Ologies with Alie Ward - Noctohabitology (SLEEP PROCRASTINATION) with Vanessa “Nessy” Hill

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

Late night scrolling. Couchlock. Habitual insomnia. You want to sleep —  so why won’t you turn off the light, dumplin’? We’ve got someone for that: sleep scientist, globally known PBS correspondent, host of the series Braincraft, and Noctohabitologist, Dr. Vanessa “Nessy” Hill. So let’s chat about what amount of sleep is “normal,” if farmers had two sleeps, electricity, blue blockers, “me time,” proof that Dolly Parton is an alien from an angel planet, the populations most prone to sleep procrastination, which of 93 scientifically-proven habit-changers are the easiest to implement, and how this expert and I have both personally battled the agony between wanting to rest but avoiding it.  Come. Gather. Get mad. Be healed. Visit Dr. Hill’s website and follow her on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Substack A donation went to Project Sleep More episode sources and links Other episodes you may enjoy: Somnology (SLEEP), Chronobiology (CIRCADIAN RHYTHMS), Oneirology (DREAMS), Attention-Deficit Neuropsychology (ADHD), Obsessive-Compulsive Neurobiology (OCD), Mnemonology (MEMORY), Ergopathology (BURNOUT), Personality Psychology (PERSONALITIES), Misophonology (DISTRACTING SOUND & NOISE RAGE), Dolorology (PAIN) 400+ Ologies episodes sorted by topic Smologies (short, classroom-safe) episodes Sponsors of Ologies Transcripts and bleeped episodes Become a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month OlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, hoodies, totes! Follow Ologies on Instagram and Bluesky Follow Alie Ward on Instagram and TikTok Editing by Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio Productions and Jake Chaffee Managing Director: Susan Hale Scheduling Producer: Noel Dilworth Transcripts by Aveline Malek  Website by Kelly R. Dwyer Theme song by Nick Thorburn Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Oh, hey, it's your 2002 sedan on hospice, gulping down, Penzoil, Alley Ward, and I hope you are sleepy, because we're going to fix our lives, all right? Plagging me most of my life is this variology. Somehow, I am friends with a researcher who tackles it. So they did their psychology undergrad at the University of New South Wales, got a master's from Australian National University and a PhD in behavioral psychology with a focus on sleep studies. You may have already seen them on their PBS series Braincraft via YouTube or other news sources. They are highly lauded for their science communication work. They're famous for it. They're also my longtime friend. So picture, if you will, a brilliant and a funny scientist with an air of like a young Winona writer in a gossamer sundress.

As a fellow Angelino and a friend, I made them come to my home studio where we did not record in my home studio, but rather we flopped on the couch. with my 14-year-old stinky gremlin snoozing between us. We literally talked for hours. It was very hard to edit this episode down. We were just gabbing about why sleeping feels so good, but why sometimes we are like cats resisting a bath about it. So we're going to address that in a moment.

But first, thanks to patrons who make the show possible and good for supporting with a dollar or more a month and submitting questions for the ologists. If anyone needs non-swearing episodes, We have kid-friendly, classroom-safe versions. They're in their own feed. It's called Smologis. S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S.

Get them wherever you get podcast. Tell your friends. Find other ologites in the wild via OlogiesMarch, which is available at OlogiesMurch.com. And for $0,000, you can spread the word just by leaving us a review. And to prove how much they matter, I read them all, and I pick a still-wet-one, such as this one from Lemon Let's Go, who wrote, Thank you, Ologies, for keeping me company while I'm up in the middle of the night with my

nocturnal baby and for fueling my early morning conversations with my fam. I lost count of the amount of times I said. And another thing about hyenas over breakfast this morning. Lemon Let's Go. You wrote that for the right episode. Say hi to the moon and your baby. As soon as that little one knows words, tell them that sleep hygiene is cool. Lastly, thank you to sponsors of ologies who make it possible for us to donate to a cause of the ologist choosing every week.

Okay, noctohabitology. Nocto comes from the Latin nocturnalists. Of course you know that, but it means belonging to the night. And habitology is a real study. It's about how the brain forms routines. But habit comes from the Latin for to dwell or remain. So if something is habitable, you can live in it. Habits are something that you could move into and they provide shelter. I never realize that.

They can also be a flop house. It's up to us how we live in them. So let's chat about what amount of sleep is normal. Proof that Dolly Parton is an alien from an angel planet. Why couch feels nice. Stealing focus from tomorrow. If farmers really had two sleeps, electricity, blue blockers, me time, which populations are more prone to sleep procrastination, which, of 93 scientifically proven habit changers are the easiest to implement sleep timing changing as we age, and how this expert and I have both personally battled the agony between wanting to rest, but avoiding it. With sleep scientist, globally known correspondent and nocto-habitologist, Dr. Vanessa, but you can call her Nessie Hill.

We have 17 hours left on this SD card. What if we use it all? We might. If you wouldn't mind, could you say, your first and last name and the pronouns you use. Yeah, Vanessa Hill, she her. Dr. Hill. You are now doctor, Vanessa Hill. I am. Well, how long were you interested in sleep? Because I've known you for years. I have been interested in sleep the whole time that you've known me. So I had a very specific life change, probably 12 years ago now, actually, where I moved from Australia to the US.

I went from being employed by the government in Australia having a very stable job that had stable working hours to essentially being a creative in New York City and running my own business and having a YouTube channel and leaning into my night owl tendencies in a way that I never had before. And my sleep became awful. I had short term insomnia. I had a lot of stresses that I had never had before in my life. And I was making a lot of content that was about psychology and health. So I tried to fix my own sleep because I was staying up late. I had radically different bedtimes day to day. I was out drinking.

I was doing all of the things that sleep scientists say you shouldn't do. Right. So I went through this process of looking into sleep, thinking about sleep, understanding what's happening in our brain while we're sleeping and then trying to get better sleep myself. And at the beginning of that time, I was making a web series for PBS, and I made an episode on sleep deprivation and the effects of sleep deprivation in your body. Throughout the 10 days of not sleeping, his pulse, blood pressure and the chemicals in his pee all stayed the same. He did a bunch of intelligence tests every day and his marks barely changed.

But his typing speed declined and after day four, Z couldn't type anymore. And I had this experience at a lot of up-and-coming YouTube creators. dream of where I published a video on this. I went to bed and when I woke up, it had 500,000 views. I think we're at a point in society where we know the effects of sleep deprivation. We know that sleep is good for us. And then if you just go and talk about how lack of sleep is going to kill you or give you Alzheimer's or cancer or heart disease or whatever it may be, that just makes people stressed. So I don't love that video now, but that was the the first piece of content that I ever made about sleep, and I started making a lot more after that.

And back in the early YouTube days, when she was making her first videos, the term sleep hygiene was not really in the zeitgeist at all. But she says people were somewhat aware of the do's and don'ts. Like, don't use the screen 30 minutes before sleep, 60 minutes before sleep. Don't eat three hours before you go to bed. Cut out caffeine in the afternoon and evening. And don't drink an hour or so before you go to bed. You know, all of these things that we kind of know we should do, but we probably don't do in reality in day-to-day life. And we listed out all of these because that's what the American Academy of Sleep Medicine

recommends. And I got all of these comments from people saying, it's impossible to do all of these things. I can't do all of these things. What kind of people do these things? And how do you actually change your behavior? Like, I want to do that. But I just find that I can't.

It's really hard and what do you recommend? And I started looking into it and I got really interested in this idea of behavior change and how can we change our sleep habits. And there wasn't a lot of information on it. A lot of the information on sleep really relies on self-control and discipline and willpower. And that prompted me to go down the biggest rabbit hole of my life and actually do. a PhD and become a researcher and research sleep and behavior change. It's so fascinating and it applies to everyone.

