Revenge Bedtime Procrastination: How To End this ADHD Habit

Let’s talk about Revenge Bedtime Procrastination. If you are a fellow ADHD brain who finds themself staying up way past their bedtime… scrolling endlessly on TikTok, binge-watching your favorite show, or starting a decluttering project when it’s time to go to sleep, then keep reading. This message is for you.

Revenge Bedtime Procrastination is a very real obstacle that so many of us ADHDers face. This phenomenon is not just about staying up late. It’s often about reclaiming your time—time that’s otherwise given to a jam-packed schedule of obligations, “shoulds,” and tasks for other people. 

This act of rebellion has a steep price to pay: our precious sleep. So, in episode 252 of the I’m Busy Being Awesome Podcast, we’re connecting the dots between ADHD, sleep, and Revenge Bedtime Procrastination. 

In Episode #252 on Revenge Bedtime Procrastination, you’ll learn:

• What Revenge Bedtime Procrastination is, specifically.
• Why it’s especially prevalent in the ADHD community.
• Practical strategies to support yourself so you’re getting the sleep you need. 

If you’re ready to improve your sleep tonight, tune into episode 252 of the I’m Busy Being Awesome podcast today.

You can listen to the episode above or stream it on your favorite podcasting app here.

Prefer to read? No problem! Keep scrolling for the full blog post.

Episode # 252: Revenge Bedtime Procrastination: How To Stop this ADHD Habit (Transcript)

You’re listening to the I’m Busy Being Awesome podcast with Paula Engebretson, Episode number 252. 

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. Are you ready for another deep dive into sleep?

As we know, sleep is such a significant obstacle for so many of us with ADHD brains, and as we explored last week, one of those major contributors is something called Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome.

Today, we’re looking through another angle at our struggles with sleep, which is the familiar beast known as Revenge Bedtime Procrastination.

What Is Revenge Bedtime Procrastination?

Now, even if you’ve never heard of this term before, I’m guessing that—in your day-to-day life—Revenge Bedtime Procrastination resonates deeply with many of us in the ADHD community.

It’s that all-too-familiar scenario where you find yourself staying up late without any real reason to do so.

I bet a lot of you are nodding your heads right now, recognizing this pattern in yourselves. We’ve all been there, haven’t we? Probably more times than we can count.

Why is Revenge Bedtime Procrastination a common ADHD Experience?

What drives this behavior?

Often, revenge bedtime procrastination it stems from not having enough free time during the day—thanks to work or other commitments—which leads us to “take back our time”, usually late into the night as a form of freedom.

It’s a compelling way to take back some ‘me’ time, but it comes at a steep cost: our sleep health.

In last week’s episode, 251, we dove into Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome (DSPS) and the critical role of sleep hygiene. If you haven’t listened to that episode yet, no worries. But I do encourage you to check it out – especially if you ever struggle with sleep or have an interest in improving your sleep with an ADHD brain.

If you heard last week’s episode, it’s probably no shock when I remind us all that establishing and maintaining good sleep habits is crucial, especially for those of us with ADHD, since sleep plays such a key role in supporting our executive functions.

In fact, research makes an even clearer link by showing that poor sleep hygiene, which we talked about in-depth last week, is frequently linked to bedtime procrastination.

So, as I mentioned last week, if you’re struggling with Revenge Bedtime Procrastination, examining your sleep habits and improving you sleep hygiene is an important component.

Just to jog everyone’s memory from last week, I’ll give a quick recap of some important sleep hygiene strategies, and if you want a deeper dive, I suggest skipping back to episode 251 after you finish this episode today for some specific step-by-step support. 

As a quick recap, some simple ways to improve your sleep hygiene:

1. Optimize Your Bedroom: Make your bedroom an ideal space for sleep by ensuring it’s dark, cool, and quiet. 
2. Limit Exposure to Screens & Dim the Lights: Reduce blue light exposure by avoiding screens at least an hour before bed and dimming overhead lights after sunset to support your body’s natural sleep-wake cycle.
3. Establish a Regular Sleep Schedule: Maintain a relatively regular sleep schedule, whether you’re a night owl or an early bird, so you’re going to bed and waking up at the same time every day.
4. Create a Relaxing Bedtime Routine: Develop a calming pre-sleep ritual that you actually WANT to do, and that helps you unwind without overstimulation.
5. Use Brain.fm: Consider using Brain.fm to help quiet your mind before bed. Their music and beat patterns are designed to shift your brain state to relaxation and sleep. If you want to check out Brain.fm, I also have a free 30-day trial through the link in the show notes.
6. Be Mindful Of What You’re Eating And Drinking Around Bedtime: Try to avoid caffeine, nicotine, and heavy meals before bed, as they can disrupt your ability to fall asleep. Also, steer clear of alcohol as it can affect sleep quality later in the night.
7. Get Regular Physical Activity: Regular exercise can help you fall asleep faster and enjoy deeper sleep, but keep in mind that for some people, heavy workouts close to bedtime might keep them awake, so try to do that earlier in the day.
8. Use Natural Light to Your Advantage: Get your eyes in natural light, especially in the morning and at sunset, to help regulate your circadian rhythms and promote better sleep quality.

