ATLANTA (CNN) – After a long day of work from home, Hadly Clark spent her hours without thoughts through her phone. She spends her regular bedtime at 9:30 pm in favor of online shopping and browsing social media.
Before Clark knows it, the clock rings 1 p.m. She finally slumbers out and wakes up exhausted the next morning, her phone on her bedside table ringing her alarm at 6 p.m.
This cycle of staying up late and regretting the next day is all too familiar to many people, even before the pandemic. In recent years, the phenomenon has been called ‘postponing revenge for bedtime’.
Postponing revenge before bedtime may be a newer term, but the kind of sleep schedule it describes is not, says Dr. Rajkumar Dasgupta, Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine in Los Angeles.
“Postponing revenge before bedtime is just a cry from overworked people, and they try to postpone bedtime just like that so they can reclaim something for themselves,” Dasgupta said.
It is normal for people to want time for themselves at night, but it becomes a problem when they are tired during their waking hours due to lack of sleep, he said.
Clark, a co-director of FasterCures, based in Alexandria, Virginia, said she had no trouble falling asleep before the pandemic forced her to work from home. Her internal clock wakes her up between 05:30 and 07:00, no matter what time she stays awake, so she had to go for coffee and soft drinks to stay awake during the day, she said.
Her days regularly followed routines, but since the pandemic hit, Clark has said she has struggled to create a night routine. She attributes this in part to the fact that she does not want to accept the pandemic.
“If I do adapt to the new way of life, it’s like I accept that it’s the reality, and I do not want it to be,” Clark said.
Brian Sinclair, a software engineer in Albuquerque, New Mexico, said revenge before bedtime stole his sleep long before the pandemic hit. It started about five years ago when his second child was born, and he left less time for himself, he said.
“There’s a lot of lack of control in my life,” Sinclair said, and in the evening he said he was taking control again. He is regularly playing video games or falling into a rabbit hole on YouTube, he said.
Why people do it
Staying inconsiderate browsing or watching television can have someone’s effort to reduce stress, said Vaile Wright, senior director of health care innovation at the American Psychological Association.
“We know that just flipping nonsense and not really communicating in a meaningful way increases our tension, as opposed to reducing it,” Wright said.
People can also find it difficult to switch off at the end of the workday because boundaries have been blurred since the pandemic began, she said.
Sinclair, who currently works for Indeed, is a veteran of the house and has been working for more than a decade. However, his work schedule shifted when the pandemic was able to accommodate the online learning of his children.
We know that just flipping nonsense and not really communicating in a meaningful way increases our tension, as opposed to reducing it.
–Vaile Wright, American Psychological Association
He spends part of his morning helping his son with online school because the 8-year-old struggles to stay focused, Sinclair said. After that, he hands over the responsibility to his wife most of the day.
Consequences of staying late
If you do not get enough sleep, you may get sleep deprivation, which can affect your mental and physical health, Dasgupta said. He said some common consequences are decreased productivity and an increase in cortisol, a stress hormone.
If you later go to bed significantly and wake up around your normal time, you run the risk of accumulating sleep debt from the lost hours, according to Dasgupta. The only way to get rid of sleep deprivation is to sleep the number of hours you missed, which he says is not possible for most people.
Studies have shown that weekends are no longer kept in mind, but that they are not the most effective way to catch up on lost sleep. People could not compensate for the effects of poor sleep during the week – such as snacking, weight gain and disrupted circadian rhythms – by falling asleep on the weekends, according to a study published in 2019 in Current Biology.
Researchers have found that if someone sleeps on the weekends but their sleep quality is poor, they tend to overeat and gain weight.
The amount of sleep someone should get varies for each person, but adults generally need to get seven to eight hours of sleep a night, Dasgupta said.
Using technology late at night can also affect our sleep, he said. Screens give a blue light, which according to Dasgupta suppresses the release of melatonin, a hormone that helps control your sleep cycle.
How to stop sabotaging your sleep schedule
It is perfectly normal for your sleep schedule to be imperfect, especially during a pandemic, Dasgupta said. He advised people to sleep physically and mentally.
Dasgupta said most people like their bedrooms “quiet, dark and cool.” He also suggested that people participate in an activity they enjoy, such as meditation that helps them fall asleep.
Turning off electronics and not putting them to bed is another strategy to fall asleep, he said.
According to Dasgupta, a strategic power nap can also reduce a person’s sleep debt. He recommends an afternoon nap of 15 to 20 minutes between noon and 2 p.m. A nap can lead someone longer in deeper stages of sleep, he said, which can cause longer sleep inertia, the drowsiness that someone feels immediately after waking up.
During the day, people need to strengthen their boundaries and plan time for themselves, Wright said. Clark said she is planning breaks in her day to do activities like exercise.
She said it would help her “get time to take a break that is also good for my physical and mental health.”
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