The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

I'm a horrible addict. But I'm not addicted to heroin. I'm addicted to staying up late.

I've always tried to stay up as late as I can. As a teenager, I would often sneak out of bed and play computer games until 5 am. As a young adult, I worked in a hostel, and I would routinely stay up until 2 am or 3 am, doing nothing other than aimlessly surf the internet on my laptop or play crap music on a keyboard.

I'm doing a little better now - I only stay up until 11:30 pm most nights - but I'm still going to bed too late.

The effects of staying up late

Here are the effects of not getting enough sleep:

• I feel like shit all day
• I'm mentally unfocused and can't work
• I'm inefficient
• My lack of sleep makes me angry at my girlfriend, myself and my three-year-old son
• I'm too tired to exercise, which makes me feel worse in the long run

Then there are the health implications of staying up late:

There is a lot of evidence that getting less than seven to eight hours of sleep per night has long term health implications for us - including types of cancer, weight gain, memory and mental health - as well as our mood the following day and productivity at work.

Addiction

My brain is an idiot. When night comes, my brain tells me to stay up late. It would happily stay up all through the night if it could. The problem is that in the morning, I wake up and I'm horribly, horrendously tired, and I know I should have gone to bed earlier.

So why don't I just go to bed earlier? It doesn't make sense. There I am at 11 pm, 11:30 pm and I still havent gone to bed yet. What am I doing, squeezing out one or two hours of TV watching and aimless internet use when I know I'm going to feel awful the next day?

The cost/benefit ratio clearly isn't a good one. I get to stay up an hour or two every night, and in return I'm tired all day. It doesn't make sense to stay up late and yet I still do it, exactly like a drug addict. I've been reading about drug addiction in Scar Tissue, a book by the frontman of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Anthony Kiedis. I've noticed that I keep staying up late and I can't stop doing it, just like how Anthony Kiedis can't stop doing drugs.

I've learned that it might be due to something called "revenge bedtime procrastination":

As a self-professed night owl, I've spent years going to bed far later than I need to with no real reason

I learned a very relatable term today: “報復性熬夜” (revenge bedtime procrastination), a phenomenon in which people who don’t have much control over their daytime life refuse to sleep early in order to regain some sense of freedom during late night hours.

Sleep hygiene

Then there's the fact that my sleep hygiene is fucked. I go to bed at a different time every night, and I use my laptop and phone right up until the point where I'm actually in bed.

There was a guy on Reddit who went to see a sleep specialist and she gave him advice:

I felt exactly like you described until about 2 weeks ago. Tired of being tired, I decided to look for a neurologist specializing in sleep disorders.

It might sound like bs, but her simple recommendations worked like a charm: going to bed always around the same time, waking up around the same time, no screens in the bed, 10 minutes of sunlight in the morning and 2 mg of melatonin 2 hours before going to bed.

By the way, no screens in bed extends to no screens 30 minutes to an hour before going to bed. Phones and computers are mentally stimulating, plus they have the blue light effect.

Here are some more comments from Reddit:

When it's bedtime, turn off everything that projects light. No TV, no computer, no phone. Sit in the dark.

Nothing productive ever occurs online past 1 AM.

I suggest giving yourself a rule: no tv/computer/smartphone/tablet/etc 1 hour before bedtime. Just read a book or something.

Things preventing me from going to bed at a reasonable time

• My girlfriend is unsupportive. She always stays up late - she watches TV until 11:30 pm, which is when she finally goes to bed. She sees this as normal and she treats me as weird when I go to bed early
• I don't get time during the day to do what I want to do

What time should I go to bed?

A reasonable question to ask is: what time should I be going to bed?

For some people, going to bed at 11:30 pm is fine. They get eight hours of sleep and wake up at 7:30 am. I can't do this and I envy these people.

Another idea is to simply go to bed when it gets dark and get up when it gets light. I like this idea. This is what our ancestors did, before they had electric lightbulbs or candles. When the sun went down, and it was literally too dark to see anything, they would have had no choice but to go to bed.

This is fine in summer, when it gets dark at 10 pm and gets light at 6 am. That's eight hours of sleep. But in winter, it gets dark at 5 pm and gets light at 8 am, which equates to 17 hours in bed, which is a little extreme.

So instead, I recommended going to bed four hours before the darkest time of the night. When is the darkest time of the time? It's the point that's halfway between dusk and dawn. You would think this would be midnight but it's not. Here's how to calculate it.

• Take the sunset time (currently 7:30 pm here in Spain).
• Take the sunrise time (currently 7:30 am here in Spain).
• Work out the midpoint of the two times, the darkest time of the night, which is 1:30 am.
• Subtract four hours from the midpoint, and you get the time you should be going to bed: 9:30 pm.

Maybe if you're younger, 9:30 pm sounds ridiculously early, but it sounds reasonable to me. I just want to stop feeling tired all the time.

Things I can do

• Don't use screens (phone, TV) after 9 pm
• Go to bed at 10 pm or 10:30 pm at the latest