It also feels like it's getting worse all the time. But I have been so absolutely gobsmacked, fascinated, giddy about sleep hygiene and how it works. And I think you have to be shitty at it to care. a lot. You know what I mean? Like, is there a consensus on how much sleep is a good amount? Apparently, Dolly Parton sleeps like four hours a night. Oh, is she a short sleeper? She just wakes up at like four in the morning, writes two songs every morning. An angel. I know. She's an angel, but she's built different. She's just better. Yeah. There is such a thing as short sleeper. people who genetically just have a very low sleep need

and that doesn't seem to grossly affect their health in different ways. But it is an incredibly, incredibly small amount of the population. The recommended number is 7 to 9 hours a night for a midlife adult. People who are in their early 20s or adolescents may need more sleep. And then when you're older, say over... 60 or 65, you may need a bit less, like six hours might be enough for those groups. So you kind of start off if you think about babies sleeping like 20 hours a day and then someone who's 90 years old sleeping like four and a half hours a night. Like you kind of throughout your lifespan go from needing

a lot of sleep to needing not so much. So I think it's important to say that seven to nine hours is the recommended amount because there's a kind of myth that I say on social media, just in popular discourse that you need eight hours. And what I think happens is that a lot of people get seven or in between seven and eight and then people feel bad that they didn't get eight. And is it harder with someone with ADHD? Is it harder with someone who... Oh, I mean, definitely. I think that I would think about it less culturally occupations. I think definitely matter, particularly when you're talking about shift workers or people in high stress jobs that, you're, you know, that, you're either have variable work schedules or just carrying a great deal of stress in their daily lives,

I think definitely that has to do with it. Your personality can affect sleep as well. And I think definitely things like ADHD can affect it. Mind blowing. I am gagged. Sleep procrastination, which relies almost entirely on executive function and resisting impulsivity is affected by ADHD. Stop. You can see the 2024 paper in the journal Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorders titled Associations of Sleep Disturbance with ADHD, Implications for Treatment, which notes that ADHD is commonly associated with disorders sleep. We knew that. You knew that. We all knew that. But what you may not know is that research came out in December, 2025, just came out via a paper in Frontiers in Psychiatry. And it was titled ADHD as a circadian rhythm disorder, evidence,

and implications for chronotherapy. So this blast out of the gate that accumulating evidence demonstrates strong associations between ADHD and an evening chronotype, aka night owls, and the disturbances are profound with delayed sleeping and waking

in nearly 80% of ADHDers. I get it, though. You got to go to work. You got to go to school. Whatever. Don't despair. The study notes that the circadian phase can be successfully advanced in ADHD populations.

It recommends fixed wake-up times, so same alarm seven days a week, adding morning bright light exposure, evening light restriction with screen hygiene, and selective low-dose melatonin. And for much more on ADHD, we have a three-part episode with the godfather of ADHD science, Dr. Russell Barkley. And that's accompanied by two episodes on the lived experience. of having ADHD, as well as another one on life tips for it. We're going to link all of those in the show notes. They're the most popular episodes we've ever done.

Super helpful. Send them to everyone who gives you shit. There are all of these things that there is correlational evidence of, that it does affect sleep health. And a lot of them are kind of outside of our control. What are some of the factors? Why are some of us putting off going to sleep? I mean, it's been a problem for me like my whole life.

I've just recently. Yeah, I feel like there are two questions within your question, right? Sorry. So there's the question of just what are the factors that affect our sleep health in general? And then why do some people have trouble going to bed? Do they sound like the same question to you? Am I just being a mega-research? No, no, no, no.

No, I appreciate your disinviguation. They are. My main question is more of an imperative where it's just like fix me. Yeah, and we'll definitely get to that. I think one of the biggest factors that can affect our sleep day to day is is stress and anxiety. So I think to your point, there are some people who are just in bed reading their book and lights off and then they're done.

And then there's people like you and me who are just up fretting and doing different things. I mean, stress and anxiety plays a big role in that. Some of that can be more of a trait. thing, like from a personality perspective, if you are more of a neurotic person, and sometimes I like to say higher in neuroticism, because I feel like neurotic has a lot of negative connotations, but neuroticism is just one of the personality traits that we measure and people are just higher or low in it. Heck yeah, we got a personality psychology episode, and in it we go over the official big five

personality traits. And yeah, number five, neuroticism. It's defined. as personality traits of depression and irritability and anxiety tendencies. So if you are higher in neuroticism, then that can affect your ability to wind down and de-stress and go to sleep. That is a big one. Then there are other things like you mentioned, ADHD, right? And something about ADHD is that it affects your perception of time. so you just have more difficulty with estimating how long it takes to do a task, right? Like you have this kind of time discrepancy.

So you could be getting ready to go to bed and you're just like, oh, I just need to like send this one email before I go to bed. It'll only take me five minutes and 35 minutes later. You're still on your computer and you've forgotten all sense of time and you're like, wait, what's going on? Oh, I just need to go brush my teeth and then you're like putting on a face mask for another 25 minutes. Like, that is more common in people who have ADHD because there is this time perception that can be a problem for people and that can really affect your nighttime routine in a way that doesn't for people who do not have ADHD. So that's definitely a thing. So there are

all of these different factors that some of them are somewhat, internal, right? Like your personality, ADHD, things like that. But then some of them are external as well. And this is all correlational evidence. But there's a correlation with how close you live to the freeway and impaired sleep quality. Yeah, because if there's a lot of environmental noise outside, that affects your sleep, there's evidence that for people of colour, They have more sleep difficulties. And I like to remind people of that because I think that when we get a poor night's sleep, if we continually have problems with sleep, we often blame ourselves.

And a lot of it is external, and I think it's really important for people to remember that. And those external pressures affect sleep, especially in marginalized communities. And this is well documented. A UC Irvine research paper by occupational health professor, Dr. Karen Lincoln, which was published in 2003 called impact of racism and inequities on African Americans' sleep and well-being explains that sleep tends to be socially patterned. And disrupted sleep patterns are seen among lower socioeconomic positions and factors like shift work and long hours contribute to really chaotic and irregular sleeping conditions.

And Dr. Lincoln continues that, quote, African Americans are often concentrated in lower paying jobs with very little control and flexibility in their schedules. Plus, there are external effects like noise and light and traffic and air pollution and crime and discrimination, and those have big effects on sleep outcomes. And this paper continues that more money and degrees aren't even protective of sleep because people of color are still subjected to stressors linked to law enforcement and racism, no matter what job or neighborhood you're in. And succinctly, Dr. Lincoln concludes that racism rather than race is a marker of risk for sleep problems. And there was another 2020 study titled a workshop report on the causes

and consequences of sleep health disparities in the journal's sleep. And it echoes this. It says people of color are less likely than their white counterparts to report motivation to make time for sleep. And they're less likely to have access to information about sleepiness and the relationship between sleep and health. There's a nonprofit project sleep. And it adds that in addition to racial and and ethnic minority communities, LGBTQIA plus folks, also experience disproportionate levels of sleep disturbance.

So this notion that rest is a luxury, that alone time or post-work pleasure of any kind should come at the cost of your tomorrow, I'm doing this episode, it's now something that is like, as my dad would have said, if fries my legs, which is Larry Ward's speech,

for that pisses me off. So try to think of bedtime as kind of an act of defiance. You're stealing back the rest that your ancestors evolved for you. Just rip the system. Go to bed. Do you find any evidence that human beings should kind of be naturally on a schedule of like waking up when it's coldest and the sun is rising and going to sleep when it's clearly dark. I can't imagine being out in the bush at two in the morning looking at sticks and carving something just out of fun, you know. Yeah. Is there something like we've evolved physiologically to try to go to bed at certain times and we're just fighting it? There is actually some really interesting evidence out of UC Boulder where they have done these studies where essentially they take people and put them in the Rockies

for a week without electricity and without technology. And I find this so fascinating because I want to pay thousands of dollars to just be a part of this experiment. I'm like, please take me out of my lifestyle and just put me in the mountains for a week without any of my things. Just Siberia. No contact. And what they find is that people's bedtime shift earlier, so they are more naturally at sunset and waking up at sunrise.

