Vanessa Hill

You might be playing a game.

You might be doing crossword.

You might be reading a book, but mostly you're going to be using the screen.

And you just want some me time.

So people will think that they should go to bed at a certain time because maybe they have a scheduled bedtime.

Maybe they need to get up for a certain...

To be a scientist is to not give you a definitive answer on this and to say, well, there could be harm and there could not be harm.

And E, if there is harm, it is in affecting your sleep schedule, not getting the duration or quality of sleep that your body needs and having an inconsistent sleep schedule, which actually matters quite a lot.

So when I started researching this topic, there was a lot of information in the media.

There were some studies that were suggesting that, hey, bedtime procrastination is bad because it affects our sleep.

And if we aren't getting enough sleep, whatever that looks like to people, that is bad for their health.

So we're kind of coming in with a lot of assumptions and we said, okay, we're going to do a big review and just have a look at all of the results that exist in the literature, in the scientific literature.

So we did a big analysis of all the studies out there and we did find that there was an association between higher bedtime procrastination, lower sleep quality, lower sleep duration, and increased daytime fatigue.

Okay, so if you are procrastinating your bedtime, there's a link with these different sleep outcomes being bad, right?

Yeah.

So that could be the case, except there is just so much individual difference in our lives, right?

Like in how much sleep we need, in are we going to work the next morning?

Is it a weekend?

Those types of things where it's really hard to have these blanket statements where you say, hey, bedtime procrastination is bad because maybe it's not all of the time, but perhaps it's not bad for everyone.

And perhaps there's