Maria Knöbel, MBBS, knew she should be sleeping, but after long days making clinical decisions as a general practitioner, she often stayed up late to read.
“It was the only time of the day that was mine,” says Knöbel, medical director and co-founder of Medical Cert UK. But pushing her sleep back was starting to backfire, and she’d wake up groggy, hijacking her productivity the next day.
Knöbel was practicing what researchers call revenge bedtime procrastination, a deliberate delaying of sleep to reclaim personal time that feels absent during daylight hours. While the term may seem unfamiliar to some, Knöbel’s sleep habits are not uncommon. According to a survey from Amerisleep.com, 56% of Americans say they don’t have enough personal time during the day, and nearly six in 10 Gen Z respondents admit to staying up late scrolling on social media, even when they know it’s hurting their health.
What it is and why we do it
“Revenge bedtime procrastination is a concept where people, even though they’re tired, put off going to bed because they feel like they deserve some time to themselves,” says Jennifer Martin, Ph.D., sleep expert and professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Often, people might do it to do things that they enjoy, that they haven’t had time to do during the day, and it has the unfortunate consequences of making people sleep deprived the next day.”
In her practice, Martin sees it most often in young adults and parents of young children. “Young adults… like to stay up and do things that tend to happen late at night, like watch movies,” she explains. “The other group I see it in a lot is parents with young children… couples want time together after their kids are in bed, and even though they’re very tired, they feel like that’s the only time they have to be together.”
Sleep consultant Meg O’Leary, founder of A Restful Night, sees the same pattern in her work with families. “Parents are running on zero with a full load of parenting responsibilities before work, then a full day of work, then parenting until your child goes to bed,” she says. “It leaves little time for ‘me time.’”
The hidden costs
While it may feel like a harmless habit at first to reclaim a sense of control, the irony of revenge bedtime procrastination is that it undermines the very relief it promises. Martin says chronic sleep loss quickly takes a toll.
“If we don’t get enough sleep, we tend to be sleepier the next day,” she explains. “When we are chronically sleep deprived, we start to see more significant impairments… in terms of our ability to cope with stress.”
The effects go beyond fatigue, bleeding into our relationships and decision-making skills. “When you’re more tired, you tend to be more irritable and edgy,” Martin explains. “We’re not good at regulating our emotions, so it creates conflict in relationships, too.”
Rethinking the “relaxation time” myth
Martin says one of the biggest misconceptions she comes across is the belief that we need hours of downtime at night because we’re so exhausted. “It’s the other way around,” Martin says. “The reason you’re so exhausted is because you’re sitting down in front of the TV for two hours every night when you should be sleeping.”
She sees this pattern frequently with couples, especially parents. After the children are finally in bed, many will default to low-effort activities like binge-watching shows or scrolling on their phones. Those activities can feel relaxing in the moment but do little to strengthen their connection or restore their energy. Over time, that pattern can leave couples feeling more disconnected, not closer.
The ripple effect of those late nights watching TV is exhaustion and lack of connection. “They’re actually too tired to go out and enjoy their time on the weekends….” Martin says. “They may even make plans for the weekend but then cancel them because everyone’s exhausted.”
This dynamic applies to individuals, too. “The things that we tend to do when we’re pushing off our bedtime are not… [leading] most people toward things that they care about,” Martin says. “Scrolling on social media or binge-watching TV shows… unless you work in that industry… that’s [probably] not… moving [you] forward.”
Martin isn’t opposed to having time to decompress at the end of the day, but it shouldn’t be taking over your evening. Instead, she says that if we sleep earlier, we won’t feel like we need to sit around and decompress for so long.
How to break the cycle
Martin says breaking the habit isn’t about eliminating “me time.” Instead, she says to make that time more intentional and try to move it to a part of the day that doesn’t cost your rest.
Shorten your wind-down. Martin recommends limiting evening downtime to about 30 minutes. If you tend to lose track, set an alarm or a TV shut-off timer.
Swap low-value activities for higher-value ones. Consider replacing part of your downtime with an activity you enjoy but rarely make time for.
Shift the timing. Move your time to mornings, weekends or other pockets of the week.
Fix the upstream cause. For parents, O’Leary recommends adjusting bedtime routines to help children become independent sleepers.
Create environmental cues. Knöbel now reads an hour before bed with lighting no brighter than 60 lux, and Martin suggests switching your phone screen to black-and-white mode in the evenings to make it less engaging.
Photo by /Shutterstock