And that is more in line with what a circadian rhythm without the influence of electronic lighting and screens would be, I suppose. You can see the 2018 study circadian entrainment to the natural light, dark cycle across seasons and the weekend, which whispered me these facts. It says that less sunlight and more electrical lighting at night leads to later sleep timing. You knew that. But the good news is, this is nuts, researchers found that earlier circadian timing can be rapidly achieved through natural light exposure during a weekend spent camping. So prescription vacation outside, your homo sapient bones and brains yearn for the darkness. Also, this study is so Boulder, Colorado, where, correct me if I'm wrong, I think,

like at least 40% of every citizen's wardrobe is required by a lot of B-from REI. So go camping, dim your phone, fix your sleep. So I find these experiments really fascinating when people do this. Do you think that things have gotten so much worse with screens, or did people stay up, burn in the midnight oil, as they say, reading manuscripts on vellum, you know, 500 years ago. So in the context of bedtime procrastination, which is what I did all of my PhD research on, there is a clip from Seinfeld, the TV show, from 1993. And I know the year of this because I cited it in one of my research papers. I love trying to bring pop culture references into peer-reviewed journal articles.

and when no one comments on it, when you get the reviewer comments back, and no one's, like, highlighted your Seinfeld reference. You're like, yes, I got it through the establishment. But Seinfeld did this stand-up bit at the beginning of the episode where he spoke about Night Guy and Morning Guy. And he said, I mean, you can find the exact language. I stay up late at night because I'm night guy. Night guy wants to stay up late.

What about getting up after five hours sleep? Oh, that's morning guy's problem. That's not my problem. I'm night guy. I stay up as late as I want. Night guy just wants to stay up late and do all of his night guy things. And he doesn't care how he's going to feel tomorrow. And I just loved this clip because it's from 1993.

It's before we had smartphones. It's before we had gaming consoles that connected to the internet where we could play with our friends. It's before the news cycles that we're in now. And yeah, people still procrastinated their bettimes. there was Night Guy in 1993, and I don't know what Night Guy was doing was probably just watching cable TV or reading a book or whatever it may be, except I really love this because something that I have come to believe through my research is that we really have this night brain that is

different from our day brains in some regard. And he was really onto that. mention of Nightguy is not an endorsement of the actions or beliefs of Jerry Seinfeld. I find it fascinating how often comedians have this insight into the human condition that it took scientists more than 20 years to catch up to. Bedtime procrastination wasn't mentioned in the scientific literature until 2014. It really exploded in the pandemic, both in the popular discourse and in science. Do you think the pandemic in quarantine had an effect where we were so disconnected, we were we were looking for connection or we were looking for ways to wind down?

I think there's definitely an element of connection, but I think a lot of it came back to what you mentioned about routine, where all of a sudden people were out of their routines. They were working from home when they would normally leave the house. They used to do things that suddenly they couldn't do for a year or two. So I think there was an element of just being completely disconnected from what your day looked like previously and then the element of loneliness or disconnection from your social circles and then also the added stress of everything that was going on. So it was kind of this perfect storm for everyone's sleep to be really messed up. What does happen in your brain? Is it that

you're fighting for some sort of like relaxation or solitude or just some time alive where you're not working, you know? Just some time to live. Yeah, some actual existence. Yeah, we did this study a few years ago where we actually just asked people why they procrastinate their bedtime. So we did a qualitative study. And the thing about these interview-based studies are that they are still rigorous.

So when you do an interview-based study, you'll take all the transcripts and you'll analyze them and some themes will just emerge. I just think it's really crazy that we're all. so different but so similar at the same time. A big reason was me time because people just felt they didn't have enough time for themselves during the day. A lot of the people that we spoke with were new career starters. So they had just started a new job. They kind of gone through this transition from university to the workforce. And something that I had kind of forgot about when I was doing this is that entry-level jobs are just kind of shitty. Yeah. So I mean, a lot of jobs are like

this, but particularly for people who were just starting out in the workforce, they don't have a lot of autonomy. They don't have a lot of say over the work that they're doing. And they just found that these nighttime hours were when they had agency in their life. Right. You will find that theme in different populations. So people who are new parents, people who are caregivers, to their parents, to other family members, to pets, whatever it may be, a lot of them find that in these evening hours is the only time that they have autonomy in their lives and they have agency and they can actually just do whatever they want to find fulfillment in different areas. A lot of people told me that the night was the only time they had to explore their identity

or niche interests. And it was just so funny when I was talking to all these different people and they're like, you know, it was 10 o'clock and I just started wondering, how did they build the pyramids? Or someone else was like, what happens to bees in winter? You know, it's just like all of these questions that just pop into our night brain in a way that doesn't happen with our day brain because we're busy and we're at work and we're thinking of other things. There's something about the silence of the night and the freedom of the night that give way to these niche interests. And people would just want to watch YouTube videos or TikToks or read Wikipedia articles about, just this thing that they were wondering.

Dr. Hill's Night Guy also has her Googling weird stuff. Can you introduce spicy foods to kids? When can kids start eating raw fish? What's the biggest airline in the world? And getting a PhD in sleep procrastination. There were a couple of people who I interviewed, who identified as queer, and said that in their day jobs,

this wasn't an identity that they could really express or lean into. And at night, late at night, they could message with other people, They could watch videos on YouTube. They could be part of those communities in different ways that they didn't have the opportunity to throughout the day. So that's a big part of it. Which explains a little why the quarantine era could have started or spiked these habits. And another part was people want to wind down.

Yeah. And use technology, paper books, whatever it may be. but they wind down and then they just kind of keep going. They put off going to bed because they're enjoying winding down. Nightbrain likes to have fun and likes to be entertained, right? And so a lot of people just want to do something fun in their day and that is the opportunity when they can do that. There was this other really interesting thing that came out of both people we spoke to

and the existing literature base that is called Tomorrow Aversion. which is, as Ian, you know, it's like such a scientific term, but you know what I mean, which is when you just don't want this day to end and the next day to begin. You're relating to this so hard right now. Yeah, that hurts. It hurts. Yeah. Yeah.

So real. And you don't even have a nine to five job where you're going into an office that you kind of don't want to be in that much. I know. Yeah. But I, this especially happens when you've got a flight to catch early and you know it's going to be rough. You know it's going to be rough and you're like, the sooner I close my eyes, the sooner I'm going to wake up at 4 in the morning. Yeah, so your night

brain or night guy optimizes for now because it's fun and we can just keep enjoying this day. I had such a interesting reaction within myself to this evidence from this study because as a sleep researcher. You come in and you're like, sleep is important. Everybody needs to be sleeping. How can we stop bedtime procrastination? Because you should all be sleeping instead. And then what emerged from all of this evidence was that people have this psychological need to do these things at night. And they're important to their stress levels, their sense of identity, their sense of connection and all of these things and then I started feeling kind of bad about telling people that they should stop doing these things at night. And I really had this kind of internal conflict that I still have now because

I think that you have this concept of sleep and the concept of rest. And they're definitely related, but they're not identical. And a lot of things that people do at night to help them wind down are forms of rest. but they're not sleep and sometimes they get in the way of sleep. So I think there's this conflict between rest and sleep and our psychological needs that I'm still working out. Well, do some of these ways of procrastinating, like say screen time or going down rabbit holes or scrolling and just having the algo sort of like roll the dice for you? Do any of those activate the sympathetic nervous system instead of the parasympathetic?

So the sympathetic nervous system is the fight, flight, freeze, fawn, the like, oh, no, part of your brain. And the parasympathetic involves the rest and digest. That's the reset. That's the cleanup crew. So does your phone or that dive into a new story poke the scary bear? And is that bear low-key room? your life? They definitely can. I mean, depending on what you see, particularly when you're just relying on the algorithm or a scroll, you're not really in control of that. And if you see something that's quite triggering for you in a certain way, that could put you in fight or flight when you want to be winding down. Yeah. When does it become compulsive and when is it by choice? Something that I've gone deep into is habit. In science, habit is this invisible force that

drives our behavior in a way. We use examples in research that I think are just so on the nose, but in a research paper, I'd be like, are you ordering the donut? Or are you ordering a salad? And you sit there debating, do I want to eat the donut? No, I should have the salad. Wait, maybe I'll just have the donut, you know. And anyway, these things use a lot of self-regulatory resources. it requires a lot of effort for your brain. And this is a slow process because you really have to think hard about every decision that you make. Now, there's a theory of self-control that by the end of the day, we're kind of burnt out on self-control. So self-control is a muscle that we exercise throughout the day in all of these different ways.

