I discovered this week that there is a Chinese word, 報復性熬夜 (pronounced – Bàofù xìng áoyè). Translated, the word roughly means, revenge bedtime procrastination. The term describes people who feel they don’t have much control over their lives during the day, who avoid sleep and stay up late in an attempt to regain a semblance of freedom and control in the late night hours.
I love the concept and how the word comes to life when translated; revenge bedtime procrastination. It sounds incredibly self destructive. It is the ultimate synonym for, cut off one’s nose to spite one’s face. There is an anger and futility behind the word that leaves you almost breathless. An act of revenge that punishes nobody but the person exacting it. It’s almost tragic.
And I have suffered from revenge bedtime procrastination through the years. I justified the act of staying up late despite being exhausted beyond the point of being able to read a sentence in a children’s book because I so dreaded the arrival of tomorrow. Going to sleep would make the next day come all the sooner. So, staying up late delayed the arrival of another day of work in a stress inducing environment that felt more like a deathmatch at the Roman Colosseum than a work space.
That is the story I told myself about why I was not going to bed. Since discovering revenge bedtime procrastination I have come to realise that staying up late was nothing more than an attempt to wrest a level of control back over my life, and perhaps to cast a magic spell over my existence.
More of us sleep less
In 1942 the world’s adult population slept for an average of 8 hours. The results of the 2019 Philips Global Sleep Survey shows that the 11,000 adults across 12 countries now only sleep an average of 6.8 hours per night during week days. Needless to say, less than 8 hours sleep is not enough for most of us.
In this research paper, the authors describe our lack of sleep, “a public health epidemic that is often unrecognized, under-reported, and that has rather high economic costs.” In this same paper the authors go on to say that 7 of the 15 leading causes of death in the US can be linked to ‘reduced sleep duration’.
We’re all stressed and we struggle to sleep for various reasons. The messages expounding the virtues of a good night’s sleep have increased over the past decade. Most of us now know that not sleeping enough is bad. Some of us know that enough sleep will help reduce the risk of issues such as heart disease, dementia, diabetes, hypertension and accidents. But despite the endless books, articles and documentaries on sleep, most of us don’t get enough of it.
So why is it, that so many of us have an addiction to poor sleeping habits? Here are a few thoughts, most based on observations, incidental research and reflection.
Blame your parents
Parents tend to be militant about their children’s bed times. Very few things are as trying in life as an over-tired child. And most bed times, for this reason, tend to be early.
However, as children grow up and start claiming their independence, one of the areas where they usually start imposing their ability to make decisions for themselves is what time they go to bed.
Young people have little control over their day. Between parents and teachers, most of their waking hours are pretty much planned and dictated to them. As they grow older, bedtime is one of the few things they can decide for themselves, and many leverage this freedom to rebel against what was imposed on them for most of their childhood. They go to bed later in the evening as a way to claim their transformation to adulthood. And for many this habit follows them into their later years.
Blame famous people who get by on 4 hours sleep
Here is the list of famous people who claim/ed to get by on 4 hours sleep a night (or less):
- Leonardo da Vinci
- Thomas Edison
- Margaret Thatcher
- Winston Churchill
- Ronald Reagan
- Bill Clinton
- Jack Dorsey
- Tim Cook
- Madonna
Think about it, with just 4 hours sleep a night, the average person who now tries to live on 6.8 hours, would be creating almost another full day of awake time in their week. You would enjoy a day that nobody else has. What a phenomenal gift and advantage. Who wouldn’t want that? I would give up an important finger (probably not a thumb) for the 4 hour sleep superpower.
That said, 4 hours sleep is only part of the story. The part that we aren’t told is that there is a rare gene mutation that allows a few to get by on far less sleep than most of us. For anyone who doesn’t have this gene mutation who tries to get that extra day, good luck. Those extra hours are likely to end up being a hazy mess of scrambled thoughts and bad moods.
That and Winston Churchill was an infamous napper.
Blame modern society’s obsession with productivity
There are myriad voices shouting out that we need more sleep, and yet we do nothing to sleep more. Instead, we wear being busy and tired as a badge of honour. It shows others we’re committed and that we’re hungry for success. We all know that one person who sends emails between 12:00 and 02:00 in the morning.
It is worth considering, however, that if you are working 20 hour days, you’re either a chef at a Michelin star restaurant, a doctor doing his residence, someone who is very bad at saying ‘no’ or a person that has poor time management skills. If you are so busy that you aren’t getting enough sleep, then it is worth asking yourself both of these questions, ‘am I happy with my life right now,’ and, ‘could I be working smarter?’
Truth is, people do still feel a pang of insecurity when they see their colleague putting in stupid hours. The idea that someone is doing that much work gives us the sense that they’re ahead of us, or doing work that is more important than the tasks we face day-to-day. However, times are changing, fewer people struggle with that insecurity. Most of the people I know who see someone online ‘doing work’ at some stupid hour shake their heads and feel pity for them.
Blame love and the feeling of possibility that comes at 02:00 in the morning
Something happens to us after 10 o’clock at night. We’re tired, our inhibitions have faded and our emotions are amplified and turned up all the way to ‘enormous’.
We’ve all had those conversations with a lover, usually some time after midnight, where the hours melt over us like a blanket and we connect with another human being in a way that daylight just won’t allow. Those endless hours filled with meaning and potential feel life-altering. It is during those times that we feel we’ve somehow spun love out of thin air, using nothing but our warm (bad) breath, emotions and words.
At other times, during those same early hours we’ve been awake ruminating about all that is wrong in our lives. It’s 02:00 and we obsess about how we are going to lose our job, our spouse or how our lives are derailed and we are utterly lost. Those hours are cold and lonely, and they don’t melt, but they crystalise and torture us as the minutes creak by like glaciers.
Magic things happen in the early hours of the night, especially when we’re dealing with large emotions. And it is during those hours that we hope we find things. Mostly solutions that will allow us to start new lives. At 02:00 anything feels possible. And we lose sleep hoping the world changes for us before the sun comes up.
Blame Revenge Bedtime Procrastination
What I realised this week is that all of the above are just different manifestations of Revenge Bedtime Procrastination. Those of us who don’t sleep, but rather, stay awake hoping that something changes during the witching hour; we are the ones for whom the term 報復性熬夜 was coined.
And I love it. I love that some of us unconsciously still believe that we can make magic in the middle of the night. That we can push needles into the voodoo doll of our days and exact revenge over the daylight hours of our lives by merely staying awake. That the answers to all our questions are folded into the darkness between midnight and 4 o’clock in the morning. That Rome can’t be built in a day, but might just be erected in a night. That we can be famous and successful by eking out another hour in front of our computer. That we can do our best work when the rest of the world sleeps.
I’m going to bed now.