“Just One More Scroll”: The Psychology of Staying Up Too Late

A topic I could nerd out on all day is sleep hygiene. It’s something that gets talked about frequently, but practiced far less consistently. Most of us know the basics: limit screen time before bed, keep the room cool, reduce caffeine intake later in the day, and so on.

The gap, of course, isn’t knowledge—it’s implementation.

A lot of the ongoing fatigue I see in clients is rooted in non-restorative sleep and living in a constant “go, go, go” cycle. Our society runs on coffee culture, energy drinks, and chronically blurred boundaries with technology. So it’s no surprise that sleep is often what gets neglected.

One concept I’ve been thinking about lately is “revenge bedtime procrastination.” It’s that almost automatic habit many of us fall into: finally getting into bed, feeling that exhale of relief, followed by a quiet sense of satisfaction—“now I get time for me.”

The uncomfortable truth is that this habit is so reinforcing because so many people spend their entire day giving to others. For a lot of us, nighttime becomes the only space that feels truly self-directed.

According to Matthew Walker, author of Why We Sleep and a professor of neuroscience at UC Berkeley, this pattern is closely tied to perceived lack of control. He shared in a recent podcast that “the less control a person had over their day, the steeper the sleep cost.” That line stood out to me because it feels deeply aligned with mental health work—sleep is rarely just about sleep.

Our brains don’t neatly “shut off” at bedtime. They process what we didn’t have time or space to process during the day. Ever found yourself suddenly replaying something that happened days ago right before falling asleep? It may not be random—it may simply be the first moment you’ve been still enough for your mind to catch up. This is also where bedtime rumination tends to show up.

And then there’s the phone.

We all know how easy it is to get pulled into the cycle of blue light before bed. When you’ve got some of the brightest minds in neuroscience optimizing apps to capture your attention—and offering a temporary escape from your own thoughts—it makes sense that at 10:00 p.m., when willpower is depleted, we give in.

It can feel like the odds are stacked against us. But I tend to think there’s more room for agency than it seems at first glance.

What if we became more aware of what’s happening right before we reach for our phones?
What if we got curious about the need underneath the habit?
What if we took better care of ourselves throughout the day so we didn’t have to “reclaim” ourselves at night?

I’m still figuring this out myself, just like everyone else.
Food for thought.

Always open to feedback.