It's a finite resource. And by the end of the day, our brains are just kind of done. They have run out of energy. And I think the dynard and the salad thing is one example, but I think that you use self-control in all different ways throughout the day that you might not even realize. Yeah. Just today, my taxed brain dealt with,

should I eat a bunch of these free starbursts from the bowl in the office kitchen? Should I walk or just drive down the street? Should I wash my hair or can I get away with another day? because I'm running late and a slob. What should I watch on TV? What should we do for dinner? Is it time to clip my dog's nails or will she hate me for that?

All day, every day. What do you want? What do you want? It's not that simple. By the time it gets to the evening, your self-control has just had it. And what the research shows is that we rely on habit

a lot more in the evening than we do at any other time of day. So our evening behaviors are largely driven by habit. So driven by that invisible force where we're taking the low effort option, we're doing what we find pleasurable and we are easily losing track of time compared to Morning Guy. And there are some fascinating studies with this. Some European researchers led a study where they wanted people to form a stretching habit. So a 10-minute stretching habit that you do every day, they split participants into two groups. So we had more

morning people and night people. The morning people formed this new habit a month and a half before the night people. It is more difficult to learn in the evening as well to form new habits in the evening to change your behaviour in the evening compared to the morning. So in this study with the stretching habit, what the research has found is that your cortisol levels predict how quickly you form a new habit. So we often talk about cortisol, like it's this really evil hormone that's keeping us in fight or flight and we need to minimize it at all times. There's so many pop-up ads that are like, do you have belly fat? Blame cortisol. Do you need to do a cortisol detox? Yeah, yeah. I see these pop-up ads and I'm like, shut up, get out of here. But your hormones have a natural circadian

rhythm to them. So they're higher at certain times of day and lower at other times. And your cortisol is higher in the morning. And cortisol supports memory and learning. So at the time when you have more cortisol naturally, you can learn things more easily. You can form habit, new habits and behaviours more easily than at different times of the day. So your hormones actually support how you remember things and learn and behave in different ways where it's easier to do that in the morning than it is at night. Is there a difference in people's behavior where like as soon as they get home, they're getting ready for bed so that they can just get into bed whenever, versus trying to do that when you're already out of energy, trying to have a routine for bed? So basically when you're

sleepy or more fatigued, your perception of effort changes. So things that you would have perceived as easier earlier in the day, suddenly you perceive it. And so, you perceive it. is more difficult. So brushing your teeth at night can feel so much more effortful than brushing your teeth in the morning simply because you are sleepy. And this has come through in the literature base. And I find that so interesting that your perception of things changes. So I think that for some people who have a nighttime routine, like I would say just brushing your teeth and putting on your pajamas is a nighttime routine, but people just find that so difficult sometimes because they are fatigued or sleepy. It's funny, tired actually isn't a word that is used in sleep science.

Wait, is it really? Yeah, why is that? Well, because tired is too vague. Yeah, scientists love precision in definition. So you can be sleepy and there's a scale of sleepiness. It's called the Karolinska sleepiness scale, the KSS. I've used it in a lot of my research. It's just a question of how sleepy are you? Ellie, are you about to fall asleep where you're sitting right now? So sleepy is when your measures basically how close you are to actually falling asleep. And then fatigued is more of a measure that we use during the day. And surprise, according to science itself, people tend to get more fatigued as the day wears on.

So you have this perception of effort that changes. You have your hormonal changes. you are operating from this place of habit instead of self-control, that changes. There is some evidence that mood can change at night. Like literally when the sun sets, the light is daylight is so important in regulating your mood. You can be susceptible to more of a negative mood in the evening, which in turn can lead to those like worried thoughts that people get late at night and catastrophizing.

I'm so awful at catastrophizing everything at 10 p. right? Like I have period pain at 9.45pm. I'm like, oh my God, I have cancer. Yeah, yeah. These things are just more susceptible for our night brain. It's this different state of being compared to our day brain. And it's important for people to understand that. So you can just have a little bit more empathy for yourself at night. And you can just work with your night brain a little bit more closely to give it what it wants in a way that can also support your sleep, right? So I am just an over-ambitious person sometimes where I just make goals that I never reach. And I think we just need to be a bit kinder about what we're planning on doing in the evening.

Well, that was going to be my next question. It's something I struggled with for the longest time that I still struggle with is, do I deserve to rest? have I done enough today to warrant closing the books on today and dealing with that like tomorrow aversion? Do you find an early career folks or maybe again it's just the hustle culture of America where there's like not a safety net at all that it's just difficult for some people to provide themselves with that kind of rest? I would never do that to my dog. I'd never be like, do you sniff enough lizards today?

I get out there. I think you could pee on a little more grass before you take a nap, you know. But I think some people, especially like high achievers or people who have high neuroticism, but is there a self-care that people withhold? There are two interesting thoughts I had floating around in my head when you were saying that. One is that from sleep trackers, so smart watches and rings and things where we can all of a sudden in science, go and have a look at the sleep data of like 500,000 people. It's kind of crazy. Wow, that's nuts. One of the most fascinating things that I have seen repeated with these high

level statistics is that the best sleep health in the world is in Scandinavia. Of course. Of course. Shocker. They list the individual countries that's like, number one, Sweden, number two, Norway, number three, Germany, number four, Denmark. Like it's just kind of going. Iceland. It's just like. And then it's like number six, New Zealand.

Yeah. They're like, they have socialized medicine. They have like more vacation time. More regular working hours or the rest of it. So I think that speaks to what you were saying from a very high level. Like, yeah, the countries that perform higher on the happiness indexes and that have socialized medicine. free education and all the rest of it, also perform better in sleep health measures.

So we did this review and what we found was there was a link between higher bedtime procrastination, lower sleep duration, lower sleep quality and higher daytime fatigue. So what you asked about kind of falls into that daytime fatigue category. And if there's anyone who is a health researcher listening to this, they may laugh because it's at the end of every study, they will say, we need interventions. And people talk a lot about interventions is the term that is used, but it's really just like a program or a technique or strategies or whatever for people to try to stop this behavior or fix this behavior. So what are those interventions? Okay, first you have to identify what's wrong. And then what we did was a type of study that's called

an ecological momentary assessment, so an EMA study. which is a really good type of study when it comes to normal everyday habits. So procrastination is one of them. However, you can't really measure bedtime procrastination in a lab. Unlike the sleep studies that measure brain waves and those diagnose clinical narcolepsy and sleep apnea, behavior choices, those are hard to spot in captivity. No way, I'm going to be a night goblin if I'm behind one. and wake glass being observed by a grad student.

So what an EMA study does is that pings your phone at many different times throughout the day and you will just fill in a quick survey over text message or you'll do a text response or whatever. So we did this for bedtime procrastination where I would ping people's phones at certain times of days based on when they told me they got up and when they went to bed. and that was how we actually measured how much people were procrastinating their bedtime day to day, how they were feeling, etc. I did two different studies in one we did it for seven days and then in the other we did it for 14 days. And I just want to say thank you to everyone who for 14 days.

