Are you feeling well rested and calm after a good night’s sleep?
Perhaps a little less so…
- Perhaps there was a show on TV you just had to watch last night…
- Perhaps you even watched a couple of episodes…
- All whilst scrolling through social media on your phone?
We’ve all done it!
After a long day of working or being otherwise occupied with doing things that are not at the top of our “favourites” list, we can often find that we want to stay up later and “enjoy ourselves”
There’s actually a name for it:
Revenge sleep procrastination.
This term refers to that feeling at the end of the day, where we’re tired and we know it’s probably bed time –
But we’ve not really done anything “fun” today and going to bed feels a bit like defeat…
So we stay up later, watching TV or perhaps even doom scrolling on our phones.
Parents with young children can get this a lot – after being “mummy” or “daddy” all day long, we finally tuck the kids into bed…
And we want some to just be ourselves!
We can end up spending hours doing mindless things we don’t even really enjoy – just because we don’t want to have spent our entire day without taking any time for ourselves.
But here’s the thing – actually the best thing you can do for yourself is to maintain a consistent bedtime.
Boring but true I’m afraid!
When we delay our bedtime in favour of mindless scrolling or half-watching TV, we’re not doing ourselves any favours.
We can often end up scrolling social media until well past midnight, then struggling to get to sleep, waking up feeling rubbish in the morning.
So how do we stop doing it?
Well, one of the best things we can do is to just make a rule about when bedtime is – and stick to it, as if we are a grumpy toddler.
You could even go so far as to put a timer restriction on your phone so that certain apps won’t work after this time.
Many phones have a function now where you can tell it what time is bedtime, and it will go into aeroplane mode or similar, perhaps making the screen grey and disabling some apps.
This is a great way of reminding yourself: Hey, it’s time to go to bed!
Revenge sleep procrastination is one of those things that feels like you’re doing something for yourself, but you’re actually not.
Just like eating cake for breakfast – seems like a good treat every now and then.
But if you do it every day, you’ll soon see some negative results!