Revenge Bedtime Procrastination
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.
Origin
Behavioral scientist Floor Kroese and colleagues at Utrecht University coined "bedtime procrastination" in a 2014 Frontiers in Psychology paper. The "revenge" prefix came from the Chinese internet term 報復性熬夜 (baofu xing aoye), linked to grueling 996 work culture. Journalist Daphne K. Lee's June 2020 tweet translating the phrase brought it to English-speaking audiences.
Everyday Use
This term likely cuts deep for many readers, myself included. It hits on something many of us have experienced without having a name for, much less an identification for why we were doing it. Why stay up late, doom-scrolling on our phones, when we know that it will only hurt us the next day? And the response is precisely because we can. It's a small but overt effort to regain authority when we feel over-committed and confined to the finite hours of the day filled with tasks, responsibilities, and chores not directly of our choosing. This also, unfortunately does not point to a quick fix. Maybe we are in situations where we can wrest control of the hours of our day in a more direct fashion, but maybe we aren't — jobs, childcare, livelihoods on the line. Nonetheless, it's always important to find the thread from our tiny acts of resistance and autonomy to our realized selves. Change doesn't happen overnight — it make take a few sleepless nights in the journey to get there.