Let me send them text messages and responded to them all that many times. So keep in mind, these are people who signed up to. a study that was designed to reduce their bedtime procrastination. So I designed one of these intervention programs. They did the program and the study, but this was the first week of the program. So they weren't doing anything other than just reporting on what they were currently doing. Any further results of those tests? Basically, everyone told us that they were using their screens to procrastinate. The majority of people in this study are clustered between zero,

and 30, maybe 35 minutes a night of procrastinating their bedtime, there's another smaller bump around 60 minutes, and then there are a smaller number of extreme outliers. So people who are delaying the bedtime by 125 minutes a night, 175 minutes a night. Two to three hours. That's my neighborhood. But this really changed how I thought about the story of bedtime procrastination,

because you can see that a lot of people who signed up to a study and said, yes, I procrastinate my bedtime. I want to change my behavior. Like half of them are procrastinating their bedtime by 30 minutes or less every day. And I think that in terms of bedtime procrastination impacting our sleep and impacting our health, yes, it can be bad. I do want to go on the record of just saying that it can be bad because, yeah, we have people here who are delaying bedtime by two.

hours a night, almost three hours a night in some cases. And that is going to have a pretty significant impact on your health, particularly if you're doing it one night and not the other night. So you have this variation in your bedtime by hours every single day. But I started to wonder when I was looking at this data, are we just being influenced by this perfectionism culture of the internet where people have a 20 minute variation in bedtime day to day? And people People are like, oh my God, I'm on my phone for 20 minutes before I go to bed. Yeah. How awful I have a problem.

I don't know if I would consider that very much of a problem. And I say this because sleep regularity is a huge area of research and some super interesting findings about how important it is to have a regular bedtime every night for our longevity and long-term health. But when you look at that research, 30 minutes variation is considered normal. And I was like, most of you guys are using your phone for 25 minutes before you go to bed. I don't think that's a crisis. Yeah, cut yourself some slack.

And not to mention that your phone has every friend you've ever had, all the news in the world, and every curiosity about infants having jalapinos that you could possibly, you know. So the idea that you have a portal to omniscience and that you're like, I don't know, I spent 25 minutes. Like that's not bad, you know. Like imagine that in like Lord of the Rings where they're like, if you open this door, there's every thought anyone's ever had. Yeah. But good luck self-regulating.

Yeah. And I mean, again, this is just a snippet of the population. that we had in this study. But it really made me consider the language that we use around screen use and sleeve and how people actually said I feel really guilty using my phone before I go to bed. But I think that there's definitely an avenue where we can do that in a way that supports a wind down. And maybe it's not your phone.

Maybe it's a different screen. Maybe it's your TV and you're just watching. some show that you find relaxing. Why is it soggy? Oh, okay. I've got a soggy bottom. There isn't really a need for adults to feel guilty about that. I say adults because there is evidence that in adolescence and kids,

screen use can have an effect on sleep. They are much more sensitive to the effects of bright screens and blue light and things like that, evidence becomes a lot more negligible in adulthood. And on that topic of kiddo sleep, that nonprofit Project Sleep notes that not enough sleep can have so many downstream effects on kids. Anyone who's seen a cranky kid will know that. But it says that surprisingly, many children are referred to behavioral problems when they should be referred to a sleep specialist. I did not know that. Now, what about the pale glow of the internet, though?

So in terms of blue blocking glasses, all are not created equal. There was a 2025 study published in the journal Translational Vision Science and Technology. It was titled, Optimizing the Potential Utility of Blue Blocking Glasses for Sleep and Circadian Health. And it explains that these lenses knock down the shorter wavelengths on the visible light spectrum. However, it continues. Their effectiveness depends on their filtering properties, their application, when and how often are you using them, and timing. And the wrong glasses or the haphazard use of them, quote, may be entirely counterproductive, leading to worse sleep patterns or groginess, causing more accidents and illness.

So what do you get? What do you? So the research in this paper says that ones you should look for are melanopic daylight filtering density or MDFD above one, just in case you like Googling letters and numbers. If you don't like that, Consumer Reports did the work for you. They tested three different brands, ranged from $8 to $55, and the ones that cut the most blue light they found were the cheap ones, a brand called Uvex Skyper, rated the highest. But the problem may not even be the light itself, but the habit of just putting off closing your eyes in favor of doing other awakey things. And we have a two-part somnology episode with research legend and author Dr. Chris Winters, who's awesome.

But if you need your science to be like a little more goff, you can check out our 2019 chronobiology episode on circadian rhythms with Dr. Catherine Hatcher. And in it, I found this Turkish study entitled, Life is Short, Stay Awake, Death, Anxiety, and Bedtime Procrastination, which explains that one cause of sleep procrastination is just the fear of being a corpse eventually. So instead of not existing for 8.5. hours reminding us of disintegrating back into the earth, you just continue to experience life's rich pleasures, such as watching donkey rescue videos and going down social media rabbit holes to

see where your ex-boyfriend went on vacation. So the prevailing advice is to take a nice bath at night. You can give yourself an hour window to get ready for bed. Or at the beginning of the day, you just arm your to-do list with a bedtime and then work backwards. from that. In essence, scientists say, suck it up, knock it off, but do it gently. So the glasses may not fix everything if you are your own worst enemy. Sweet, sweet, sweet babies. If you're using your phone for 30 minutes before bed, the blue light is not really going to have that much of an impact on your sleep, but the content might, right? Right. So I think that we really need to absolve ourselves of the guilt that we feel using our phone to do the crossword or the spelling

B or something like that for 20 minutes or 30 minutes before we go to sleep? Yeah. Well, I have questions from listeners. Can I lightning around you some of them? But as always, first we'll toss some money at a worthy cause. And this week, Dr. Nessie Hill chose Project Sleep, which is a nonprofit dedicated to raising awareness and bridging the gaps between sleep health, sleep equity, and sleep disorders. You can learn more at project dash sleep.com or we put a link in the show notes. And thank you to our ology sponsors for making these donations possible every week. Okay, so let's cozy up to 37 pages of your questions, listeners. If you would ever like to submit some, you can support ologies just by signing up for a dollar a month or more at patreon.com slash ologies.

We also have discussion threads of each episode every week. So go ahead and go to that on your desktop or your mobile device. Maybe not at 3 a.m. Though, on that note. Okay, screen time. Goblin prints. Jessica Swanson, first-time question asker, says, Kindles and e-readers before bed.

Do they limit blue light and mimic a paperback book? Is it all marketing? And flim-flam, Goblin Prince said, I've heard screens are bad before bed because the blue light they admit does night mode on phones? on phones, does it actually make a difference? A lot of people wanted to know that that light filter in the blue light, does it help? So to answer that very briefly, I would say the blue light from your devices probably is not affecting your sleep that much. What affects your sleep more

are the lights in your house? So consider how bright your ceiling lights are compared to how bright your phone is or your tablet is or your TV is, all you need to do is turn off all of your lights and you can see how bright they are compared to your devices, right? And there's a really interesting research group out of Monash University in Melbourne where they have done a lot of studies on ceiling light and how that affects people's melatonin suppression. And they clip light meters onto people's pants and wear them around their house and things like that. And they found in one study that Sean Kane and his colleagues published in 2020, they found that about half of the households had lights so bright that it suppressed 50% of their melatonin production in the evening.

Wow. And this is also why when they do studies like throwing people in the Rockies for seven days without any devices or electricity, one of the reasons why the circadian rhythm shifts so much is because of house lights, not so much your devices. So I am a big advocate for lamps. If there was big lamp industry, I would be shilling their products. You know what I love? We've recently started doing, and you can kind of see it.

Oh, you have very warm light bulbs. We have those hue lights. Yeah, we have smart bulbs, and we've set them to candle flicker. Oh, you have. I didn't even know you could do that. At night, you have, like, we have this, like, really warm, very gentle, like candle flicker. And it's so cozy. We also have, like, a digital fireplace going. I love, I've been admiring your digital fireplace. I'm wondering if I should get one for my own home.

I love it. It's so cozy. Okay. I know you're wondering, I would be too. So these are these LED panels. They're made by Twinkley, who is giving me no money for this. I got nine of them to form a grid of squares. And then they have this app where you can upload a picture or a, GIF or a pattern or colors. And it looks like 8-bit animation. And I uploaded a fireplace GIF and it's on our wall where a fireplace would be because we don't know how to install fireplaces. So imagine like a life-sized 1983 video game version of a hearth. The heart craves the flicker of fire. The brain says no open flames, okay? But we've we've kind of done that and not because we're good at sleep hygiene, but just because for v. This would suggest that you are good at sleep hygiene. I mean, I've gotten better.

