Hi there, it's Matt and welcome back to the podcast.

I want to start with your thumb.

It's 12.7 a.m.

You're flat on your back in the dark, the phone warm against your face, flicking upward.

Nothing is stopping you from putting it down, nothing except the small, stubborn, almost unaccountable hope that the next video

might be the good one. 40 minutes vanish this way. You're not anxious, you're not in pain. Sleep

isn't refusing you. It's waiting politely just outside the door to be let in. And somewhere in the dark, without ever

quite deciding it, you've decided that one more video beats closing your eyes. That moment has a name.

It isn't insomnia. It isn't obligation. It isn't even, for most people, a habit. Scientists call it bedtime procrastination, a specific

behavior with a precise definition, a way to measure it, and more than a decade of research

behind it. You may know it by its livelier name, revenge bedtime procrastination. That one didn't come from a laboratory. People coined it

to capture a feeling, that after a day spent answering to everyone else, the late hours are the only

ones that truly belong to you. The behavior the researchers study and the behavior behind that

phrase are one and the same.

The name is cultural.

The science underneath it isn't.

One quick word before we go on.

Not long ago, we devoted a whole episode to doomscrolling, to what evening screens do to your sleep.

Tonight is different.

The screen isn't the subject.

The choice is.

Let me take you through how this works,

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