Is Sleep Procrastination Messing With Your Health & Mindset? | Vanessa Hill, PhD
4/20/202652 min
It’s getting late, you know you “should” go to bed. But you just can't…or won’t. You tell yourself, just one more episode, or a few more minutes of scrolling, or a little more work to sneak in. It seems innocuous, but what if it was actually causing a world of harm? To your health, relationships, state of mind, performance at work, and more?
Our guest is Vanessa Hill, PhD, a leading sleep scientist and Research Fellow at CQ University, who specializes in the science of bedtime procrastination. She is a Science Communication Fellow at the Museum of Science and an expert in how our digital habits shape our rest.
And today, we’re talking about:
- The near-addictive quality of sleep procrastination, and the hidden reason for it
- The surprising research showing why blue light might not be the sleep villain we’ve been told it is
- Why your "night brain" finds it nearly impossible to “do the right thing, and get to bed”
- The one habit that often matters more than the total minutes spent on your phone
- Why common sleep advice often fails, and what to do instead
If you find yourself stuck in a cycle of late nights and tired mornings, you are not alone. Listen to this episode to discover a more compassionate, science-backed way to reclaim your rest and feel like yourself again.
You can find Vanessa at: Vanessa's Substack | Instagram | Episode Transcript
Next week, we're sharing a conversation with Elena Brower about the wisdom of emptiness and the art of showing up to your life completely.
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsJonathan Fields· Host0:00
So have you ever found yourself on the couch at ten, eleven, twelve, one AM watching videos on how the pyramids were built even though you know you have to be up in three or four or five hours? Or maybe scrolling on your phone. It's that strange moment where your brain says you, quote, "should go to bed," but some other part of you just isn't ready to let the day go. We call this bedtime procrastination, and most of us carry a lot of guilt about it. We feel like we kind of should be falling asleep or that we just lack the willpower to put the phone down or stop watching TV. But what if the late-night scrolling or watching is actually a search for something deeper, like a sense of agency or me time or meaning or identity that you just didn't get during your busy workday? Today, we're looking at sleep through a very different lens. We're moving away from the, quote, "sleep hacking performance sport" and towards something much more human. And joining me is Vanessa Hill. She is a sleep scientist and research fellow at CQUniversity who's dedicated her career to studying why we delay sleep, what it actually does to us when we do it, and how we can actually bridge the gap between our intentions and our behaviors. We drop into why, quote, "revenge bedtime procrastination" is often a cry for help and autonomy. We explore the intention-behavior gap and why it's hardest to close at night. We really think about a simple pattern interrupt to help you move towards bed without struggle and why being consistent might actually be more important