How to Break the Exhausting Habit of Revenge Bedtime Procrastination
Revenge bedtime procrastination is an onerous name for a simple (and common) phenomenon: putting off sleep in favor of “me time” activities — often involving Netflix, social media, and next-day exhaustion. Here, learn more about this unhealthy sleep habit, why individuals with ADHD are particularly prone it, and strategies to break the cycle.
4 Comments: How to Break the Exhausting Habit of Revenge Bedtime Procrastination
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I 100% agree with the above comments. This article may be helpful in some ways but seems as though it has been written by someone with little knowledge of how the adhd brain functions.
I do this revenge bedtime thing constantly, but I got stuck in the article early on, here:
“Plan satisfying, tiring activities during the day and stick to a schedule that prioritizes them. This will make revenge bedtime procrastination less tempting.”
This is what drives ME nuts about articles at Additude: The articles fundamentally don’t understand ADHD. Articles frequently tell us to do things that we struggle with instead of helping us strategize around or out-clever our innate “obstacles.” I am supposed to plan and stick to a schedule? Now why didn’t I think of that!
I have always been a “nightowl” as described by my mother, even as a school aged child. Sometimes it gets so bad that I literally just don’t go to bed one night, because my bedtime gets later and later which then transitions to earlier in the morning, like going to bed at 6 or 7 am. So I just skip a day of sleep, knowing I will be really tired that next night and go to bed at midnight or 1 am which is more “normal”(according to the rest of society) for me.
One thing these articles in Additude don’t do, which drives me nuts, is explain the physiology of why or how a certain behavior happens for those with ADHD. This is one great example. The author discusses the Circadian Rhythm being disrupted by ADHD, but says nothing about how that occurs, what brain chemicals are associated with it or lacking and what parts of the brain affect our circadian rhythm. It’s like ADDitude thinks us all to be too dumb to understand the physiological nuances OR, they are just putting out fluff pieces. Either way it’s a waste of my time. I always read an article and think: “Well, that was fairly useless and I want more information.”
Also, I know, that harsh blue light or bright blue/white light really hurt my head, and are offensive to my eyes. I hate electronics with blue light buttons and most of them around my house have electrical tape over the lights. I always use a red light alarm clock, because red, orange and orange/yellow light relaxes the brain, because those wavelengths of light trigger melatonin production which does feed into your circadian rhythm and making you want sleep. So if you need to look at your red light alarm clock in the middle of the night, it’s not a shock to your brain chemicals. Also, if you are light color sensitive like me, always chose light bulbs that are in the 2700 Kelvin range, which are the more yellow/orange light spectrum. It calms your brain in the evenings when you typically use lights. Change your computer settings to more warm color palettes for windows (most are blue/white/purple/green which are all in the cooler light spectrum of color). Buy blackout curtains if your community’s street lights are blue or blue white, or a neighbor’s house light is the same to keep it out of your life as much as possible. Good luck.
I got suspicious when I read about the blue screen light being similar to sunlight, thus waking us up. Sunlight is neutral, neither cool nor warm, so it’s not blue. Furthermore just this week I read about a study proving blue screen light has no effect on the eyes. Of course it may still affect sleep, so I went to check source 12. My interest pealed when I saw the source was Basel, Switzerland, which is where I live. Further investigating it turned out the study was in Taiwan and the publisher, MDPI, has its headquarters in Basel but is in fact a Chinese company that published just about everything, including papers that are unscientific, racist and sexist. They’ve been accused of being a predatory firm and I don’t think Addituse Mag should be using sources from such an editor that has even published unscientific studies claiming glyphosate caused ADHD among a number of other things. There is an extensive Wikipedia article listing different instances of this and complaints and concerns from a number of countries about this editor.