Edited by: Marcel Zentner, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Reviewed by: Ralph Erich Schmidt, University of Geneva, Switzerland; Cornelia Wrzus, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany
*Correspondence: Floor M. Kroese, Department of Clinical and Health Psychology, Utrecht University, PO Box 80.140, Heidelberglaan 1, 3508 TC Utrecht, Netherlands e-mail:
This article was submitted to Personality and Social Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology.
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Procrastination is a prevalent and problematic phenomenon. Its prevalence comes about in impressive figures showing, for example, that up to 46% of college students report to procrastinate on specific academic tasks (Solomon and Rothblum,
Procrastination is defined as a “voluntary delay of an intended course of action despite expecting to be worse off for the delay” (Steel,
One imperative domain in which procrastination has received remarkably little attention is health behavior. Although it has been noted that, for example, procrastinators tend to experience higher stress and poorer health (Tice and Baumeister,
What is as of yet unclear, however, is to what extent the association between procrastination and health behaviors could have been explained by the underlying factor of trait self-control. That is, trait self-control—the ability to override or change one's inner responses (Baumeister,
The current study will investigate a form of procrastination in a specific health domain: sleeping behavior, or more specifically, going to bed. Getting sufficient sleep is increasingly being recognized as essential for people to function in an optimal way, with studies showing that sleep deficiency is related to concentration and memory problems (Ram et al.,
Our first aim is to demonstrate that bedtime procrastination—going to bed later than intended while no external circumstances are accountable for doing so—is associated with general procrastination and self-regulation. This attests to our notion that going to bed later than intended is indeed a matter of procrastination, and that individuals who are procrastinators or poor self-regulators in general are also more likely to procrastinate on their bedtimes.
The present study includes several measures of self-regulation. First, we are interested in trait self-control, which is a dominant construct in self-regulation research (De Ridder et al.,
The second aim of the current paper, then, is to show that bedtime procrastination is associated with self-reported objective and subjective sleep outcomes (i.e., hours of sleep, daytime fatigue, and experienced sufficient sleep), above and beyond demographics and self-regulation. In this way, our study is the first to show an association between procrastination and a specific health behavior, which cannot be explained by an underlying factor like trait self-control. Importantly, our specific focus is on the normal population who have no actual constraints for going to bed in time, but “just” fail to do so. Hence, we exclude people who have been treated for sleeping disorders or who work night shifts, as these circumstances may have large impacts on getting insufficient sleep outside of a person's control.
In sum, the current paper contributes to the literature in two important ways: First, it puts forward a novel health behavior area in which procrastinators may experience problems, namely getting sufficient sleep. Second, the current paper contributes to understanding insufficient sleep as a personality-related problem that may require novel approaches in terms of potential solutions.
Participants were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk (
The survey was posted on the MTurk platform, and made available only to workers who had successfully participated in previous tasks with a 98% approval rate, to ensure high-quality data. The approval of completed tasks is given by the task requester (e.g., experimenter) based on accuracy and reliability judgments of the given responses. Participants earned $1 for completion of the 20-min survey.
The study was conducted in accordance with the ethical standards described by the Medical Research Involving Human Subjects Act (WMO,
Demographics included sex, age, marital status (single, married or domestic partnership, widowed, divorced, separated), ethnicity (Caucasian, Hispanic or Latino, African American, Native American, Asian or Pacific Islander, Other), education (elementary school, secondary school, vocational education, Bachelor's, Master's, Doctoral, or Professional degree), and employment status (employed fulltime, employed part time, unemployed and looking for work, unemployed and not looking for work, student, homemaker, retired, other). Finally, participants indicated the number of children under the age of 5 living in the same household.
A 9-item scale was developed to assess bedtime procrastination (Cronbach's α = 0.92; see Appendix). Items were answered on 5-point scales ranging from 1
General procrastination was assessed with the 20-item general procrastination scale (Lay,
Four individual difference variables associated with self-regulation were assessed.
