Why Don’t You Go to Bed on Time? A Daily Diary Study on the Relationships between Chronotype, Self-Control Resources and the Phenomenon of Bedtime Procrastination

Abstract

Background: This daily diary study investigates the phenomenon of bedtime procrastination. Bedtime procrastination is defined as going to bed later than intended, without having external reasons for doing so. We highlight the role chronotype (interindividual differences in biological preferences for sleep-wake-times) plays for bedtime procrastination. Moreover, we challenge the view that bedtime procrastination is the result of a lack of self-regulatory resources by investigating momentary self-regulatory resources as a predictor of day-specific bedtime procrastination.Methods: One-hundred and eight employees working in various industries completed a general electronic questionnaire (to assess chronotype and trait self-control) and two daily electronic questionnaires (to assess momentary self-regulatory resources before going to bed and day-specific bedtime procrastination) over the course of five work days, resulting in 399 pairs of matched day-next-day measurements.Results: Results of multilevel regression analyses showed that later chronotypes (also referred to as evening types or ‘owls’) tended to report more bedtime procrastination on work days. Moreover, for late chronotypes, day-specific bedtime procrastination declined over the course of the work week. This pattern is in line with expectations derived from chronobiology and could not be explained by trait self-control. In addition, on evenings on which employees had less self-regulatory resources available before going to bed—compared to evenings on which they had more self-regulatory resources available before going to bed—employees showed lower bedtime procrastination. This finding contradicts the prevailing idea that bedtime procrastination is the result of a lack of self-regulatory resources.Conclusion: The findings of this study provide important implications for how bedtime procrastination should be positioned in the field of procrastination as self-regulatory failure and for how bedtime procrastination should be dealt with in practice.

Bedtime Procrastination, Sleep-Related Behaviors, and Demographic Factors in an Online Survey on a Polish Sample

“…A negative correlation between BPS scores and age ( r = −0.11) was also obtained in a sample of users of an internet crowdsourcing platform (Kroese et al, 2014), but due to the relatively low sample size it did not meet the criterion of statistical significance. In addition, a negative correlation ( r = −0.19) between age and bedtime procrastination assessed by means of sleep diaries was found in employees working in various industries (Kühnel et al, 2018). Apart from confirming a negative correlation between BPS scores and age, we also managed to capture the more detailed pattern of the associations between bedtime procrastination and age.…”

Academic Self-Efficacy and Postgraduate Procrastination: A Moderated Mediation Model

“…Thus, self-control as a volitional factor may have an inhibitory effect on procrastination behavior. Numerous studies showed that self-control negatively predicted procrastination ( Kuhnel et al, 2018 ; Przepiorka et al, 2019 ), and trait self-control interacted with sleep quality in impacting next-day work procrastination ( van Eerde and Venus, 2018 ). Studies have also confirmed that academic self-control negatively predicts academic procrastination ( Ariely and Wertenbroch, 2002 ).…”

The Explanations People Give for Going to Bed Late: A Qualitative Study of the Varieties of Bedtime Procrastination

“…The tendency to engage in bedtime procrastination, as a contributing cause of sleep deprivation, has been shown to be a pervasive phenomenon in the general population (Kroese, De Ridder, Evers, & Adriaanse, 2014b;. Recent research is beginning to shed light on the role of various causal factors in explaining bedtime procrastination, such as depleted self-regulatory resources or biological factors such as chronotypes (Kadzikowska-Wrzosek (2018); Kühnel, Syrek, & Dreher, 2018). What is less often studied, however, are the qualitative differences in the ways that bedtime procrastination is understood by those who engage in it, who are also the ones who must be able to recognize any proposed intervention as being relevant to their situation.…”