I've been a bad sleeper for most of my life. Not in that I have trouble staying asleep or falling asleep, but I hem and haw about going to sleep at all, believing there are more important or fun things to do instead. When I was 12 and my family would go on vacation, I'd come back to my Tumblr dashboard and see all the posts that went up while I was away, so my first night back from an exhausting flight would usually be spent totally awake until the following morning, scrolling through photos of k-pop boys until I reached a point in my dashboard that I'd already seen.¹

Now that I'm on Pokemon Sleep, this bad habit is more obvious to me than ever. The day resets at 4am on my app – which means that if I'm awake on a Tuesday until 4am Wednesday, it records my sleep as part of Wednesday.

Here is a diagram:

This also means that when I do go to sleep on Wednesday, I don't get as many points as I could have gotten, because you can only get a total of 100 points (a fraction of which I would have earned on my Tuesday-counted-as-Wednesday sleep), and they're trying to reward people for sleeping at appropriate times and not just, like, sleeping at all. Which, okay, fine. But I think there should be an option where you can set when the day resets at the very least. I want those points!

Revenge bedtime procrastination is a term people use now for the way I've been sleeping my whole life. Even in school, I was dissatisfied by how much of the day I spent in classes I didn't care about. Now that I'm working in corporate, it's the same thing.²

It all circles back to the need to spend more of my days doing stuff I find... not necessarily productive, but worthwhile. What activities make me feel fulfilled? Does that even come in the form of a job? I worry that whenever something becomes something I "have" to do, no matter how fun it was originally, it becomes unfun. Someone put me onto the rebel tendency and I haven't stopped thinking about it since.

Maybe I'm just pathologizing my habits, but I do think I need to get this sleep thing in check. I want to catch a Riolu.³

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1. This was, of course, when social media feeds were chronological.↩

2. Then again, when I was unemployed during the pandemic, I did the same thing – but that was probably a different, pandemic-specific depression-flavored bedtime procrastination, lol.↩

3. And also have more energy, and feel better, etc. But Riolu first...!↩