Does resisting temptations all day make us go to bed late?
People who reported resisting more temptations during the day also reported putting off going to bed more that night, though the link was small.
Source
Too Depleted to Turn In: The Relevance of End-of-the-Day Resource Depletion for Reducing Bedtime Procrastination
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — One-off retrospective online survey (MTurk) relating a time-weighted count of the previous day's resisted desires to that night's bedtime procrastination.
- N
- N=218 · 218 MTurk adults after excluding 27 of 245 who had a sleep disorder or worked night shifts.
- Population
- U.S.-based Amazon Mechanical Turk workers aged 18-75.
- Outcome
- State bedtime procrastination scale score and self-reported minutes of bedtime delay the previous night.
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
Online participants recalled the previous day in six three-hour blocks, noting what they did, which desires they felt (such as for coffee, snacks, media or leisure) and which they tried to resist. Resisted desires were combined into a 'depletion index' that gave more weight to later ones. Participants then rated how much they had delayed going to bed the night before and for how many minutes.
What they found
The depletion index correlated modestly with bedtime procrastination scores (r = 0.21) and with minutes of delay (r = 0.17). The simple number of desires felt, as opposed to resisted, was unrelated to procrastination. The results held when the first and last blocks of the day or the desire for sleep were left out, and an unpublished second sample showed a similar correlation (r = 0.27).
The limits
What it doesn't show
This is a correlational, one-time retrospective survey, so it cannot show that resisting desires causes later bedtimes. Tired participants who went to bed late may have recalled more resisted desires, and alternatives such as fatigue, feeling entitled to 'me time', or strategic effort allocation fit the data too. The depletion idea itself is contested, the effect sizes were small, and the sample was an online convenience sample paid a small fee.
Key terms
- Bedtime procrastination
- Needlessly and voluntarily going to bed later than intended despite expecting to be worse off for it.
- Ego depletion
- The contested idea that self-control draws on a limited resource that gets used up by earlier acts of self-control.
- Strength model of self-control
- The theory that self-control works like a muscle that tires with use; its evidence base has been challenged.
- Depletion index
- Here, a weighted count of desires a person tried to resist, with resistance later in the day counting more.
- Implementation intention
- A pre-planned 'if situation X, then I will do Y' rule that helps people act on goals semi-automatically.
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Quiz yourself
What kind of design did this study use?
Common questions
Why did the authors count resisted desires rather than all desires?
Merely having a desire is not thought to use up self-control; trying to resist it is. Consistently, the number of desires felt did not predict procrastination.
Could the direction of cause run the other way?
Yes. People who habitually procrastinate at bedtime are more sleep-deprived, which could make resisting temptations harder and make them notice more desires.
What practical idea comes from this?
If people are depleted at night, relying on willpower is unlikely to work; pre-planned action plans or nudges timed for the evening may help more.
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