Revenge bedtime procrastination

This probably would work for most but mine tried to kill me.

My oldest had a stretch where 5:30am was his normal, natural wake up time. By stretch I mean I think he was 6 or 7 and finally grew out of it.

Alright I’m ready. Let’s go!

I’m usually a 7-8am until to 12-1am kind of person, so that was tough.

One of the times in my life I got along the best with little sleep was when I woke up before dawn to go surfing. I still went to bed after midnight, but the excitement of going into the ocean got me out of bed quick as lightning. There's something to that idea for sure.

I've started doing this as well this year, waking between 0530 and 0700. I work out within an hour of getting up.

I'm usually ready for work between 0930 and 1030. It required a LOT of training (I am not, historically, a morning person) but I have been super consistent with it for the last few months.

On a plus side, I can get up without an alarm now on a consistent basis. On the minus side, I now get super sleepy at 2200, which makes hanging out late very difficult.

The alternative was starting work when I got up, but the flipside to this was my workouts getting on super late if I got hit with a late meeting. I still work out like this while I'm traveling. It usually means I have to skip on team dinner, which sucks.

Names are important. One of the most important things, perhaps. It conditions how we think. For example, the denomination “fiscal paradise” could have been “tax evasion den” instead.

I had a similar revelation at work recently.

I've lead a team for the past several years. Our productivity and the quality of the work never was never questioned for the first ~4 years. We consistently met or exceeded expectations, and everyone was happy.

In the past year of belt tightening, my leadership and methods have come under scrutiny by our executives. I've spent many hours defending my decisions, especially team structure. The thing which finally got them (mostly) off my back was sharing the name of the methodology that most resembled what I had built. Suddenly my explanations check out.

While I'm happy to have a lot of that pressure relieved, it's also been a frustrating experience. My credibility relied on someone else giving a name to a methodology that I devised independently, and that was more important than any of the results of the previous 4 years.

Ideas, both names and concepts, are interfaces. They are useful, though they are also limited in the sense both that the label is not the thing (the map is not the terrain), and that simply having a name for a thing is not the same as having a deep understanding for it, though having a language for discussing the thing can itself help substantially in achieving that understanding. It can also lead to cargo-cult or fad-based ("buzzword bingo") aping, however, and you want to be on the watch for that.

Feynman illustrates the distinction between naming and knowing in an lecture (I believe also appearing as an essay in one of his books):

See that bird? It’s a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it’s called a Halzenfugel, and in Chinese they call it a Chung Ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird. You only know something about people; what they call the bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way.

<http://www.fotuva.org/feynman/what_is_science.html>

I find Feynman a bit too dismissive of the value of shared terminology, though his broader point has merits.

Maybe fix it by accepting it and yourself.

I love getting up early for the same reason. Everyone is asleep everything is quiet and I can just relax in a way I can’t when people are around.

If you can, try to arrange your morning routine to give you some extra time to sleep and enjoy the quality time at night.

For me it’s all about removing the tempting things I would normally waste time with. Go camping and don’t take a phone or book or kindle. Buy night two I’m asleep before my head hits the pillow!

So at home I try to do the same. Before reaching for the laptop or phone I ask myself what I’m going to do with it, and if the answer Is waste time, I try very hard not to pick it up (doing something else makes that easier - load the dishwasher, get lunch ready for tomorrow, etc)

I can't say I've struggled with it--I've leaned into it and accepted it as how I get my own time. The quality of that time however is low since it comes at the end of the day. Sometimes I'll have a large meal, short but deep nap, then have quality late night time. The 'fix' seems to have come from being able to get by on fewer hours of sleep as I get older. Other times like around DST change, I'm able to get time at the beginning of the day, which if I plan or think of something doesn't merely go sleeping in while half-awake.

I consider it a feature, not a bug.

Also read in the dark with a flashlight when I was a kid. I'm writing this near midnight with my wife and our dog soundly asleep. I'll be around for an hour or two until I switch off to sleep myself. All I hear is the faint hum of my laptop fan and the car lights that pass by on the road in distance. Just perfect.

Some life lessons from a fellow night owl. Don't worry about it! Don't schedule important meetings at 8 am! If you need to become a regular at some place at 8 am, then they only solution for a night owl, is to get up before 6; 5:30 for example - then you are foolling your body into thinking you're still getting up at night.

I've struggled since that age as well. I have good periods and bad periods, but I still can't really get to sleep unless I've had an hour of "quiet house" time.

I did the same thing, BTW. I'd stay up and read, complete school workbooks ahead of time, etc.

I bedtime procrastinated pretty badly.

CBT-I helped a lot. It forces you to skip to a schedule. The schedule is completely set around the time that you want to get up. Or at least it forced me to; I was paying $300/mo for the privilege!

Quitting Reddit helped a lot too. I wouldn't have done this had their leadership team decided to go hostile with their API access, but they did, so i did. It's been a great time-regainer. I didn't realize until after I left (and using this site more) that Reddit was designed to be a textual version of the same hooks that keep people glued to social media, which I quit almost entirely years back for the same reason.

(New Reddit does infinite scroll by default, with no way of turning it off, along with boosting chats, de-emphasizing multireddits in favor of subscribed reddits, tweaks their front page to maximize engagement, rewards short, quippy posts regardless of substance, and more. I still browse Reddit through Google for finding local restaurants and things to do, but I'm enjoying that while I can until I have to trudge through TripAdvisor or city-data.)

