Revenge Bedtime Procrastination: What Three Studies Measured About the Hour You Take Back

Evidence Review · The Reading Room, Vol. 105 · 9 min read · what three studies measured about the hour you take back at midnight

Revenge bedtime procrastination is the internet’s name for staying up late on purpose to get some time that is finally your own. The research term is plainer and older than the meme. Three Dutch studies have measured it, and one of them asked people why they do it. Their answers split into three different problems with three different fixes.

The house goes quiet at about ten. The dishwasher is on, the last message has been answered, and nobody needs anything from you. You are tired enough that you have read the same paragraph twice. You know that bed is the sensible choice and that the alarm is set for six. And you sit there, phone in hand or a programme you are not really watching, until it is well past midnight, because this is the first hour of the day that has belonged to you and you are not ready to give it up to sleep.

The next morning you are exhausted and slightly cross with yourself. Then the day runs exactly as it always does, and at ten o’clock that night you do it again.

The short answer: revenge bedtime procrastination is delaying sleep on purpose to claim time for yourself after a day that had none. Research on bedtime procrastination has linked it to getting insufficient sleep in a representative sample of 2,431 adults, and a qualitative study found that people describe three distinct versions: staying up because they feel they deserve time for themselves, losing track of time, and waiting until they feel sleepy enough to fall asleep.¹ ² ³

Jump to: What it is · What was measured · The three versions · What it is a symptom of · How to fix it · Questions women actually ask

What is revenge bedtime procrastination?

It is the habit of staying up later than you meant to, on purpose, to get time that is finally yours after a day spent on other people’s schedules. The “revenge” is against the day. You could not control the meetings, the calls or the dinner, but you can control midnight, so you take it.

The phrase spread online around 2020, from a Chinese expression about workers staying up late to reclaim time from long working hours. The research concept is older. In 2014 a team at Utrecht University led by Floor Kroese introduced “bedtime procrastination” as a formal idea and built a scale to measure it.¹

What have the studies actually measured?

Three things, in order.

The first study, in 2014, recruited 177 adults online, with an average age of about 38, and excluded anyone with a sleep disorder or night-shift work. People who scored lower on self-regulation reported more bedtime procrastination, and bedtime procrastination predicted insufficient sleep even after accounting for demographics and self-regulation.¹ The authors concluded that it appears to be a prevalent and relevant issue associated with getting too little sleep.¹

The second, published in 2016 in the Journal of Health Psychology, used a representative sample of 2,431 Dutch adults. A substantial share of them regularly went to bed later than intended, and the link between weaker self-regulation and insufficient sleep ran through bedtime procrastination.² In plain terms, staying up is the route by which a tired, stretched person ends up short of sleep.

The third study did something the first two could not. It asked.

If the hour you take at midnight is the only hour in the day that is yours, it is worth seeing what the other twenty-three are spent on. The Quiet Audit lays that out in ten minutes. Start here.

Why do I stay up late when I’m exhausted?

In 2019 Sanne Nauts and colleagues, including the health psychologist Denise de Ridder of Utrecht, interviewed 17 people who frequently delayed their bedtime and had no diagnosed sleep disorder or shift work. Their explanations fell into three groups.³

Deliberate procrastination. Participants wilfully delayed going to bed because they felt they deserved some time for themselves.³ This is the revenge version. It is not a failure to notice the time. It is a decision, made with full knowledge of the cost.

Mindless procrastination. Participants lost track of the time because they were absorbed in what they were doing.³ The programme rolls into the next episode. The phone scroll has no end. Nobody decided anything.

Strategic delay. Participants went to bed late because they felt they had to in order to fall asleep quickly.³ The authors noted that this group may be describing unrecognised insomnia rather than procrastination at all.

The researchers suggested that telling these apart may help design interventions that work.³ That is the useful part for you, because the three need different responses, and the advice usually offered, put the phone away and go to bed, only fits the second one.

What is revenge bedtime procrastination a symptom of?

The deliberate version is best read as a symptom of the day, not of the night. If the only unclaimed hour you have starts at ten, of course you protect it, and protecting it with your sleep is the one currency you still control. The studies above measured self-regulation, and weaker self-regulation was associated with more procrastination.¹ ² It would be easy to read that as a verdict on willpower. A fairer reading, for a woman who has spent fourteen hours regulating everything for everyone, is that by ten o’clock there is not much left to regulate with.

