Revenge Bedtime Procrastination: What Is It and How Do You Stop It?

It’s 11:47 pm. We’re tired. The alarm is set for 6:30 am. And here we are, halfway through a TikTok rabbit hole, telling ourselves we’ll close the app after one more video. Then another. Then another.

There’s a name for this. It’s called revenge bedtime procrastination. And according to our 2026 UK Sleep Survey, it’s catching out more of us than you might think.

Almost a third of UK adults look at social media in bed before sleep. A quarter watch TikToks or YouTube videos. The average scroll lasts over 15 minutes. The clock keeps ticking. Sleep keeps slipping. Here’s what’s actually going on, and how to put the phone down without giving up your evening.

The phrase has three parts, and each one matters.

Bedtime procrastination itself was coined in 2014 by behavioural scientist Dr Floor Kroese and her team at Utrecht University, in a paper published in Frontiers in Psychology. They defined it as deliberately delaying sleep without any practical reason for doing so. No emergency. No shift work. Just a choice to stay up.

The revenge part came later. It started in China in the late 2010s, where overworked employees on the “996 schedule” of 12-hour days, six days a week, were said to be staying up late to reclaim some time for themselves. The phrase went global in 2020, when journalist Daphne K. Lee tweeted:

“A phenomenon in which people who don’t have much control over their daytime life refuse to sleep early in order to regain some sense of freedom during late-night hours.”

Three things define the behaviour: a delay in going to sleep that cuts your total rest, no good reason for staying up and full awareness of exactly what the morning is going to cost you.

You might be revenge bedtime procrastinating if:

• You set yourself a target bedtime, then quietly ignore it night after night
• Your “one more episode” turns into three
• The phone comes to bed with you, and stays there
• The reason you’re still awake is enjoyment rather than insomnia or worry
• You know exactly how tired you’ll be tomorrow, and you stay up anyway

One thing worth being clear on: this is different from insomnia, which is when you genuinely want to sleep and can’t. With revenge bedtime procrastination, sleep is available. We’re choosing not to take it yet.

Our 2026 UK Sleep Survey asked 2,000 UK adults what they typically do in bed before they go to sleep, and how long they spend doing it. The results paint a pretty recognisable picture.

What we actually do in bed before sleep

• Read a book or magazine: 35%
• Watch TV: 34.5%
• Scroll social media: 29.2%
• Browse the web: 28.5%
• Watch TikTok or YouTube: 24.3%
• Check emails: 23.6%

Of those who do, the average social media scroll in bed runs to nearly 16 minutes, with TikTok and YouTube sessions stretching closer to 17. Late-night TV averages over 21. Stack two or three of these together, and you’ve quietly added an hour to the day before sleep even arrives.

The age split is sharper still. Among 25 to 34 year olds, 53.2% scroll social media in bed. Among 18 to 24 year olds, 51.2% are watching TikTok or YouTube before sleep. Among the over-65s, only 3.3% are watching videos in bed. The screen-led bedtime is a generational story.

There’s no single cause. A few likely culprits tend to combine:

Time poverty

At the root of it, revenge bedtime procrastination comes from feeling time-starved during the day. Long working hours. School runs. Caring responsibilities. Life admin. By the time the evening arrives, there’s often nothing left for us. So we take it later, even though we know we might regret it in the morning.

The intention-behaviour gap

We want to sleep. We plan to sleep. Then we don’t. Behavioural psychologists call this the intention-behaviour gap, and it’s why sleep procrastination feels so familiar to so many people. Self-control tends to be at its weakest at the end of the day. The things competing for our attention (Netflix, TikTok, group chats, online shopping) are designed to keep us engaged.

You might be a natural night owl

Some people are wired to feel more alert in the evening. If you’ve got an evening chronotype and you’re being forced into an early-morning schedule, switching off at 10 pm can feel impossible. For more on this, our guide to resetting your body clock is a useful place to start.

Screens that don’t let us go

Phones aren’t passive. They reward attention, in short, dopamine-hitting loops. Our 2026 Sleep Survey found that 11.3% of UK adults with disturbed sleep blame spending too long on a phone or tablet before bed as one of the main reasons. It’s a tough opponent at midnight.

Stress and racing thoughts

Over a third of UK adults with disturbed sleep (36.5%) say racing thoughts or a busy mind are the reason. Another 28.4% cite stress. For some people, scrolling becomes a way of avoiding the quiet moment when the lights go off, and the thoughts start.

Research into bedtime procrastination is still relatively new, so we don’t yet have a full picture of who’s most affected. What our 2026 UK Sleep Survey does show is a clear generational pattern in the screen-led behaviours linked to it:

• 53.2% of 25 to 34 year olds scroll social media in bed (compared to 8.9% of over-65s)
• 51.2% of 18 to 24 year olds watch videos like TikTok or YouTube in bed
• 31.6% of 18 to 24 year olds are phoning or texting someone in bed before sleep
• 22.8% of 18 to 24 year olds are gaming in bed

Daytime stress patterns also matter. People with high daytime demands (demanding jobs, caring duties, studies) often feel that the evening is the only time that’s truly theirs. Which makes it that much harder to hand it back.

One late night isn’t a big deal. The trouble is when it becomes the default, four, five, six nights a week. The effects don’t show up on the first night, or even the fifth. They build up over time.

Regular sleep loss can lead to:

• Difficulty focusing, remembering and making decisions
• Lower mood and increased irritability
• A weaker immune system
• Higher risk of cardiovascular and metabolic issues
• Daytime fatigue that makes you more likely to procrastinate the next day again

Researchers have found that end-of-day mental resources matter; when our capacity for self-control is at its lowest, sleep procrastination is more likely. Stack that against accumulated tiredness, and the loop gets harder to break.

We’ve all been there. Closing the laptop, putting the phone down and going to sleep when we said we would is harder than it sounds. A few shifts that actually help:

1. Plan a wind-down hour: A bedtime is when you want to be asleep. The hour before is the bit that does the work. The 10-3-2-1-0 method is a brilliantly simple way to plan one.
2. Put screens to bed first: Aim to switch off 30 to 60 minutes before sleep, and charge your phone outside the bedroom if you can. Our TV beds come with built-in timers for exactly this reason.
3. Make the bed worth coming to: When bed actually feels like a treat, the late-night scroll loses some of its grip. The right mattress and pillow do a lot of the work. Our Sleepmatch tool finds you a match in around three minutes.
4. Anchor your wake-up time: Consistent wake times train your body clock and make it easier to fall asleep earlier over time. Our Sleep Cycle Calculator works out the right time to switch off.
5. Reframe your “me time”: If 11 pm is the only time you feel like yourself, the day is what needs the rework. A 20-minute walk at lunch, a protected hour before screens come out, even a small claim back of the day, can take pressure off the night.

For a deeper guide to building habits that stick, our take on the importance of evening routines is the place to go next.

Late nights happen. A binge of a new series. A long call with a friend. The World Cup. The trouble is when the late night becomes the default, four, five, six nights a week. A wind-down hour, a screen-free buffer before bed and a bed you actually look forward to climbing into can take a lot of the heat out of “five more minutes”. And help you reclaim the morning along with the evening.