There’s something familiar about lying in bed, doomscrolling past midnight, even when you know you’ll regret it the next morning. For Gen Z, this nightly ritual has a name: bedtime procrastination. It sounds harmless enough—just another TikTok-friendly behavior like “bed rotting” or “girl dinner.” But new research suggests that delaying sleep might be less about vibes and more about unresolved emotional tension.
In a recent study presented at the 2025 meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies, researchers tracked the sleep patterns and mental health markers of nearly 400 young adults. What they found wasn’t just bad habits—it was a link between bedtime procrastination and deeper mental health vulnerabilities, including anxiety, neuroticism, and depressive tendencies.
This isn’t your usual lecture about putting the phone away. This is a look at what bedtime procrastination might really say about how today’s young adults are navigating overstimulation, avoidance, and emotional self-regulation—one delayed bedtime at a time.
The research followed 390 adults (average age: 24), asking them to log their sleep habits for two weeks while completing psychological questionnaires. Importantly, the study zeroed in on intentional bedtime procrastination—not being kept up by work or social obligations, but choosing to stay awake without any external reason.
Participants who regularly delayed going to bed weren’t just night owls. They scored higher on measures of neuroticism, tended to be more anxious or moody, and showed lower levels of conscientiousness and extraversion. In plain terms: people who struggle with going to bed on time may also struggle with emotional regulation, planning, and engaging with the world.
Rather than filling their evenings with enjoyable or energizing activities, habitual procrastinators were less likely to seek out pleasurable experiences. Their late nights didn’t reflect rebellion or indulgence—they reflected avoidance.
On social media, Gen Z has reframed many tired behaviors (no pun intended) as aesthetic trends. “Bed rotting” is celebrated as a form of self-care. “Sleep revenge” is recast as personal time reclaimed from the demands of productivity culture. But what happens when the scroll becomes an emotional delay tactic?
There’s a fine line between resting and numbing. Between decompressing and detaching. When bedtime becomes the moment we avoid—because lying down means facing our thoughts, or turning off stimulation—it stops being restorative. It becomes a form of passive resistance.
This is where the cultural tension lies. Gen Z knows more than any prior generation about burnout, therapy, and mental health language. But awareness doesn’t always translate into coping. Especially when the architecture of your day is already wired for overstimulation.
Let’s be honest: sleep is vulnerable. It requires surrender. You can’t doomscroll your way into rest. You have to let go.
For someone carrying emotional stress, loneliness, or anxiety, bedtime can feel like entering a space without distraction or defense. It’s no surprise, then, that staying awake becomes a way of postponing that discomfort. The glowing phone becomes a buffer against the quiet. The next video, a reason not to be alone with your own mind.
In that sense, bedtime procrastination isn’t laziness or lack of discipline—it’s emotional friction. And for many, it's the last daily checkpoint where avoidance takes the lead.
Lead researcher Steven Carlson puts it plainly: those who put off bedtime aren’t chasing fun. They’re retreating. “They were less likely to report engaging in exciting, enjoyable activities,” he noted. That reframes bedtime procrastination from being a reward to being a red flag.
The implication is clear: interventions for poor sleep might need to start before bedtime—with emotional health strategies, not just time management apps. In other words, the solution isn’t always a new sleep tracker or alarm hack. It might be asking why we dread the moment the day ends.
Sleep procrastination fits neatly into a broader pattern of delayed self-care: skipping meals, stretching deadlines, or living in a cycle of micro-avoidance that feels manageable… until it’s not. For Gen Z—already the most digitally saturated, therapy-literate, and burnout-conscious generation—this isn’t just a wellness issue. It’s an emotional logistics issue. When every corner of life is optimized for performance or aesthetics, true rest becomes an act of resistance.
But the irony is this: the more we delay sleep in the name of “me time,” the less emotionally resilient we become. The cycle feeds itself—poor sleep reduces impulse control, makes emotional processing harder, and deepens the very avoidance that caused the procrastination in the first place.
It’s worth noting that bedtime procrastination isn’t just an individual pattern—it’s structurally encouraged. Streaming platforms auto-play. Social media never ends. And the line between work and personal time continues to blur in hybrid life. For many, nighttime is the only sliver of agency they feel. It’s the one part of the day not monitored, not productive, not beholden to others. But using that time to delay rest rather than nourish it may reflect a culture that offers too little breathing room and too much stimulation.
The researchers behind the study suggest a shift in how we approach bedtime interventions. Instead of blaming bad habits or offering behavioral hacks, we might need to examine the emotions we carry into the night. That could mean journaling before sleep to externalize thoughts. Or simply acknowledging that you feel tension around ending the day—and sitting with that discomfort instead of avoiding it. More radically, it might mean redesigning daily routines to include moments of non-performative rest—so that bedtime isn’t the first time we stop performing.
Bedtime procrastination is a symptom. Of digital exhaustion. Of emotional overflow. Of young adults trying to delay the moment where nothing distracts them from themselves. And like most symptoms, it’s worth listening to—not pathologizing. The goal isn’t perfection. It’s awareness. Not to fix bedtime overnight, but to understand why sleep feels like something we have to fight for.
In a culture that rewards productivity, performance, and perpetual availability, letting go isn’t easy. But it may be one of the most important things we relearn—one bedtime at a time.
Maybe the trend isn’t about staying up late. Maybe it’s about what we’re too tired to feel until the day is finally, completely, quiet. That quiet can be terrifying. In a world wired for noise and movement, stillness feels foreign—almost unsafe. So we stall. We buffer. We reach for something, anything, to keep the silence at bay. A reel, a Reddit thread, a playlist titled “It’s Fine I’m Just Spiraling.” And when the sun begins to rise, we’re left more depleted than defiant.
But here’s the thing about sleep: it’s not just about rest. It’s about release. The chance to pause the performance and recover who you are without the constant input. And when we delay that moment again and again, it’s not just our bodies that get tired—it’s our sense of self. We forget that healthy sleep isn’t a productivity hack. It’s a kind of emotional hygiene. Just like we brush our teeth or wash our faces, we need rituals that signal: “You can stop now. You’ve done enough.”
What this generation is asking—quietly, subconsciously—is: When is it safe to rest? Who gives me permission to stop trying, scrolling, proving? That’s not a discipline problem. That’s a culture problem. The next time you find yourself fighting sleep, maybe don’t shame it. Maybe ask what you’re trying to avoid. And then ask what it would feel like to meet that avoidance with compassion instead of control.
Not everything has to be optimized. Some things—like sleep, like softness—just need space. So dim the light. Power down the feed. Let stillness become a signal, not a threat. Because sleep isn’t what’s wasting your time. Avoidance is. And rest, real rest, is what makes us brave enough to face tomorrow.
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