Yeah. I've gotten better. So this is something that I would say about the lights in your house, potentially doing more to suppress your melatonin than the devices that you use. But you will see a lot of people on social media in particular. I'd be like, no screens, an hour before sleep or something. And what I have found in my recent, is that people just do it anyway. So I think rather than saying don't do it when there isn't

evidence that suggests that it's awful for our sleep, how can we do it in a way that supports our wind down that gives us a bit of me time and helps us de-stress, but not go on autopilot for two hours on our phones, right? It's like how can we have more of a routine in place where we do it, but we end at a certain time. If you have smart lights, like, can you watch TV, but have the lights go out at 11.30 every night, and you know that that's your cue that you need to get up and go and get changed or whatever.

Like, how can we actually build it into our routine in a way that can be healthy and can affect our sleep? So in general, while I want to climb up flock camera poles and I want to bite them broken, I do wear fitness and sleep trackers that measure my every move, even during sleep. And it has been really helpful for me to see trends. Like, oh, maybe I did sleep 12 hours on Saturday

because I only slept four to catch a flight the night before. How about that? That's not very surprising now. You cannot cheat Mr. Sandman. He will come and he will collect debt. And a sleep tracker, like one of those rings, gives you the evidence. Vanessa, Nessie,

I noticed also wears a fitness tracker ring. It was really interesting when I went to my first big sleep conference. Everyone was really shitting on sleep trackers and consumer sleep trackers. But I went last year to the same conference. And it was like night and day how scientists were talking about them. And they were more like, let's just work with the companies to get the data to use in our research. It was just so remarkable. this was in like a five-year period,

how much the discourse on it changed in the research community. And that is because they got a little bit more accurate. Yeah. Yeah. I love mine. I think that for people who use them, it's always best to just look at the data over a period of time as a pattern,

more than obsess about it day to day. Yeah. It is there to give you a picture of your health rather than a minute-by-minute accounting. Yeah. You know. You're not Brian Johnson trying to live forever, right? Isn't that his name? The guy who gets like blood transfusions from his own son. Yeah. I am just so tired by that corner of the internet. I couldn't be more different in my philosophy around health compared to everyone in the longevity space. And we still talk about sleep in black and white a lot of the time where we're like, oh, you have to get seven.

hours and I. You have to go to bed at the same time. You have to wake up at the same time. And when you have a lot of guilt and shame about your sleep behaviors, that affects your sleep and it affects your overall health. Oh, wise words. Amanda Acton said, hi, Ali. My name is Amanda. I live in Iowa. I love reading at bedtime to avoid sleep procrastination, but I use a Kindle. Is that okay? Does that have the same effects as if I were to be reading or scrolling on my phone with the blue light and such, or are Kindles practically books? Thanks. Kindles, I think Kindles are great. And I have a Kindle. I use that a lot of nights. And I like them because you can't swipe away and go into another app, right? Like, you have your

book and that's it. So it kind of forces your brain to wind down in that way. Yeah. I have one of the smaller kindles. And if it's in my purse, and I find myself like, I went out to go eat alone and I went to go scroll. And I was like, I got a book in my purse. Yeah. I have several books in my purse. Yeah. If I'm being honest. Magda from India says, Hello. My question is, why does listening to podcasts make you fall asleep within the first five minutes of the podcast beginning? Staring at the ceiling doesn't work. Meditation doesn't work. Nothing works, but turn on a podcast. I'm out within five minutes. Uh, insulting.

They didn't even make it this far in. They're never going to hear their question. Which is funny because I was thinking since you have a child, bedtime procrastination starts so early when it's like, read me one more, read me one more. Like that's bedtime procrastination. Do you know what is so funny is that my kid loves books. Uh-huh. It's so sweet and funny at the same time, but she actually cries now when she goes to bed

because she wants to keep reading. Wow. It is my type of procrastination. I hadn't even thought of it like that. Genetic. Wow. And I have to put all of these stuffed toys in her cart so I can be like, but look, doggy is waiting for you to go to bed.

We can read more books tomorrow when you wake up. I'm like already negotiating with her. Her night guys, like, I don't think so. What I find is that when I try to use sleep stories or meditations or listen to music, my internal monologue is just so loud that it overpowers those things. They're almost too gentle or too slow paste where I have my internal to-do list or I have something that is worrying me and I just have that obsessive thought and the sleep story can't overpower it.

But when I turn on an audio book or a podcast or something that just has more of a narrative focus, it has just the right amount of noise to drown out my internal monologue. and I also fall asleep within five minutes of listening to podcasts or audiobooks. I've actually been listening to the same audio book for five months. And I've slept through 90% of the book. Yeah. And I've actually never done this, but I've thought about starting a boring book club where I share these book recommendations.

And I'm like, hey, guys, this one knocked me right out. It's a 16-hour audio book about the Berlin Wall. which is the one I just finished. Was it really? Yeah, but it's like interesting enough where it talks about the history of Berlin in the 60s and things like that and it's pretty fascinating. Yeah.

But it's also not that interesting at the same time. I don't know. It's like it is interesting, but it's also slow because it's a historical book. And the guy who narrates it has this really slow British cadence. Through deceit. bribery and blackmail. West German government bodies and military interests

induce certain unstable elements in the German Democratic Republic. To leave for West Germany, the Warsaw Pact member states must take... All the ingredients I need to fall asleep. Just... Chef's kiss. Jarrett has these headphones that are like a headband that are rechargeable so we can sleep in it.

So it's like a sweat band, essentially. And it's an eye mask? as well. He can use his eye mask, goes over his ears. Every single night, if he doesn't have it, he cannot fall asleep. He sets a timer for the audiobook to play for like 30 minutes and shut off. That way, he knows where he's at and he goes back to the next. Yeah, I do the same thing. Yeah. Those sleepy headphones are called sleep phones. And no, they are not sponsoring me either. My mom has this trick, and we've talked about it in a different sleep episode. We call it the fancy Nancy. And you pick a category like, let's say, band names or,

or desserts or types of clothing. And then you think of one that starts with A, one that starts with B. Yeah, that's this technique called cognitive shuffling, where you just kind of go through things like that. I think that's really good for when people wake up in the middle of the night. Maybe you need to use the bathroom or whatever, but you then have trouble falling back asleep. And I think doing things like that are really good.

It gets me out every time, despite jet lag, despite anxiety. It's so funny. I have also done desserts so many times for some. reason. You just wake up wanting tiramisu and toffee. I never make it that far. Everything that starts with tea. I never make it. I'm like apple cobbler, butterscotch, buddino, and then just out. Let me see. Now what if in the category of things that go in your mouth you get to M? Medication. Patrons David, Vanessa Adams, and Dr. Lena Carpenter wanted to know about that. And while we do discuss medication, in much more depth in the two-part somnology episode with Dr. Chris Winter,

Dr. Nessie Hill had an important PSA. An interesting note on medication generally is it continues to blow my mind how many people ask me about their sleep. And one of the first questions I'll ask, like, honestly, no judgment. I'm just curious to help shape whatever I'm going to reply to you with is I ask, have you spoken to your doctor about it? and the majority of people will be like, oh, no. And I just find that so crazy.

Like, if you had a rash, you would be at the dermatologist in like a week. Like as soon as you could get an appointment, right? And people just tolerate sleeping badly for so long. I think because we just assume at something that is a natural biological process and we should be able to do. But, I mean, if you're having trouble with it, there are so many amazing qualified people, including your primary care physician or GP or whatever is always a really good place to start.

But a lot of people avoid or just don't bring it up with their doctor. Yeah. I think also cost. Cost and then access as well. Yeah. I will just say this is a really low key plug for something called CBTI, which is cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. It's the gold standard treatment for insomnia beyond any kind of medication, but it has a marketing

problem. It is a therapy. People, a lot of people just don't want to do something that is a therapy. These programs go for six weeks or eight weeks. A lot of people don't want to commit to doing something for that long. They just want a quick fix. But it has really good long-term efficacy in helping. people with different types of insomnia?

