It's late. You should go to bed. You know you should go to bed. But you’ve spent so much of your day with work, the kids, all the things you do for other people.
What about you? What’s left of your day for you? Maybe you should stay up and take that me time you’ve been dreaming of all day. But if you do that, you’ll become one of them. A revenge bedtime procrastinator. A wha? A revenge bedtime procrastinator.
According to Edel Coffey, talking to Sarah McInerney on Drivetime, revenge bedtime procrastination is a Chinese term that "describes the habits of workers who, you know, were working 12-hour days and then they were trying to reclaim a little bit of leisure time to make up for those long workdays. So that’s where it comes from".
Edel, like so many of us, is guilty of being a revenge bedtime procrastinator. And she was a revenge bedtime procrastinator before there was a term for revenge bedtime procrastination:
"It started very intensely around the time I had kids because, do you know when people used to say that thing, like, 'Oh, the baby’s asleep now, it’s seven pm. You should go to sleep.’ And that to me was the most offensive suggestion because I was like, ‘This is the first time today that I’m going to get to pick up a book or to pick up a glass of wine or to watch a television programme.’ So, it kind of started then."
Whether you have kids or not, Edel suggests that people’s lives these days tend to run at the same sort of pace and we tend to view downtime as something that’s almost wasteful:
"We don’t then allow ourselves that downtime or free time or we see it as almost lazy or wasted time, when actually we need it as human beings. So I think we’re all kind of doing it automatically. We do know that we need it, we know that we need to unwind and yet somehow, we find it hard to do so."
And that’s where staying up late catching up on all the things we didn’t get to do during the day comes in. Edel sometimes hits the spare room because she’s planning to stay up really, really late.
"It’s just the simple stuff that you’d like to do during the day that people just don’t have time to do during the day and just kind of catching up on that, almost. And it feels like self-care or a luxury, when really it should just be something small and simple that we all do."
So, when we stay up late to finish that Slow Horses season finale or get in another chapter of our current read, we’re sacrificing our precious sleep to get in that extra bit – or that only bit – of downtime. And sure, that’s not a great option, but it’s sometimes all the world’s left us:
"It is, I think, a very negative comment on our culture and our society the fact that we have to, you know, squeeze in, like, steal our sleep from ourselves, which is so important for our health, to kind of squeeze in this leisure time. It just says a lot about the kind of world we live in where we just kind of work non-stop."
Is being a revenge bedtime procrastinator good for us though? Short-term, Edel reckons yes, but long term, no. Could the solution, Sarah wonders, be turning things around and getting up early to get some downtime in before everything else gets under way?
"No, see, I think that’s just equally mad. It’s just the flipside, you know, Mark Wahlberg getting out of bed at 2.30am for his workout. Like, he’s on a different time zone. And, like, Meghan Markle gets up at half four to do her emails. It’s all as bad as the other. It’s just that we need to look at our world, our culture, our society and say, maybe we need to go back to that nine to five life?"
You can hear Sarah’s full chat with Edel – if you can squeeze it in without compromising your sleep – by clicking above.
