It's 11.40pm. You're exhausted. You've been in bed for an hour. And you're still scrolling.
There's a name for this. In Chinese it's bàofùxìng áoyè, roughly "revenge staying up late." It spread through Chinese social media as shorthand for the long hours work culture of the cities, then crossed into English in 2020 as revenge bedtime procrastination. Within months it had become a description almost everyone recognised: the habit of delaying sleep, knowingly and against your own interests, because the hours after dark are the only ones that feel like yours.
It's easy to read this as a discipline problem. Put the phone in another room. Set a wind down alarm. Buy the right app. But the word that matters in that phrase isn't procrastination. It's revenge.
Revenge is a response to something taken.
The behaviour was studied before it had a viral name. In 2014, Dutch researchers introduced the term bedtime procrastination, defined as going to bed later than intended without any external reason for doing so.[i] What they found didn't fit the stereotype of the lazy night owl. It looked more like a struggle over self regulation at the end of a day that had already demanded a great deal of it.
That makes sense. When your day belongs to your inbox, your manager, your children, your clients and your commute, the evening is the first stretch of time with no one waiting on you. Sleep, in that light, isn't rest. It's surrender: the moment the day ends and the next one, which also isn't yours, begins. Staying awake is a small act of protest. It's also a protest the body ends up paying for.
The night has become the only room of one's own.
Virginia Woolf argued that a woman needed a room of her own in order to write. A century on, many of us don't have a room so much as a window of time, somewhere between the last email and the first yawn. That window has to hold everything the day crowded out: rest, play, connection, boredom, desire.
It rarely does. What fills it instead is the easiest available pleasure, and the phone is very good at being that. So we trade sleep for something that feels like freedom but mostly isn't. The scroll doesn't restore us. It just postpones the end of the day.
What gets lost first is intimacy.
When the night becomes the only time for yourself, it stops being time for anyone else. Partners go to bed at different hours. One person scrolls while the other sleeps. The slow, unstructured time in which desire usually begins (talking in the dark, lying close with nothing to do) gets squeezed out by the private negotiation each of us is having with the clock. And a body running on too little sleep is a body in a state of low-level alarm, which is precisely the state in which desire withdraws.
The fix isn't a stricter bedtime.
We could treat revenge bedtime procrastination as another behaviour to optimise away. But that would miss what it's telling us. The answer isn't to win the battle with the night. It's to stop needing to fight it, by giving back some of the time the day takes.
That might mean a lunch break that's actually a break. An evening that begins at 7pm rather than 10.30. A shared hour with a partner that has nothing to do with screens or logistics. Small, protected pockets of time in the daylight, so the night no longer has to carry all of it.
The night wasn't meant to be the only part of the day you get to keep. When you stop fighting for it, sleep tends to come easier, and so, often, does everything else that happens in bed.
[i] Kroese, F.M., De Ridder, D.T.D., Evers, C., & Adriaanse, M.A. (2014). Bedtime procrastination: introducing a new area of procrastination. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 611.
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