Bedtime Procrastination vs. While-in-Bed Procrastination

A person can be lying in bed, phone six inches from their face, fully intending to sleep, and still be procrastinating. Sleep researchers have started measuring this as its own behavior, separate from whatever kept that person out of the bedroom an hour earlier.

Bedtime procrastination is delaying the act of getting into bed when nothing external prevents it. While-in-bed procrastination is delaying sleep onset after you’re already there: scrolling, watching one more episode, reading past the point of tiredness, or simply staying awake by choice rather than necessity. Both count as procrastinating sleep. They are not the same behavior, and the research measuring them separately has found they barely correlate.

Two Separate Failure Points

The term “bedtime procrastination” comes from Floor Kroese’s 2014 research at Utrecht University, which defined it narrowly: failing to go to bed at the intended time with no external reason for the delay. That definition says nothing about what happens after the person actually lies down. For six years, sleep-procrastination research mostly didn’t ask.

In 2020, a team led by Paula Magalhães at the University of Minho, publishing in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, built a scale to measure the after-lying-down behavior directly and ran it alongside the standard Kroese bedtime-procrastination scale in a sample of 400 Portuguese high school students.

The correlation between the two scales came out to r = 0.158. For context, a correlation that low means the two measures share roughly 2.5% of their variance: statistically distinguishable from zero, but weak enough that a high score on one tells you almost nothing about the other. The paper’s authors concluded that sleep procrastination is better understood as two facets rather than one behavior measured incompletely. They also found the two facets keep different company. Bedtime procrastination correlated with a later wake time and a later dinner hour, while while-in-bed procrastination correlated with being male, an earlier dinner hour, and wanting to fall asleep later than one’s actual bedtime.

What Each One Looks Like

Picture two people on the same night, both intending to be asleep by 11.

The first spends the evening on the couch. Dishes, one more show, a scroll through a group chat, a vague sense that going to bed means the day is over, and 11 becomes 11:40 before they’ve even brushed their teeth. This is bedtime procrastination: the delay happens entirely before the bedroom.

The second walks into the bedroom at 10:55, gets under the covers, and picks up their phone “for a minute.” The minute becomes an hour. They are not avoiding bed; they are in it, horizontal, lights off, and still not trying to sleep, because the phone is right there, because the show has three episodes left, because lying awake scrolling doesn’t feel like failing the way staying up in the living room does. By the time the phone goes down, it’s 12:15, and the first real attempt at sleep starts more than an hour late, with no time spent outside the bedroom to explain the gap.

Both people lost the same 75 minutes. What cost them the time differs in kind as much as in setting. One is a decision about where to be; the other is a decision about what to do once already there.

Why the Split Matters for Fixing Either One

An intervention aimed at the first person, an alarm-style prompt that gets someone off the couch and into the bedroom on schedule, does nothing for the second person, who was already in bed on time. And an intervention aimed at the phone itself, a screen-time lock, a grayscale mode, a bedroom charging dock, does nothing for the first person, who hasn’t picked up the phone as the problem yet; they haven’t gotten near the bed.

This is the practical argument for treating the two as separate problems rather than one. A 2025 tracking study from the National University of Singapore’s Sleep and Cognition Laboratory, led by Stijn Massar, followed 119 university students for two to four weeks and found they rarely planned a bedtime at all, fewer than one night a week on average, overrunning the nights they did plan by 46 minutes, most often citing schoolwork or “e-leisure.” That’s a bedtime-procrastination finding, about missing the target time to get horizontal. It says nothing about how long the same students then lay awake once there, because that’s a different measurement entirely.

The two failure points likely respond to different fixes for a reasonable reason: one is a decision made while still mobile, in a room with other cues and other people; the other is a decision made alone, already still, with the lowest-effort distraction imaginable within arm’s reach. A prompt that makes one moment visible and accountable, did you get up and go, yes or no, has a clean answer for the first problem and nothing to offer the second, where the person already did what was asked and the failure happens in a form no check-in was built to see. The emotional, autonomy-driven version of evening delay sits mostly on the bedtime-procrastination side of this line, even though it can bleed into the second once someone is finally lying down. The broader argument for anchoring sleep timing to wake time rather than bedtime is related but separate; it doesn’t distinguish between these two facets of bedtime itself.

What the Research Doesn’t Yet Show

The evidence for this split is still thin. The while-in-bed procrastination scale exists in exactly one published validation, on 400 adolescents in one country, using self-report rather than any objective measure of when phones actually went dark. Nobody has yet run the same two-scale design on adults, on shift workers, or on a sample large enough to say with confidence how the weak correlation holds up outside a Portuguese high school population. The 2025 Singapore study is a useful adjacent data point, real and objectively tracked, but it wasn’t designed to test the bedtime/while-in-bed split and doesn’t claim to.

What the 2020 study established is narrower and still real: that measuring only the walk to the bedroom, which is what sleep-procrastination research had done since 2014, leaves out a second behavior that isn’t well predicted by the first. Whether that second behavior turns out to be one thing or several, and whether it looks the same in a 45-year-old as in a 16-year-old, is unanswered.

On the first half of this split: an alarm that requires a friend-witnessed proof of being up doesn’t touch what happens once someone is already lying down with a phone. Where it can matter is earlier in the evening, for someone whose problem is the walk to the bedroom rather than the phone once they’re in it, a hard morning consequence changes the incentive to start that walk on time the night before. It has no answer for the second failure point at all.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can someone score high on both bedtime and while-in-bed procrastination? Yes. A weak correlation (r = 0.158) means the two scores are largely independent, but independence isn’t exclusivity. Some people dawdle before bed and then dawdle again once they’re in it, losing time to both behaviors in the same evening; the study didn’t estimate how common that combination is.

Which one is more common? The 2020 study didn’t establish population prevalence for either behavior in a way that supports a clean comparison. What a separate 2025 tracking study found is that bedtime overrun itself is close to universal: on the rare nights students planned a bedtime at all, they missed it by 46 minutes on average.

Can someone have one form of sleep procrastination but not the other? Yes, and this is the practical core of the distinction. Someone who gets into bed exactly on schedule and then spends 90 minutes scrolling has while-in-bed procrastination with none of the bedtime kind. Someone who avoids the bedroom for an hour and then falls asleep within minutes has the reverse.

Does a screen-time limit or notifications-off setting fix while-in-bed procrastination? It removes one easy channel, but the decision underneath it can just redirect toward a book, a show, or lying awake on purpose. The behavior being measured is the delay, and a locked phone only closes off one route to it.

Is there a name for the category that includes both? Sleep procrastination is the umbrella term researchers use, with bedtime procrastination and while-in-bed procrastination as its two measured facets. Studying only the first, which is what the field did from 2014 to 2020, missed roughly half of how people actually delay sleep.