And this was on the mind of patron Eleanor Wall, who asked, It would be good to know what a person can do if they sincerely dread going to sleep, whether because of chronic pain that worsens in bed or because of night terrors or because of past traumas. And so in terms of chronic pain, we have an excellent dolorology episode with Dr. Rachel Zoffness, who also just came out with a book, Tell Me Where It Hurt's, The New Science of Pain and How to heal. and we'll also link to that Dolorology episode in the show notes is also one of our most downloaded episodes in Ologies history. Super helpful. But the therapy Dr. Hill mentioned specifically is called CBTI. It's cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. So yes, this exists. It's maybe just for you out there. I'm a little bleary-eyed little pumpkin. So according to Stanford Health Resources, Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia addresses

three factors that contribute to persistent insomnia. So this kind of therapy figures out why you're having conditioned arousal, not the sexy kind of arousal, rather the, oh no, why am I awake, why am I still awake kind? And it identifies and works to eliminate the habits you developed around sleep that actually suck. And CBTI also reduces the sleep-related worry and those other sources of heightened arousal. So a therapist focuses on those factors and can dig into the beliefs about sleep that might be freaking you out. And I was like, okay, does this work? And I was delighted to read the Stanford reports that the majority of patients respond to this treatment fairly quickly, some significantly after just two therapy sessions. Others may need

four or more sessions, and therapy can be group or individual. So for patrons like chronic insomniac, Elizabeth Westner, this might help. And for the extremely relatable listeners, nurse, Mish the Fish and Ella Sugarman, who asked, where is the boundary between bedtime procrastination and insomnia? I asked for my bed where I began the night procrastinating and now can't seem to wind down enough to sleep. Look for someone who practices cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. Erica G. Tiger G. Georgia Curen H. Phaser Phelon.

Peck Piper, mom of eight. And Anna Corral. Anna asked, why do I get the zoomies right before bedtime? Pais, Faser wanted to know about second wins. Like, yeah, what's going on there? How do you imagine a human adult has the zoomies? I guess I'd just be like so stoked to work on a craft project. And then also just like, you know what? I need to organize the sock drawer.

I'm going to do it right now. I should unpack the thing that is my suitcase that's sitting in. Yeah. I would think like, oh, I'm suddenly productive, you know? Like midnight. There are many different reasons for this. One of them could be if this person is naturally a night owl or what we would call an evening chronotype.

Something I find really interesting is you see a lot of things on social media, etc. That are like, are you an early bird or a night owl? Yeah. But actually, most people, like up to perhaps 60% of people are neither. Like the majority of people are just kind of in between. between. Really? Yeah. And the latest S method I've seen suggests that between 10 to 15% of people either fall into the early bird or night owl categories. Wow. I had no idea. Yeah. But if you were naturally a night owl and you are forced to live on society's schedule where you need to wake up

to go to work at 8 o'clock in the morning or whatever it may be, then you could just naturally have more energy in the evening. It could be something related to some of the things we were talking about before where this is finally the time that you have to do things and there is just a second wind that comes with that. It could definitely be something like that. And it's funny too, during the daytime, you're like, my emails could go off any second. I could have forgotten. I had an appointment. But at night, too, you're like, pretty sure everyone's asleep. so I can finally like chill and do my own stuff. But I sometimes find that I get better writing done because I'm not getting any texts. I'm not worried about, you know, yeah, is there something

that I'm not tending to? I love that while we're recording this too, Grammy is just passed out. Grammy's been having the nap of her life. Grammy is not procrastinating her bedtime. She's like, no time for that. I'm asleep. She's like, you want me to be gorgeous? I'm going to need to nap. I know a lot of people who are creatives because I have a YouTube channel. I know a lot of people who make videos and who write and whatever. And they are getting into their creative rhythm at midnight. Yeah. Yeah.

I thought this was interesting in terms of bedtime procrastination. Lindsay Bartholomew said, Why, when I'm struggling to stay awake and I fall asleep on the couch, do I have a hard time falling back asleep once I've completed my night routine and crawled into bed? Maddox and Sheridan Kelly all asked about this. Tiff the Turtle said, I will often get cozy on the couch knowing I'm tired and we'll fall asleep and should just go to bed, but I don't want to for some reason and end up passing out on the couch. I have to admit, literally I did this last night. I slept. Me and Jared both slept the entire night of the couch.

Amazing. Love sleeping on the couch. Our bed is 20 feet away. But what is it about couch time, couch time that feels so different? Sometimes this has to do with the association. that people have with sleep. So it's something that gets covered a lot if you do something like CBTI, the sleep therapy that I mentioned, or if you just kind of go through a lot of sleep hygiene where a lot of people

have these different psychological associations with their bed if they have trouble sleeping, where they have this association with it that is bad. There is this recommendation that you should only use your bed for sleep. sex, because if you're lying in your bed, scrolling on your phone, if you're eating lunch on your bed, if you're doing all of these other things, your brain associates your bed with being awake. So that's part of it, for sure. I think the other part of it is that when you're on the couch, oh my God, I love sleeping on the couch, Kelly. Because I'm a sleep scientist, a lot of people think that I must have this perfect evening routine and that I am just a model citizen when it

comes to sleep health. And I will say my sleep has improved a great deal compared to where it was 10 years ago, but I still love staying up late from time to time. I love falling asleep on the couch. I think part of it is that you're often doing something on the couch, like you're watching TV and you have that distraction, right, that can just take your brain a little bit out of that fixation mode where you're stressed or you're thinking about work or whatever you have to do. And it just sets your brain free in a way and you can just be under a blanket and you can be so cozy and it often is the first thing that you go to do to relax rather than just doing your bedtime routine and getting into bed that it just creates these perfect conditions to just

slip away. Oh, that makes me feel so much better. Are there such a thing as second sleep where farmers would get up in the middle of the night or is that a myth? There are records of this definitely before the 9 to 5 work schedule or before really the widespread nature of electricity where there was this thing called polyphasic sleep where people would have a first sleep and a second sleep and get up and do things in the middle of the night. I question how common it is because there's been a number of papers and books written about this and media interviews that are all done by the same guy. And here I must shout him out, Roger Eckrich, who authored the

2006 banger at days close, night in times past. The very first words of this book are the quote, never greet a stranger in the night, for he may be a demon. That's from the Talmud. Now, chapters in this juicy historical work include in the shadow of death, terrors of the night, plunder, violence, and fire, and the passages that launched modern polyphasic sleep curiosities, sleep we have lost, rhythms, and revelations. And I've read parts of this book. It is an absolutely lovely romp through medieval peasant alehouses, DTF messaging via snuffed candles, lanterns, shooed away past fornicating Romans. Just 10 out of 10 for the gossip. But if you are not in the mood for the porn of your, you can skip straight to

Roger Eckert's views on second sleep. He also has a seminal 2001 scholarly paper, sleep we have lost, pre-industrial slumber. He's a second sleeper. He's an academic, and he's done some good work, but he loves to say that everyone did this. And I think that certainly some people did it, but I'm sure that it was a thing that some people did and some people did not. So funny. He's like, I'm a polyphysics sleep influencer. The biggest question so many people had is, how do I stop? I just want to shout out the listeners specifically whose questions involved the caps lock button, including Stacey Pinkowitz, Natalie J., longtime listener, Victoria Clifton, Katie, who feels attacked, Margo Hayes, as well as thistle businger, Melissa, Ariel Vanceance, Sydney Gaysbeek, Valby listening, Janganator, first-timer Jessica, Erica G, Mariana Elvarez, Kiret Singh, and Detredivore, Dragon Killer, who begged please please. followed by five ellipsies.

Is it important to stop? It can be. It can be. This is ruining my life. Yeah. How do you stop? Yeah. Some people come to me and they say, this is ruining my life and I can't do my job and I'm not a good partner and how do I stop?

