By Clare Stephens Wellness 13.11.2025

“I Thought Staying up Late Was ‘Me Time’ – Until I Learned the Truth”

Writer Clare Stephens unpacks the late-night doom-scrolling spiral keeping her awake.

It’s 2am, and I have the entire world in my hands.

Words, and images, and stories, and videos, and all of human history. The answer to almost any question I can possibly conjure. Live footage of a tragedy unfolding on the other side of the world, and a guy laughing at a seal who’s enthusiastically joined a pod of dolphins, and a debate where a charismatic politician ‘owns’ his opponent. It’s all at my fingertips, just waiting to be discovered.

It’s a never-ending promise, my phone screen. A promise that I’ll find what I’m looking for inside it. What, exactly, that is, I don’t know.

I can’t remember when I started using my phone as a numbing agent, to distract me until my eyes become so heavy I can no longer keep them open. It definitely wasn’t a conscious decision. But now, when I get into bed, all the energy and anxiety and uncertainty of the day comes with me, like a layer of grime that can’t be washed off in the shower. I either lie there, my brain buzzing with all the thoughts I haven’t confronted from the day, or I drown them out with this device that’s essentially attached to me. And I’m aware, of course I’m aware, that the device itself makes it harder to sleep.

The blue light emitted by a smartphone screen can disrupt the hormone responsible for our circadian rhythm. At 2am I’m still wide awake because for hours I’ve been staring at a thing that’s telling my brain it’s daytime. That I should be alert. Even when I try to put my phone down, I can’t sleep, and unfortunately there isn’t much to do in the middle of the night when everyone you know is unconscious. I could read, I suppose. But my phone is right there. And shouldn’t I check tomorrow’s weather? Do today’s Wordle? Google the name of that actor who was in that show and might also have been in that other show? Maybe then I’ll finally be able to drift off.

My screen addiction and its impact on my sleep has been getting worse lately, particularly since I had my daughter. You’d think it would be the opposite – that a parent would behave better with this added layer of responsibility, that the exhaustion of chasing a toddler would be so profound that there’d simply be no time for toxic phone habits. But the tiredness erodes my self-control. And there’s something else, too.

Years ago, I read about a phenomenon called Revenge Bedtime Procrastination. It originated on a Chinese social media platform, where users said they delayed sleep at night in response to feeling as though their entire day belonged to someone else. At work, they didn’t have a sense of control over their lives, so they exercised it once they got home. Procrastinating sleep. Trying to pry some moments of autonomy from the tail end of their evenings.

I think it’s what I’m doing. Rebelling against structure and schedules in the tiny window I can. The early hours of the morning are my revenge for a life that – between work and parenting – doesn’t always feel like my own. Shameful, I know.

Like most self-destructive habits, the question of how to solve this problem isn’t an intellectual one. I’m acutely aware of the logical answers. I need to charge my phone outside my bedroom. Not look at it for an hour before bed. Change the screen to grayscale. Put it on Do Not Disturb. Establish a phone-free nighttime routine. At one point, while I was writing my novel, I literally bought a safe to put my phone in. It was effective. Life-changing, even. But somehow that safe is now gathering dust in the back of a cupboard, and my phone is still beside me. Finding a solution isn’t my issue. Implementing the solution, consistently, is. Being motivated to actually change.

And I am motivated. I don’t remember the last time I had a full eight hours of sleep. I’m forgetful. Foggy. I need two coffees now, when I used to only have one. I have such little energy during the day. A nap is my idea of heaven.

I know what the small, rectangular screen beside my bed is doing to me. I know what it costs me. Tonight, it will sleep in another room. If I’m wide awake, craving the bottomless promise of my phone, I will choose to stare at the ceiling. Or to go through the alphabet and find a country to fit every letter, which is the game I play when I can’t switch my mind off. Usually by the time I get to ‘X’, I have no mental resources left (there is no country that starts with an ‘X’, so you have to choose one with an ‘X’ in its name, like Luxembourg).

Perhaps my revenge at bedtime shouldn’t be against myself – against the lack of freedom I have in a day. But revenge against the tech companies who have designed platforms and devices that prey on our weaknesses. That give us the illusion of the entire world to hold in our hands, making it near impossible to put them down.

They built a source of temptation with billions of dollars, the greatest modern minds, and all the resources to hack human psychology. So sleeping in a phone-free room, my endless stream of notifications pinging away into nothingness, with that temptation out of my reach, feels like a necessary form of revenge. A powerful one.

Even if it’s remarkably difficult.