3 Connections Between ADHD and Revenge Bedtime Procrastination

Again, many humans—not just ADHDers—struggle with sleep hygiene and getting good sleep, so if you notice you’re navigating revenge bedtime procrastination, sleep hygiene may be one of the culprits, and it can also be a great place to focus first for some quick wins. 

Additionally, there are specific ADHD-related traits that can further fuel this type of bedtime procrastination. In fact, a friend of mine often says, “If I go to sleep now, I’m wasting the day and not making the most of my time.”

Just think about that. If I sleep, I’m wasting the day and not making the most of my time.

First of all – have any of you thought this to yourself? I know I have! Honestly, I think this sentence beautifully represents two common ADHD challenges of time-blindness and all-or-nothing thinking, both of which are significant contributors to the cycle of Revenge Bedtime Procrastination. 

So, with that in mind, let’s unpack this a bit further to understand better what’s going on with Revenge Bedtime Procrastination. How can we address this rather significant obstacle to getting the sleep so many of us need?

1. Time Blindness & Overcommitted Schedule

Our executive functions are incredibly taxed all day long. We’re juggling demands coming from all angles, we’re trying so hard to stay organized and hold everything together.

Whether we have the proper support or not, living this kind of back-to-back life can leave us desperate for downtime where we can simply be. 

Often the only time we’re able to find this respite from the go-go-go is late in the evening when nobody else is around to need something.

Most people I work with share how exhausted they feel daily since we’re not just managing our own schedules. We’re often syncing with everyone else, too. And we’re trying to pack in as much as possible. 

This balancing act is a huge obstacle when we take into account struggles with time blindness, as we try to map out what we have the capacity for amidst a myriad of random tasks, competing deadlines, and shifting schedules. 

You most likely don’t carve out enough time for these tasks – let alone downtime at the end of the day.  So, by the time we reach the end of the day, and it’s time for bed, it’s often our first real shot at any unstructured downtime, and 99.9% of the time, we take it. 

As I shared in Episode 115: Real Talk—Your Brain Needs Rest, the fact of the matter is that your brain needs rest. And one way or another, it’s going to take it.

So, the brain is going to choose pleasurable quick dopamine hits like scrolling and projects, rather than sleep because it provides that delight we’ve been craving all day.

We’re trying desperately to compensate for what feels like a major deficit in personal time or relaxation, and our basic need for sleep suffers because of it. 

2. Hyperfocus

Hyperfocus is a phenomenon that many of us ADHD brains experience on a regular basis.

As I talk about in Episode 234: Hyperfocus in Adults with ADHD, it’s a situation where we become completely absorbed in an activity that our brains find particularly interesting or stimulating.

This intense concentration can make it extremely difficult to break away from the task at hand, even when it’s necessary to do so (or we know our future self would really appreciate us breaking away from it.)

Why Do ADHD Brains Slip into Hyperfocus?

Hyperfocus often happens when our ADHD brains engage in activities that are particularly stimulating, rewarding, or enjoyable.

So when our ADHD brains drop into this type of activity – especially when it’s an activity that creates a sense of anticipation or that “just right” level of challenge, the brain releases dopamine, which lights everything up and makes us want to focus on the thing even more.

This is especially important to note for those of us with ADHD because our ADHD brains have less dopamine naturally.

This means that when we engage in these types of enjoyable, stimulating activities that release relatively huge amounts of dopamine in the brain, we want to keep doing them since it’s so much more enjoyable.

How does hyperfocus impact revenge bedtime procrastination? 

When our ADHD brains hyperfocus on this kind of activity late into the night, it can directly impact our sleep time.

The engagement is so absorbing that it’s hard even to notice those hours passing by – especially when we struggle with time blindness – and our bedtime gets pushed even further back than intended.

Plus, the mental stimulation of these activities often makes it even harder to wind down and transition into a state where the mind is ready to sleep.

Instead, it’s stuck in that active, alert mode, which again prolongs the time it takes to not only think about sleep and actually move toward getting ready for sleep but also finally falling asleep.

3. Emotional Regulation & Impulse Control

With emotional regulation, I’m referring to our ability to allow and respond to emotional experiences in a way that is supportive.

