Psychologists Know Why You Can’t Stop Scrolling At Bedtime – And This Is What It Says About You

The lights are out, the room is quiet, and you’re in bed. This environment should lull you to sleep, but there’s one major distraction: the smartphone glued to your hand. You want to get some rest, yet you simply can’t stop scrolling. But why is that? Well, psychologists may finally have the answer!

It happens to the best of us, doesn’t it? We lie down and can’t fall asleep instantly, so we reach for our smartphones. “Just a minute,” we think to ourselves as we unlock the screen. But 60 seconds of scrolling is never what actually happens. Instead, we look down for a half-hour, an hour, 90 minutes…

The next thing we know, we look up at the clock, and it’s no longer bedtime – it’s halfway through the night! This issue affects the younger generation of adults, in particular. A 2019 study by the phone company OnePlus found that 15 percent of millennials use their phones between 11:00 p.m. and 3:00 a.m. And 86 percent reported phone-related sleep interruption. Amazingly, only 9 percent of those in the 55-and-older age group had the latter problem.

It’s not necessarily our phones’ fault that we scroll until the wee hours of the morning, though. If you can’t put down your device, it could actually be down to a psychological phenomenon that has been uncovered in recent years. Perhaps you’ve fallen victim to this cycle, too. And now, it’s time to find out why!

There’s a popular colloquial phrase that people use to describe their endless nocturnal scrolling: it’s called revenge bedtime procrastination. And this odd moniker resonates with a lot of people. This is especially true in the phrase’s country of origin – China – where it became a widely known descriptor of the activity.