These days, I fall asleep within 15 mins of hitting the bed and wake up between 0530-0700 without an alarm feeling refreshed on most days.

Everyone telling me to accept it, I wish I could. Unfortunately the kids gotta get up and go to school!

If it can fit into your schedule try the flavor of biphasic sleep where you go to bed with everyone (or even a little early) then wake up 4 hours later for 2 hours or so max, then sleep another 4. It will give you your alone time, with a motivator to get to bed earlier as that is now a prerequisite. It has been proposed that this is closer to the "natural" human sleep cycle that people used before ubiquitous artificial light.

Lack of sleep is literally unhealthy.

You "listen" to anything or silence?

Is there a name for this circadian misalignment? I've never done any serious testing but over time have experienced the same realization, that my ideal day seems to be longer than 24 hours.

Absolutely agreed. I've had some type of insomnia on and off most of my life, last year was particularly bad. Started taking melatonin, first day I fell asleep and rested like I couldn't for the past year. Asked my doctor about and he told me to keep taking it as long as I felt it worked, since anything he could give would be much much more addictive

> Often I would lie to myself about being productive and then quit a tutorial after a few minutes and load up a game instead.

I struggled with this exact thing. For me personally I was able to focus better by dual-booting my machine so that my personal desktop/storage/workspace was distinct from my work stuff. Currently I have a work laptop I use on the same desk and I turn off my personal machine during the work day.

Revenge makes sense for me as I feel I'm "getting back" at the circumstances of my life for taking time away from me

I think it’s because it was translated from a Chinese expression. Probably the original had different nuances.

Asserting against whom? Your sleep?

Exactly the same, and "wasting" the time is the same sentiment I have. It means I get ~5h of sleep normally, and most of the activities I do in that time are what Tim Urban (in TED talk, "Inside the mind of a procrastinator", which is excellent) calls "Dark Playground" - something I next morning feel at least a bit guilty for spending time on.

For the last couple of days, during some workshops, I've slept for ~9h a day, and difference in my mential acuity today vs otherwise is impossible to deny / wave away...

Exactly the same for me. I subconsciously try to fight the sleep from my eyes while trying to do any activity that won't make me feel like I wasted the evening. And sometimes I have to yell at myself in my head just to go to bed when my eyes are already half closed.

I don't know how to stop this habit. Maybe knowing there's a name and that it happens to other people might help me catch myself.

This was my way of making time for my stuff without disturbing my sleep schedule as a parent.

The philosophy basically is: do I want to do it bad enough to wake up early?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I learned a thing or about myself in the process.

Love this. How much suffering have I inflicted on myself from the sheer refusal to accept that forces other than my own will play a part in determining my destiny?

That’s not Refusal to Concede. That’s conceding completely. By taking time out of your sleep you’re officially conceding that you can’t fight forces that impose this onto you, so you’re going to take it onto “you time”.

> Power naps started working for me nicely once I removed the stressful requirement of actually having to sleep.

This is a lesson I keep having to relearn, that rest without sleep is still beneficial. And of course there's always a reward for 'failing' to fall asleep - then I get to do something interesting!

Lately I've had some success in making a game of cultivating enjoyable, productive thoughts while I lie there unable to fall asleep, rather than indulging in the usual anxious worry / regret cycle.

Yeah, I'm not for mindless consumption of social media designed to make you addicted, but this article really feels like the medicalization of what would be described before as a slave revolt.

Playfulness isn't even a basic human traits, it's an animal trait, and yet the lack of any consideration in this article on whether the work/life balance might truly be unhealthy and people just need a breather sometimes, this feels truly sociopathic.

報復性熬夜 is the Chinese source of this.

A place were 996 is also thrown around a lot. That's 9am to 9pm 6 days a week.

This articulates well why the tone of this article irritates me so much.

> Furthermore, revenge bedtime procrastination is also associated with the concept of deliberate procrastination, which in this context occurs when people intentionally delay going to sleep, because they feel that they deserve some time for themselves.

People do deserve time for themselves. To frame that as a feeling that people have rather than a basic need is insulting, like “people feel that they need human contact”, or “people feel that they need regular sleep”.

Sure, spending hours on social media is a luxury (and a waste of time) rather than a human right, but it’s absurd to imply that someone who literally does nothing but work and meet others’ needs has an emotional problem for wanting a pocket of time to use as they choose.

>Any article about revenge procrastination that doesn't include a call to action about legislating massive PTO minimums or a 30-hour workweek is an element of the ongoing class war. Convince labor that their struggles are internal and they'll never organize against you

Do you think eg. Waren Buffet paid for this article to be written? And do you have any data that show that people who work are more affected by the issue in the article than people who don't (eg. highschoolers?)

> massive PTO minimums or a 30-hour workweek

and WFH.

i stopped staying up until 3am+ and coming into work dead tired when i started WFH full time.

still didn't cure all my insomnia issues, but stopped the entirely self-inflicted ones.

I think that might have to do with your body clock and schedule. As you said, those are your "regular" sleeping times. If you start to consistently go to bed at 10pm and make that "regular", you'll get the same quality of sleep as with your current schedule. But, ultimately, if 1am to 9am works for you and there are no major negative effects to your life, I wouldn't think there is anything wrong with continuing to keep that schedule.