Table
Less than 5 h | 4 | 2.3 | 2.3 | |||
5–6 h | 48 | 27.1 | 29.4 | |||
6–7 h | 60 | 33.9 | 63.3 | |||
7–8 h | 45 | 25.4 | 88.7 | |||
8–9 h | 16 | 9.0 | 97.7 | |||
9–10 h | 2 | 1.1 | 98.9 | |||
More than 10 h | 2 | 1.1 | 100.0 | |||
0 | 29 | 16.4 | 16.4 | 26 | 14.7 | 14.7 |
1–2 days | 79 | 44.6 | 61.0 | 78 | 44.1 | 58.8 |
3–4 days | 46 | 26.0 | 87.0 | 45 | 25.4 | 84.2 |
5–6 days | 17 | 9.6 | 96.6 | 16 | 9.0 | 93.2 |
7 days | 6 | 3.4 | 100.0 | 12 | 6.8 | 100.0 |
For self-regulation, a compound measure was created as the individual variables were highly correlated (ranging from
Table
1. Gender | ||||||||||
2. Age | 0.11 | |||||||||
3. Marital status (dummy) | 0.15 |
0.19 |
||||||||
4. Employment (dummy) | −0.02 | −0.02 | −0.02 | |||||||
5. Children < age 5 | 0.08 | −0.16 |
0.36 |
0.04 | ||||||
6. Bedtime procrastination | 0.07 | −0.11 | 0.01 | −0.04 | 0.09 | |||||
7. General procrastination | 0.08 | −0.18 |
−0.03 | −0.05 | 0.06 | 0.60 |
– | |||
8. Self-regulation | −0.04 | 0.14 | 0.05 | 0.12 | −0.01 | −0.52 |
−0.81 |
– | ||
9. Hours of sleep | 0.02 | 0.13 | −0.02 | −0.10 | −0.12 | −0.49 |
−0.19 |
0.20 |
– | |
10. Fatigue | −0.01 | −0.14 | −0.08 | −0.19 |
−0.00 | 0.46 |
0.37 |
−0.40 |
−0.29 |
– |
11. Insufficient sleep | −0.04 | −0.17 |
0.04 | −0.04 | 0.14 | 0.61 |
0.35 |
−0.39 |
−0.54 |
0.65 |
Three hierarchical regression analyses tested the effect of bedtime procrastination on (a) reported hours of sleep, (b) daytime fatigue, and (c) experienced insufficient sleep, above and beyond demographics and self-regulation. The demographics included in Step 1 were sex, age, marital status, and employment status. Furthermore, the number of children below the age of 5 living at home was included, as this could also be related to getting less sleep. As marital status for most participants was either married (or in a domestic partnership) or single, with relatively few participants falling in the other categories, dummies were created for “married” and “single” only. The same holds for employment status for which dummies were created for “currently employed” and “student.” The compound self-regulation variable was included in Step 2, and bedtime procrastination in Step 3
The final regression models are reported in Table
Δ |
Δ |
Δ |
|||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
β | β | β | |||||||
Sex | 0.05 | 0.46 | 0.04 | −0.03 | 0.69 | 0.06 | −0.09 | 0.16 | 0.04 |
Age | 0.09 | 0.22 | −0.09 | 0.26 | −0.11 | 0.13 | |||
Marital status |
|||||||||
Married | 0.12 | 0.32 | −0.11 | 0.37 | −0.01 | 0.91 | |||
Single | 0.18 | 0.16 | −0.08 | 0.57 | −0.07 | 0.52 | |||
Employment |
|||||||||
Employed | −0.09 | 0.19 | −0.17 | 0.02 | −0.02 | 0.71 | |||
Student | −0.01 | 0.90 | −0.02 | 0.75 | −0.02 | 0.74 | |||
Young children | −0.06 | 0.45 | −0.02 | 0.79 | 0.06 | 0.34 | |||
Self-regulation | −0.06 | 0.46 | 0.04 | −0.18 | 0.02 | 0.13 | −0.09 | 0.23 | 0.14 |
Bedtime procrastination | −0.52 | <0.001 | 0.19 | 0.36 | <0.001 | 0.09 | 0.56 | <0.001 | 0.23 |
The present aim was to introduce bedtime procrastination as a novel area of procrastination in the domain of health behavior. It has been known that procrastinators experience problems in various domains, although particular attention has been paid to academic procrastination. Given that insufficient sleep is related to severe outcomes including health problems (Buxton and Marcelli,
Our results allow for important initial conclusions and implications regarding bedtime procrastination as a novel construct in the procrastination literature. First, we found that bedtime procrastination was associated with self-regulation as well as general procrastination, endorsing its position as a form of procrastination. Second, bedtime procrastination was indeed related to general reports of insufficient sleep, above and beyond demographics and self-regulation. In view of the high numbers of participants reporting to get insufficient sleep in an average week, bedtime procrastination further proves its relevance as a construct that deserves future attention in the literature.
