Can’t Sleep? Ditch This Bad Habit Immediately!

There is one habit that is highly disruptive to any person who wishes to be productive at work and at home.

It now turns out that it worsens your insomnia too.

The worst part is that almost all of us are guilty of this habit from time to time. It’s how you apply it to your life that matters.

A team of Israeli researchers published a study in a recent edition of the journal Personality and Individual Differences that connected procrastination and insomnia.

Procrastination is the habit of delaying or postponing tasks that you know you should do. People often put off tasks because they believe they will be unpleasant, but many procrastinators also put off basically pleasant tasks simply because they might require effort.

The researchers asked 598 adults to complete online questionnaires to obtain information on their procrastination habits, their sleep quality and disturbances, their ability to turn off rumination during the night, their emotional states, and their bedtime and rising time preferences.

Possibly unsurprisingly, they found that people who procrastinated a lot slept worse than those who did their work immediately.

Interestingly, this held only for intermediate and evening people; that is, for people who preferred going to bed and waking up relatively or extremely late. Many of these people reported being unable to turn off their thoughts during the night and struggling with negative emotions that interfered with their sleep. This is precisely why the researchers thought procrastination may interfere with sleep, because procrastinators would be anxious about the work they had been putting off.

A strong majority of morning people – those going to bed and rising early – reported that they did not procrastinate and did not have difficulty sleeping. These are the people that annoyed us all at school, because they never worried about unfinished assignments or about the lack of remaining time in which to do them.

This seems to be the first study on the direct relationship between procrastination and insomnia, but a study published by Utrecht University academics in a 2014 edition of the journal Frontiers in Psychology showed that there might be another peculiar twist in the procrastination tale.

According to their survey, which they also conducted via an online questionnaire, procrastination is not just a phenomenon at work. Many people who go to bed very late at night in fact do so because they procrastinate. The scientists call it bedtime procrastination.

These are the people who hang around on the Internet, play games, or watch television series until the early morning hours. They are so caught up in their pleasant activities that they cannot bring themselves to do something as boring as sleep.

Of the 177 people who completed the questionnaire, most work procrastinators also report being bedtime procrastinators. In other words, many people who go to bed too late at night do so because they have the same poor self-control that makes people put off tasks at work.

In the 2014 study, they also report sleeping poorly compared to those guilty of neither work nor bedtime procrastination.

The best advice is, therefore, to go to bed and rise relatively early until your body adjusts to this new schedule. If you start working immediately in the early morning hours, you will probably lose your procrastination habit too.

Now if that’s too much to ask, or if you’ve tried the early-bird approach, here is a simple technique that works for almost everyone to fall asleep in 10 minutes – anytime, anywhere…