprivation, power naps and going to bed super early once in a while.
Power naps started working for me nicely once I removed the stressful requirement of actually having to sleep. I just set my phone timer for 20 minutes and allow my mind to float away. Just hitting sleep for a few minutes this way is super helpful and refreshing. And 20 mins you can easily sneak in even into a work day, or when coming home from work.
The going to bed super early is just me crashing once in a while. Sleep deprivation accumulates and for the sake of my health I just let my body crash at 7pm. Happens maybe once a month.
Re: Revenge bedtime procrastination
#63When you're in bed and about to sleep you have the most control of your attention. You're not on your phone, no one is trying to talk to you. The most access most people have of their attention is right before bed. Things like self-awareness, worry, ambition, memories that might've been ignored all day, are all of a sudden in the foreground of our perception, and a person finds themselves actually thinking rather than just reacting to stimuli.
Re: Revenge bedtime procrastination
#64Re: Revenge bedtime procrastination
#65Charitable 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…
> massive PTO minimums or a 30-hour workweek
and WFH.
i stopped staying up until 3am+ and coming into work dead tired when i started WFH full time.
still didn't cure all my insomnia issues, but stopped the entirely self-inflicted ones.
Re: Revenge bedtime procrastination
#66Bedtime procrastination is my kryptonite. Every other habit like working hard, exercising, eating right I do well at but can't fix this. I've battled with it my whole life. Even as a toddler I would stay up late reading in secret. There is just something about the stillness when everyone else is asleep where I feel like my brain can finally wind down/process the day/kick back and relax. Anyone else struggled so badly…
I've struggled since that age as well. I have good periods and bad periods, but I still can't really get to sleep unless I've had an hour of "quiet house" time.
I did the same thing, BTW. I'd stay up and read, complete school workbooks ahead of time, etc.
Re: Revenge bedtime procrastination
#67Haven't read the comments, but I have something to contribute. I am married and a parent of a 1.5-year-old child. Employed at a full-time job, working out is something I consider mandatory. Adding all this together, plus household chores, it leaves little time for personal projects or just chilling out by myself. I used to stay up late to get some alone time, but as the article describes, it is not sustainable, espec…
One of the times in my life I got along the best with little sleep was when I woke up before dawn to go surfing. I still went to bed after midnight, but the excitement of going into the ocean got me out of bed quick as lightning. There's something to that idea for sure.
Re: Revenge bedtime procrastination
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe fix it by accepting it and yourself. I love getting up early for the same reason. Everyone is asleep everything is quiet and I can just relax in a way I can’t when people are around. If you can, try to arrange your morning routine to give you some extra time to sleep and enjoy the quality time at night.
To second this- I have been an extreme night owl my entire life. Trying to sync my sleep/wake to an early morning schedule was to live a miserable life of permanent jetlag. It wasn't thriving; it was barely surviving, with no mental juice left for love or hobbies. I finally had a health event that was a real come-to-Jesus moment about 10 years ago. As part of dealing with it, I learned to accept my nature as being wh…
what do you mean by "accepting"? To me accepting means being a night owl and not being bothered by it or its social repercussions. sorry, mixed with the note about the health event, it sounds like you sleep nights now, but that clashes in my mind with "living as myself" and "accepting". not trying to say it is contradicting, just that I did not fully understand it.
Re: Revenge bedtime procrastination
#69It’s amazing how much attaching a name to some phenomenon or problem and discussing it helps in understanding it and taking the first steps to address it. Knowing that bedtime procrastination is a real thing that affects others not only gives me comfort, but also helps me think about it very consciously and figure out how to take the first steps to solve it. I never thought about it from the revenge and agency perspe…
Ideas, both names and concepts, are interfaces. They are useful, though they are also limited in the sense both that the label is not the thing (the map is not the terrain), and that simply having a name for a thing is not the same as having a deep understanding for it, though having a language for discussing the thing can itself help substantially in achieving that understanding. It can also lead to cargo-cult or fad-based ("buzzword bingo") aping, however, and you want to be on the watch for that.
Feynman illustrates the distinction between naming and knowing in an lecture (I believe also appearing as an essay in one of his books):
See that bird? It’s a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it’s called a Halzenfugel, and in Chinese they call it a Chung Ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird. You only know something about people; what they call the bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way.
http://www.fotuva.org/feynman/what_is_science.html>
I find Feynman a bit too dismissive of the value of shared terminology, though his broader point has merits.
Re: Revenge bedtime procrastination
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
To second this- I have been an extreme night owl my entire life. Trying to sync my sleep/wake to an early morning schedule was to live a miserable life of permanent jetlag. It wasn't thriving; it was barely surviving, with no mental juice left for love or hobbies. I finally had a health event that was a real come-to-Jesus moment about 10 years ago. As part of dealing with it, I learned to accept my nature as being wh…
what do you mean by "accepting"? To me accepting means being a night owl and not being bothered by it or its social repercussions. sorry, mixed with the note about the health event, it sounds like you sleep nights now, but that clashes in my mind with "living as myself" and "accepting". not trying to say it is contradicting, just that I did not fully understand it.
By accepting, I mean stop trying to force myself to be a morning person. This wasn't a trivial thing- the job I had paid well, and people depended on me. But I now do different work, that fits my natural rhythms.