That is an interpretation, and the studies did not test it in women in their fifties specifically. What they do establish is that the behaviour is common, that it costs sleep, and that for many people it is chosen for a reason that makes sense. The reason is worth taking seriously, because a fix that ignores it will not hold for more than a week.

For some women the strategic version is the real one, and it overlaps with the sleep changes of perimenopause. If you delay bed because lying awake is worse, that is worth a proper conversation, and our piece on being too tired to talk at dinner and wide awake at 9:52 is the place to start. The sentence for the appointment is short: “I’m exhausted but I can’t fall asleep, and it’s been going on for weeks.”

How do you fix revenge bedtime procrastination?

For the deliberate version, the fix is to move the hour, not to confiscate it. Taking away the only personal time you have and calling it sleep hygiene will fail, because the need that created the habit has not gone anywhere.

The practice is small and it attaches to something that already happens every evening: the moment the dishwasher goes on. That is when your hour starts. Eleven o’clock was always too late for it. Mark it out loud if that helps: “This is mine now.” Then set a second alarm on your phone, a going-to-bed one, labelled with a single word, such as “enough.” When it goes, the hour is over and you have had it. For the mindless version, that alarm is the whole fix: it gives the evening an end that the programme or the phone will never provide.

It helps to be honest about the limit. If your evening only frees up at ten because the day is crammed to the edges, no alarm will fix the day. That is a question about how much you are carrying before the evening begins, which is a larger conversation than sleep.

And if the evening is where the work thoughts finally catch up with you, so that even the stolen hour is spent solving things, that pattern has its own piece: why am I still solving it at eleven at night.

Questions women actually ask about this

What is revenge bedtime procrastination a symptom of?

Most often, a day with no time of your own. In interviews, people who deliberately delayed bed said they felt they deserved some time for themselves.³ It can also reflect absorbing evening activities with no natural end, or, in some people, trouble falling asleep that may point to insomnia.

Is revenge bedtime procrastination linked to ADHD?

It can be. ADHD affects time awareness and the ability to stop an absorbing activity, which fits the mindless version described in the research.³ The studies cited here did not look at ADHD specifically. If losing track of time happens all day as well as at night, it is worth raising with a doctor.

What is the 3:2:1 rule before bed?

A popular heuristic: stop eating three hours before bed, stop work two hours before, and stop screens one hour before. It is sensible advice, but it comes from wellness writing rather than a tested trial of the rule as a package, and it addresses habits, not the need for personal time.

How to fix revenge sleep procrastination?

Give yourself the personal time earlier in the evening, with a clear start and a clear end, rather than trying to cut it out. A going-to-bed alarm gives the evening an ending. If the delay is really about not being able to fall asleep, talk to a doctor about insomnia.

Is it bad to stay up late for me time?

Occasionally, no. As a nightly habit, it reliably costs sleep: bedtime procrastination has been linked to insufficient sleep in both online and representative samples.¹ ² The need behind it is legitimate. The timing is what costs you.

If the hour at midnight is one symptom of a longer tiredness that nobody around you sees, the wider pattern is set out in our burnout guide: everyone keeps telling you how well you’re handling this.

On the research. The two quantitative studies are correlational, one drawn from an online panel and one representative of Dutch adults. The qualitative study interviewed 17 people, which is right for mapping reasons and wrong for estimating how common each reason is. None of the studies focused on women in midlife, and none used the word “revenge.”

References
1. Kroese FM, De Ridder DTD, Evers C, Adriaanse MA. Bedtime procrastination: introducing a new area of procrastination. Frontiers in Psychology. 2014;5:611.
2. Kroese FM, Evers C, Adriaanse MA, De Ridder DTD. Bedtime procrastination: A self-regulation perspective on sleep insufficiency in the general population. Journal of Health Psychology. 2016;21(5).
3. Nauts S, Kamphorst BA, Stut W, De Ridder DTD, Anderson JH. The Explanations People Give for Going to Bed Late: A Qualitative Study of the Varieties of Bedtime Procrastination. Behavioral Sleep Medicine. 2019;17(6).

Written by Tomasz Nowak for Blue Leaf Journal. Updated: 27 September 2026.