By Robyn Finlay, Christina McCallum, Alina Khawaja and Nadia Ozzorluoglu
In an age of work-from-home, Zoom school, and digital socialization, boundaries between being on-the-clock and off-the-clock diminish while screen time skyrockets. Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, working, exercising, sleeping, socializing, and relaxing have been confined to the home. How is a distinct personal space of respite created?
Enter revenge bedtime procrastination: an active choice to delay sleep in order to engage in leisure activities. Oftentimes, this looks like scrolling through the internet—video after video on TikTok or episode after episode of Squid Game—to find joy in content that is easily consumable. Instant gratification in the moment takes precedence over the future and that 9:00 am meeting. Bedtime procrastination is taking back the time lost to labour when contributing to the stain on society that is capitalism. Bedtime is “me” time. It’s the time of night where there are no social responsibilities.
While there may be “benefits” to revenge bedtime procrastination as a means of winding down, this can come at the cost of mental and physical wellness. Bedtime procrastination can lead to insufficient sleep and lower self-regulation. Excessive nighttime screen use can also affect eyesight and reduce attention span. Since social media is a product of the capitalism that this movement tries to critique, is it possible to get revenge?
It can be hard to break away from the internet when it comes to bedtime procrastination. We also watch too much of The Office even though we’ve seen it, like, five times. There isn’t an easy solution. However, here are a few things that can be done to capitalize on those late hours and to stop scrolling: turning phones on “do not disturb” mode an hour before bed, journalling, and meditating. These activities help improve well-being and encourage reflection by reclaiming personal time.
In an ideal world, sleep time wouldn’t need to be used as personal time. Employees wouldn’t be overworked and would have shorter work days. Home would be a space for relaxation and there would be no pressure to continue the grind off-the-clock. There wouldn’t be a need to engage in bedtime procrastination. Although this isn’t completely possible in a capitalist society, as a first step toward this ideal world, Ontario is trying to pass a promising bill that would require workplaces to create a “right to disconnect” policy, giving employees the chance to reclaim some personal time for themselves. The COVID-19 pandemic has also brought greater awareness to the imbalance of personal and work time. This will hopefully result in more policy changes at all levels of government so that bedtime procrastination will be a thing of the past.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to solving the issues at the core of revenge bedtime procrastination because policy change takes time and it isn’t possible to completely eliminate the capitalist system. One of the major challenges of bedtime procrastination is that few people are aware it even exists. Many people do not even realize that this act of scrolling through their phones at night has a name. While increasing awareness about its negative effects can’t fix the problems of bedtime procrastination, it is a starting point. In a society that will work its people to the bone, it might just be better revenge to practice self-care.
Editor’s note: The editors would like to acknowledge and thank the Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) English graduate students who wrote this feature. We would also like to acknowledge and thank the TMU graduate students who commissioned the art for this feature: Pauline Nguyen, Stephanie Klintsaris, Niki Anastasakis, Zahra Mouhammad, and Siobhan Spera.
