How many of you procrastinate sleeping every night? Get in bed, but don’t turn off the light. Hang out with your devices. Doomscroll for a (long) while. Or watch some videos. Mindless. Relaxing, you say? Unwinding from a busy, stressful day? Some needed quiet time for just you?
Before you know it, it’s late. After midnight. And then you kick yourself for staying up when you know you need the sleep and need to get up tomorrow morning for work or whatever. You wake up at your desired time but you’re tired from not getting enough sleep.
The cycle repeats again.
Sound familiar? Perhaps you do justify it with the previous reasons but you might ask yourself – are you actually getting benefits from it? Are you feeling better overall? Or is it just some momentary respite? Or perhaps that momentary respite is deceptive too…? (Does cycling through endless short videos actually restore your brain…?)
Many clients come to session asking for help with sleep. Sleep procrastination is inevitably one of the major things we work on.
How to break that cycle of hanging out in bed and not actually turning off the lights and going to sleep? If you just did, you’d probably gain all the benefits that you were looking for. But what prevents you from sleeping?
Busy mind?
Feeling amped up?
Not drowsy?
Hearing the call of your device?
A wealth of possible solutions can be found in this post from Time, How to Stop Procrastinating at Bedtimef and Actually Go To Sleep.
So many! Usually it does take a multi-pronged approach to resolve sleep procrastination.
When you reflect on the possible reasons why you don’t just simply turn off the lights when you get into bed, shut your eyes, and go to sleep, what comes up for you?
And as you list those reasons, what is stopping you from changing?
If you acknowledge the benefits of getting more sleep, how do you feel about changing your sleep procrastination pattern now?
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