Chapter 5 - Bedtime Procrastination: A Behavioral Perspective on Sleep Insufficiency

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Abstract

In this chapter, we discuss a specific domain of procrastination that significantly affects health and well-being, “bedtime procrastination”: the phenomenon of postponing going to bed, typically resulting in a lack of sleep. This chapter describes how a lack of sleep affects health and well-being, how bedtime procrastination plays a role in this regard, and why people do it. Essentially, we argue that going to bed late can be conceived of as a self-regulation problem, just like procrastination in other domains. Building on this conceptualization, we suggest interventions that may help people hit the pillow on time, and discuss avenues for future research. We conclude that considering sleep insufficiency from a self-regulation perspective may be an important step to further understanding and finding ways to reduce this self-undermining behavior.

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    2022, Journal of Criminal Justice
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    Of note, a comparison of these two statistical approaches allows for an examination of the extent to which parsing out between- and within-person variance in self-control and sleep problems accounts for the cross-lagged associations frequently reported in CLPM analyses. Given past research documenting the effect of sleep on self-control (e.g., Barnes & Meldrum, 2015; Meldrum et al., 2015; Vazsonyi et al., 2018) and, likewise, the effect of self-control on sleep (e.g., Exelmans, 2019; Exelmans et al., 2019; Kroese, Evers, et al., 2016; Kroese, Nauts, et al., 2016; Zhang & Wu, 2020), we felt it was critical to tease out the nuances of the interplay between these two constructs. While investigations into the reciprocal association between sleep and concepts related to self-control have started to emerge in the research literature (e.g., Bauducco et al., 2019; Kortesoja et al., 2020;Williams et al., 2017; Williams & Sciberras, 2016), no study has explored the association between sleep problems and self-control within a criminological framework and across both childhood and adolescence.

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