The current study is the first to present bedtime procrastination as a possible cause for insufficient sleep. As insufficient sleep is increasingly recognized as causing problems related to mental and physical well-being, it is important to further our understanding of contributing phenomena. In that sense, the current study adds to other sleep research highlighting the alarmingly high rates of people experiencing insufficient sleep (e.g., Moore and Meltzer,
Another interesting aspect of bedtime procrastination is that, while procrastination typically involves voluntarily delaying aversive tasks (Steel,
Three issues have to be kept in mind when interpreting the current results. The first concerns the advantages and limitations of Amazon Mechanical Turk. To begin with, the use of community samples has obvious advantages over the typically used student samples: especially in the case of bedtime procrastination, students—who tend to have distorted sleeping schedules (Lund et al.,
The second issue, a conceptual one, concerns our definition of bedtime procrastination as referring to going to bed rather than sleeping. Of course, there may be a discrepancy between the time someone gets to bed and the time he actually sleeps, which can be due to various reasons. Although these may include some form of procrastination as well (e.g., watching TV in bed), it is less clear to what extent failing to sleep when already in bed is a matter of voluntary delay. In contrast to going to bed, the intention to sleep cannot always be enacted. Therefore, we restrict our conceptualization of bedtime procrastination to going to bed, thereby still assuming that it is related to the amount of sleep one will get—an assumption that was indeed supported by the current findings.
Finally, the interpretation of the found relationships should be considered with caution, as the cross-sectional nature of our study does not allow for causal inferences. An alternative explanation could be, for example, that the causal relation is reverse. For instance, the less people sleep and/or the more they feel fatigue, the less they can exert self-regulation and go to bed on time, hence show bedtime procrastination. Additionally, a confounding variable may explain the relation between self-regulation, bedtime procrastination and sleep outcomes. In addition, it should be kept in mind that the assessment of bedtime procrastination and sleep duration based on general self-reports is probably not as accurate as assessments using daily measurements and actigraphy.
Our conclusion that going to bed late is a procrastination problem suggests that typical self-regulation enhancing strategies could be applied to prevent or reduce insufficient sleep. For example, implementation intentions could be particularly promising in this context as they do not require cognitive resources (Webb and Sheeran,
Another road for future research would be to address which particular aspects of self-control are related to going to bed late (e.g., the inability to quit fun activities, or problems with “getting started”). Relatedly, it would be interesting to identify possible subtypes of bedtime procrastinators. Intuitively, we would predict that a distinction may exist between “active” and “inactive” types of bedtime procrastinators (cf. Chun Chu and Choi,
Finally, it is important for future research to investigate the relationships between bedtime procrastination and other factors that are known to be related to bedtimes. A first candidate, for example, would be chronotype (morningness/eveningness). Initial data suggest that chronotype is indeed a significant predictor of going to bed later than intended, whereby self-reported eveningness was related to more bedtime procrastination, while the independent effect of self-regulation also remained significant (Broers,
In sum, the current paper proposes a novel area in which procrastinators may experience problems by introducing bedtime procrastination as a self-regulation perspective on insufficient sleep. Being surprisingly understudied, we advocate giving greater priority to studies investigating procrastination in the domain of health behavior. Approaching health behavior from a procrastination perspective allows for novel insights and strategies to improve mental and physical well-being.
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
This research was supported by the Dutch Technology Foundation STW, which is part of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), and which is partly funded by the Ministry of Economic Affairs. The authors acknowledge Joel Anderson for putting forth the bedtime procrastination concept and thank Bart Kamphorst for his assistance with data collection.
For each of the following statements, please decide whether it applies to you using a scale from 1
I go to bed later than I had intended.
I go to bed early if I have to get up early in the morning (R).
If it is time to turn off the lights at night I do it immediately (R).
Often I am still doing other things when it is time to go to bed.
I easily get distracted by things when I actually would like to go to bed.
I do not go to bed on time.
I have a regular bedtime which I keep to (R).
I want to go to bed on time but I just don't.
I can easily stop with my activities when it is time to go to bed (R).
1Indeed, for two of the three dependent variables (hours of sleep and experienced insufficient sleep) the correlation with bedtime procrastination was significantly stronger than the correlation with general procrastination; Steiger's
2We chose to include bedtime procrastination rather than general procrastination as this scale was specifically construed to tap into a specific subtype of procrastination that is related to sleeping behavior and that was thus expected (and found: see Table