Any of this sound familiar? You get into bed at a reasonable hour with the intention of getting as much sleep as possible, turn off the lights and shut your curtains. A couple of seconds pass and – lo and behold – you haven’t quite fallen asleep yet, so you grab your laptop and see if there’s anything that will lull you into sweet nothingness on Netflix.
You’ve been meaning to catch up on the new series of Orange is the New Black anyway. It’s going to take a few minutes to load, so you might as well check in on Twitter to see what’s happening, when suddenly you find yourself sucked into an argument about youth unemployent.
Speaking of unemployed, you wonder what your ex-boyfriend is up to these days? A quick look at his recent Facebook posts tell you that he’s on holiday, which, as well as making you wonder how he can afford a holiday, reminds you that you really must find a bikini yourself – now’s a good a time as any to have a quick browse, isn’t it?
And while you’re at it, you might as well check Reddit to see if there are any particularly compelling threads. Before you know it, it’s 2am and you have 13 tabs open on your browser and you’re no closer to going to sleep than you were four hours ago. Well done, you’ve manage to procrastinate your way into a sleepless night. Again.
If any of this applies to you, you’re not alone because new research has shown that ‘bedtime procrastination’ is most definitely a thing. Dutch researchers have just conducted a study on bedtime procrastination, which they see as failing ‘to go to bed at the intended time, while no external circumstances prevent a person from doing so’. We might all be doing it, but the study suggests that it’s definitely not doing us any good: ‘Self-reported bedtime procrastination was related to general reports of insufficient sleep above and beyond demographics and self-regulation.’
No massive surprise there, but how do we get out of this internet-induced-lack-of-sleep hole? Jordan Gaines Lewis, a sleep researcher at Penn State College of Medicine, told Science of Us that it’s all about planning. ‘It’s most important to realise how crappy you feel and how much your work suffers after an OITNB night time binge… A simple fix is to keep a schedule for yourself and stick to it. If you can’t fit in all of your fun daytime activities in before your scheduled bedtime, then take comfort in knowing you’ll be alert and well rested the next day to experience them.'
Although we’re kind of lolling at the idea of Facebook trawling falling under the category of ‘fun daytime activities’ we can definitely see where he’s coming from. We might have FOMO about missing something amazing on Twitter at 1am, but it’s very rare that anything of note actually happens overnight. So maybe it’s time we give our laptops (and ourselves) a bit of a rest.
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophiecullinane
Picture: Beth Hoeckel
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.