“Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals,” Vladimir Nabokov writes in “Speak Memory.” He goes on, “It is a mental torture I find debasing … I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.”
Reason, humanity, and genius may not be found in the shadows of your room at bedtime, or past it, when there’s nothing left to do but go to sleep, and you find yourself, against your better judgment, not even doing that. Scientists at the self-regulation lab of Utrecht University, in the Netherlands (which specializes in examining bungled attempts of all kinds), are calling this phenomenon “bedtime procrastination.” The name was coined by Dr. Joel Anderson, of the school’s Practical Philosophy department. “When I started using this term, everybody immediately knew what I was talking about,” he told me. The team’s initial research, published recently in the journal Frontiers of Psychology, defines the problem as “failing to go to bed at the intended time, while no external circumstances prevent a person from doing so.” Dr. Floor Kroese, who led the study, said, “Funny enough, I do not at all experience bedtime procrastination myself.” Her husband, on the other hand, will often tell her that he’s coming to bed in fifteen minutes, only to show up an hour and a half later.
To figure out what the trouble was, Anderson, Kroese, and fellow researchers decided to conduct a twenty-minute online survey of a hundred and seventy-seven people, recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online marketplace for workers from a wide array of fields. The participants were shown a “bedtime procrastination scale” containing nine items—including “I have a regular bedtime which I keep to,” “I easily get distracted by things when I actually would like to go to bed,” and “I want to go to bed on time but I just don’t”—and gave answers ranging from (almost) never to (almost) always. Participants were asked other questions, too, like how good they are at resisting temptations, and how tired they feel during the day. Eighty-four per cent reported that they slept too little or felt tired at least once per week; more than forty per cent said that they felt this way at least three or four days per week. “Bedtime procrastination is just a specific area in which people fail to keep to their good intentions,” Kroese explained. “We find that people who are generally more likely to procrastinate on things are also more likely to procrastinate on going to bed.” Kroese contends that avoiding bedtime involves the same mental process as failing to resist a cookie while you’re trying to diet.
“It’s a longstanding puzzle in philosophy, since Aristotle: why it is that people fail to do what they know is good for them to do,” Anderson said. “People want to improve their health; people want to go to bed on time.” Yet sleeplessness has become a public-health concern, according to the Centers for Disease Control: around fifty to seventy million American adults have some kind of sleep disorder; a third of adults are not sleeping enough hours; and only a third of high-school students are coming close to a good night’s rest. Insufficient sleep has been linked to memory problems, cardiovascular disease, obesity, and car accidents.
In another study—whose results will soon be published in Journal of Health Psychology—Kroese looked at a representative sample of twenty-four hundred and thirty-one Dutch adults, who responded to an online survey and kept a sleep diary every day for a week. The participants reported what time they wanted to go to bed, what time they actually went to bed, and, if there was a discrepancy between the two, whether that reason was outside of their control (crying baby, sick husband, waiting up for a tardy daughter) or within it (good TV). Again, her team found that a large number of people got insufficient sleep and that, as the report states, “people who have low self-regulation skills are more likely to keep watching the late night movie, or play yet another computer game despite knowing they might regret it the next morning when waking up tired.”
“When you’re in these situations, it’s sort of a foggy state, a foggy inertial state,” Anderson said. “You need to get going, you need something to get you out of that. You need a greased skid to help you.” This might be a timer that switches off your television, or an alarm on your phone—anything to switch off the illicit zombie impulse that makes you keep scrolling through Twitter under the bedcovers. “It’s not magic, but the effect is robust,” he went on. “If there’s a clear cue, and a clear plan of action lined up, then there are ways of managing yourself.”
That is, of course, if we really want to manage ourselves.
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Credit: Nishant Choksi.