It’s taking care of yourself without reacting to the emotions by throwing them out toward other people. And for those of us with ADHD, this is extra challenging. 

Since we struggle with this regulation, it can mean not only a bigger response to daily stressors but also a longer duration of emotional recovery. In other words, it takes us longer to regulate, “shake it off,” and feel better.

Think about times when you’ve felt dysregulated in the past, you can probably find examples where it took you longer to move through or shift from the “negative emotions,” or you might find yourself fixating on stressful or even exciting events longer than others.

In short, we often experience our emotions more intensely and have a harder time sitting with them rather than acting on them. 

Also, many of us struggle with impulse control, which is especially challenging when we’re feeling dysregulated.

As ADHD brains, we experience these big feelings, and they often come on quite suddenly. If we don’t have supports in place to help us regulate, our ability to manage our impulses becomes even more challenging.

This is because we don’t have that built-in moment to pause, check-in, and decide intentionally whether we:

• Jump to that new idea we just thought of, or stick with the current task at hand
• Share what we really think about our boss’s new plan to “do more with less,” or take a beat and wait to talk it through once we’ve heard the entire plan.
• Or let the next episode on Netflix just keep playing – despite it being way past our bedtime – rather than turning it off and heading to sleep. 

How emotional regulation & impulse control impact revenge bedtime procrastination

After hearing this, I’m sure you’re not surprised to hear that both emotional dysregulation and this struggle with impulse control can significantly impact our ability to both go to sleep and stay asleep.

On top of everything we’ve talked about already, the struggle to “switch off” emotionally can also lead to increased anxiety, rumination, and stress, which can further exacerbate insomnia and fragment our sleep.

When our body’s stress response is activated, we’re dealing with an increased heart rate and heightened alertness, which makes it much harder to wind down, not to mention stick with the routine we’ve established ahead of time.

how these different ADHD obstacles come into play 

After a marathon day of trying to fit in everything from our overflowing to-do list, often paired with scrambling to meet all the external expectations of our colleagues, families, and friends, we’re exhausted, dysregulated, feeling behind on our list of things to do, and seeking some quick wins or dopamine bursts.

Following another expectation feels too hard

At this time, the mere idea of following another expectation – even if it’s our own bedtime routine that we established on purpose – is a very tall order.

In fact, many of our brains want to rebel against it entirely as a way to reclaim control over our time, feel like we have a say in our decisions, and finally get a bit of time to ourselves.

By the time evening rolls around, we’re out of steam

Decision fatigue sets in, our self-control takes a hit, and the thought of doing all those executive function demanding tasks that are often involved in getting ready for bed is simply too much.

It’s like we’re down to our last decision of the day, and we decide to spend it staying up a bit later for some quiet time rather than making all the tiny microdecisions required to get to sleep.

Instead, we opt for the decision that allows us to shut out the day’s stress and immerse ourselves in another world, whether through social media, the latest Netflix series, or a book you can’t put down. 

We struggle with transitions

Struggling with transitions makes shifting from our evening activities into our bedtime routine even more of a hurdle. And for those of us who tend to catch that ‘second wind’ late at night, it can trick us into thinking we have the energy and can stay up even later.

This is especially true because of our common struggle with both future planning and our aforementioned impulsivity, which can quickly lead to spontaneous, in-the-moment decisions that disregard our future selves who need to get up early the next morning for work. 

This difficulty with task switching is quintessentially ADHD, I talk about it all the time since it’s one of my biggest hurdles.

When we’re faced with the choice between sleep and pursuing that elusive hit of dopamine, we often opt for the latter—not only because it’s more enticing but also because it’s the path of least resistance with less friction in the way.

To Do: Rethink Your Bedtime Procrastination

I hope that what we’ve talked about so far really helps give you some context and understanding of why so many of us struggle with the whole bedtime thing. I know so many people who get really down on themselves, thinking it “shouldn’t be that hard.”

But the truth is, for many of us with an ADHD brain – especially those of us with the hyperactive or combined type of ADHD, IT IS HARD. It is incredibly taxing on our executive functions. Period. 

This doesn’t mean that we have to simply settle for never getting enough sleep, either. Be careful of that black and white thinking that loves to sneak in here. 

• What if we stop shaming ourselves for struggling to get to bed and instead get curious?
• What are the main obstacles in our way?
• What are the culprits that keep us up later than we’d like?

By thinking through the lens of curiosity rather than judgment, it’s so much easier to gain traction and develop solutions that work for your unique circumstance. 

The Truth about Revenge Bedtime Procrastination

Revenge Bedtime Procrastination offers us a delightful dose of short-term gratification; we unwind, have fun, and feel like we’ve reclaimed some of our time. However, there’s a significant trade-off.

