Many people today find it hard to sleep without the known endless scrolling through social media sites at bed. That seems to be a catastrophic waste of time, that is the result in executive functions deficit not allowing the person to have the necessary self-discipline to just go to sleep when needed.
But nothing could be further from the truth.
It seems that such a behavior (also known as ‘Bedtime Procrastination’) is the result not of lack of willingness or knowledge of the need to go to sleep, but of deeper emotional needs of the person that find their way to the surface at the end of the day right before sleep…
Persons who are endlessly scrolling through Facebook and Instagram know that they have to sleep. They also understand that what they do will destroy their next day due to fatigue. However they still stay awake and continue to scroll. Only because with this behavior they fulfil another important need: The need for personal time they didn’t have the chance to enjoy during daytime.
Everyone needs that personal time. Time to stay alone, with your thoughts. Time to spend without anyone else talking to you, without doing anything, without thinking of anything. Because our hectic way of living does not allow us to have this personal time during the day, our brain rebels right before we go to sleep and claims that time on his own! So with this scrolling we compensate emotionally for the freedom we didn’t enjoy while we were awake during the day. Now we control the scrolling, we view funny posts, we post reactions and we even enter comments. It is our personal time. Our small moment of being alone, even in the midst of all this information shown.
So imposing bedtime discipline is not fixing this.
The emotional need for personal time will still be there inside me.
I just want time with myself while awake so that I can sleep.
So don’t always blame the night.
Sometimes the problems that arise in the dark, are bred under the sun…
Relevant References
- Kroese, F. M., et al. (2014). “Bedtime procrastination: introducing a new area of procrastination.” Frontiers in Psychology.
- Baumeister, R. F., et al. (2007). “The Self-Regulation Failure Model of Procrastination.
- Cook, A., et al. (2022) in “Revenge Bedtime Procrastination: Causes & Solutions” (Somnology research)
- Yoo, S. S., et al. (2007). “The human emotional brain without sleep — a prefrontal amygdala disconnect.” Current Biology
Harmonia Psychologica 
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