Is Sleep Procrastination Messing With Your Health & Mindset? | Vanessa Hill, PhD
Good Life Project
Jonathan Fields / Acast
4.5 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 20 April 2026
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So have you ever found yourself on the couch at 10, 11, 12, 1 a.m., watching videos and how the |
| 0:07.1 | pyramids were built, even though you know you have to be up in three or four or five hours? |
| 0:12.1 | Or maybe scrolling on your phone, it's that strange moment where your brain says, |
| 0:15.8 | you quote, should go to bed, but some other part of you just isn't ready to let the day go. |
| 0:21.9 | We call this bedtime procrastination, and most of us carry a lot of guilt about it. |
| 0:26.5 | We feel like we kind of should be falling asleep or that we just lack the willpower to put |
| 0:31.0 | the phone down or stop watching TV. But what if the late night scrolling or watching is actually |
| 0:36.8 | a search for something deeper, |
| 0:38.3 | like a sense of agency or me time or meaning or identity that you just didn't get |
| 0:43.7 | during your busy workday? |
| 0:45.5 | Today we're looking at sleep through a very different lens. |
| 0:48.7 | We're moving away from the quote, sleep hacking, performance sport, and towards something |
| 0:53.0 | much more human. |
| 0:55.3 | And joining me is Vanessa Hill. She is a sleep scientist and research fellow at CQ University, who's dedicated |
| 1:01.3 | her career to studying why we delay sleep, what it actually does to us when we do it, and how we can |
| 1:07.9 | actually bridge the gap between our intentions and our behaviors. |
| 1:11.7 | We drop into why, quote, revenge bedtime procrastination is often a cry for help and autonomy. |
| 1:17.5 | We explore the intention behavior gap and why it's hardest to close at night. |
| 1:22.5 | We really think about a simple pattern interrupt to help you move towards bed without struggle |
| 1:27.1 | and why being consistent might actually be more important than being perfect with your devices. |
| 1:32.5 | And we bust a really huge myth about blue light and screens at bedtime. |
| 1:38.4 | I'm so excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project. |
... |
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