This short-term pleasure often comes at the cost of our long-term well-being.

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. I think it’s something I’ll do an episode or two on in the coming weeks. It’s so easy to have the toddler brain take over – especially after taxing our executive functions all day long – and focus on the short term pleasure and disregard the long term impact.

With sleep specifically, regularly pushing back our bedtime can lead to chronic sleep deprivation, which in turn impacts our executive functions, mood, and physical health.

Plus, it can magnify common comorbid sleep disorders in ADHD brains, like Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome (DSPS), which we talked about last week. 

How To Improve Revenge Bedtime Procrastination

We know we want sleep. We know we want to get to sleep at a time that aligns with our current schedule and demands. What do we do?

Again, the first thing to do is get super curious. What’s in the way? What’s the friction, and how can we solve for it?

I encourage you to think through the categories we explored today and get specific in your answers:

1. How are time blindness and an overcommitted schedule affecting your unique situation?

• Do you notice these areas are particularly challenging for you on specific days of the week?
• Or when you’re working on particular projects or at specific times of the year? If so, what can you do to smooth out the friction?

For example, after I finish my workday and before I eat dinner, I have a routine of washing my face and taking out my contacts so I don’t have to do those steps late at night when I am ready to sleep.

I always hated doing them late at night, and I would procrastinate doing them, which pushed back my bedtime because they always took longer than I thought they would.

By doing them early, however, I don’t have to worry about them pushing back my schedule later because I can adjust and make sure I’m heading to bed on time. 

2. When does hyperfocus trip you up & how can you help yourself ?

Maybe you decide ahead of time how long you will do the activity or how much of the activity you will do before stopping.

Once you’ve decided that, you then put some reminders or alarms that provide you with enough time to transition out of the activity. Or perhaps you want to do those hyperfocus activities earlier in the day when you have more executive function left to help you pull away when you want to? 

For example, if I’m crocheting, I’ll decide ahead of time that I can work to a certain part of the pattern or do a certain number of rows. If I’m coloring, I’ll decide how much of the page I’m going to do – for example, I’ll finish these two flowers or this set of shapes – and then it’s time for bed.

Maybe you put a timer on your audible app or your streaming service so the episode stops when the timer ends.

• What can you do to help make that transition out of hyperfocus a little smoother?

3. How can you support yourself emotionally?

What do you need at this time?

Think about what you’re really seeking when you let the next episode keep playing, or you keep scrolling on Instagram, or you continue answering email after email?

What is the feeling you’re trying to reach with those activities, and how can you help yourself move through the discomfort of stopping them so you can take care of your true need for sleep?

For example, I’m working to establish a non-negotiable end time for my work days. Right now, it’s still pretty fluid. If I have more work to do, I will keep doing it.

However, by making my stop times non-negotiable, I help ensure I have more downtime and transition time for myself, which helps me feel grounded and relaxed, which is what I’m actually looking for when I stay up later at night.

Revenge Bedtime Procrastination: Recap

So again, if you’re struggling with revenge bedtime procrastination, in addition to using all the sleep hygiene strategies we talked about in last week’s episode, I highly encourage you to shift from judgment into curiosity.

Check in with what you’re really seeking when you find yourself staying up much later than your bedtime.

Ask yourself:

1. How are time blindness and an overcommitted schedule affecting my bedtime?

Do I see any patterns—specific days, projects, or times of the year when this intensifies? How can I reduce that friction? 

2. When does hyperfocus typically disrupt my bedtime routine, and what strategies can I set up in advance to manage it?

Can I set limits on the duration of the activity or how much I’ll do? What reminders can I set to help me with the transition? 

3. What am I truly seeking when I’m putting off my bedtime?

Is it relaxation, escape, free time, calm, or something else? Identify the underlying emotional need behind these activities that keep you up much later than you’d like and start brainstorming ways you might fulfill these needs earlier on or in other ways that won’t interfere with your sleep. 

4. Be Clear On Your Bedtime

Ask yourself – why you genuinely want to stick with this bedtime?

I’m telling you – if getting to sleep is not a full body yes and it’s instead an intellectual “should,” it’s going to be a nearly impossible uphill battle to get yourself to follow through on it regularly.

When our executive functions have left the building, we need a super compelling reason why we’re willing to lean in and follow through even when the toddler brain throws a tantrum.

So be sure to check in and give yourself that compelling reason so you can turn to it when you need it most. 

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Links From The Podcast

• Learn more about We’re Busy Being Awesome here
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• Get the I’m Busy Being Awesome Planning System here
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• Episode 251: Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome 
• Episode 115: Real Talk—Your Brain Needs Rest
• Episode 234: Hyperfocus in Adults with ADHD
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