And it can be really hard to stop because what you find is that people have this habit strength and it is so hard to change our behavior and essentially break. our habits and even harder to do it at night than it is at different times of day. What I have encouraged people to do in interventions that I've developed, which is basically programs for people to reduce their procrastination, is to look at it from a habit perspective. So if you think about how we form a habit, it's through cues and repetition and reward, right? So if you think about the cues for why you are procrastinating your bedtime, and sometimes this is. is really hard, okay? You might have to keep a journal and do this over the course of a week,

two weeks, a month, whatever, but I want people who ask this question and who are trying to change to think about why you start procrastinating your bedtime. The answer could be, you don't know, but just try to figure it out because a cue, I'll give you some examples of some cues. A queue could be the time of day, so it could just be 11 o'clock every night and you just start doing whatever you're doing. It could be an emotion, like you could feel dread at going to sleep because you don't want to wake up the next day. It could be a specific place. Like, it actually could be your couch. You could just lie down on your couch and just never be able to get up, okay, and go to bed because it is so effortful for you to do that that you just can't even

contemplate it at midnight. Yeah. My couch is up to get me. That's one thing. And another force field between me and rest is the sensory agony of washing my face. Water down my sleeves, cold on my neck, a scratchy towel, get fucked. I don't want it. I avoid it. So some fixes I have found are using like a gentle cleanser, like setafil. It requires no noxema commercial face splashing. You can just wipe it off with a soft towel or a cotton pad and your moisture barrier loves it. I have also chopped up a sock and used it as two wristbands so that water can't drip down to my elbows. Now other cues that might keep you from sleeping might be just the decision to floss or not to floss or looking for comfort by scrolling,

but your content is literally designed to keep you engaged, enraged, or unsatisfied. And I will say that the 50 bucks I spent on something called a brick that you have to physically go tap your phone against to unlock certain apps. Honestly, life-changing. Thank you to Simone Yatch for telling me about it. Brick paying me zero money, but I love you. So I'm going to tell you that if scrolling is ruining your life, you can go to getbrick.com. It's the only thing that stops me from scrolling. But yes, soul search why you're doing it. So have a really hard thing about what the cue is. And then think about the reward. So what are you actually getting out of whatever you're doing?

Do you like watching YouTube videos because they're funny? Because you're exploring a niche interest, because you just need a bit of me time, because they help you de-stress. Like, think about whatever that reward is. Because you can try to stop and you can try to use all of your willpower. It probably won't work because your self-control is just out the fucking window at 12 o'clock at night, right? So you really have to come from this behaviour or habit perspective to essentially try to hack your habits to be different at that time. There are all of these things that we call behaviour change techniques in science. So actually habit science is like super rigorous and scientific.

Basically, about 15 years ago, all of the behavioral science scientists got together and essentially came up with this list of 93 different behavior change techniques that you can use to help you change different behaviors. Wow. But of those 93, some of them are more effective for different behaviors than others. Yeah, I look them up and I read all 93. And you can too by pulling up the 2015 216 page report compiled from over 4.4. hundred different behavioral change experts. And it's titled, Behavior Change Techniques,

the Development and Evaluation of a Taxonomic Method for Reporting and Describing Behavior Change Interventions, a suite of five studies involving consensus methods, randomized controlled trials, and analysis of qualitative data. So these 93 methods of behavior modifications are sorted into 16 different categories. And that title was already long enough. People would be so mad if I read the whole thing to you. So I'm going to tell you, my two least favorite, okay? Scheduled consequences, if behavior is not changed. I don't like that. And inducing or raising awareness of your future regret. But Nessie will endorse her faves. One of them is actually called behavioral monitoring, which is actually what I just described.

Like you're keeping a journal, you're trying to figure out what's causing your behavior. Sometimes that is enough to actually inspire change, where you might figure out that your cue is the cap. and you're like, okay, I actually just need to not sit down on the couch at night. And maybe I just need to sit in a chair at the dining table, do this thing for 10 minutes, and then go and go to bed, right? Yeah, yeah. And maybe I read in bed for 20 minutes and then I fall asleep because I just, once I sit on the couch, it's all over for me.

Yeah. So sometimes behavioral monitoring can actually be really helpful. I ran a clinical trial using a bunch of these different techniques. One of the other ones was called behavioral substitution. which is basically you're just trying to replace one habit, one behavior with another. So if you are scrolling on your phone because you just need to wind down

and you just find it relaxing and that's it, what's something else you can do that would be relaxing that has more of a finite end point. So could you replace your evening scroll on the couch with watching a 30-minute episode of something on Netflix in your bed and then you just put the sleep timer on your TV and you can just fall asleep. And a lot of people think that, oh, I shouldn't do that because it's a screen and I'm going to be in bed, but like it's a lot better than what you're doing,

scrolling your phone on the couch because you can't stop doing that and you can stop doing the other things. So I think that this kind of substitution, which is just trying to find another behavior where you get the same reward out of it. but it's just something that has a set end point, and all of a sudden that just becomes more of a habit for you. You know, I was thinking about maybe just because the death of print media makes me sad as a former newspaper reporter, but I was thinking about maybe just subscribing to some magazines. I've started getting magazines.

Have you? Yeah. Because it's the same itch as like little bits and it's interesting and it's pretty. Just a side note, I looked this up out of rage, and roughly one in three posts and reels on Instagram are just ads. And recent users of Pinterest have been estimating between 50 to 70% of the mobile feeds are now just straight up advertisements. You are making billions of dollars for Mark Zuckerberg, who is using manipulation and addiction models to reach into your brain and steal sleep, peace, creativity, your identity and data. Now, magazines, at least they're not tracking my eye movements. What do you subscribe to? I need some recommendations. Oh, I don't know if they're good recommendations.

I actually have just been buying them. Yeah. I bought Harper's Bazaar. I bought Architectural Digest, which I find so funny because every article is like, these people spend $700,000 renovating their farmhouse backyard. Yeah, yeah. And they're like, we didn't think we were those kinds of people. and we're not those kinds of people, but we installed this theater room, and you're like, you are those kinds of people. But you know what? We'd be looking at, we'd be for-sfed the Kardashians' new backyard anyway, so might as well

read it in small bits on paper. Yeah, the thing I found is that I was too ambitious where I was like, maybe I'll get the New York or the Atlantic or something with an interesting long read. And like, who is long reading when your toddler is a meter away? Right, right. Like you're not deep in the economist or something. I just need like Vogue where I can just look at different hats or something. That's sometimes what we need.

What about the hardest thing about what you do? About my research? Yeah. Like what sucks about your research? I'll ask the best too. Wow. What sucks about it? That's a really difficult question.

For me, it's that I work from home. So I am still an adjunct research fellow and I still do some research. but I'm always alone in my house and I love working from home, but sometimes I feel like I would be more abreast of what other people are working on or just have more of a connection to colleagues and things like that if I was actually working day to day at a university. And we have a lot of Zoom calls and things like that. But I think part of it would be more fulfilling if I was doing it in person.

Yeah, I've had to start going to cafes. Yeah. go to the library. I mean, but I don't have a toddler, but I definitely, I certainly have to go lay eyes on other people. Yeah. It's good to get outside. What do you love the most about studying sleep? I, this, maybe this sounds weird. I had a YouTube channel before I became an academic researcher. And I think that being a YouTuber made me a better researcher. And it still does. And it still does because I read all the comments. And I think that YouTube comments have a really bad reputation for being awful and yes, some of them are mean. But in the little educational pocket

of YouTube that I exist in, people are super smart and mostly respectful, not always, but have really valid things to say. And I think it's just a touch point that a lot of academics don't have. And this is where and how I've developed this opinion that I think sleep science needs to have more humanity to it and just be a lot more human and talk to people more about the day-to-day things that they do in their life that are necessary and kind of prevent them from getting good sleep. And I think it's shaped how I approach my research because I'm always thinking of those comments and those people and how people find this really tough. And I think a lot of academics are like, oh yeah, this is the formula that you need to change your behavior and it just doesn't always work for people.

Yeah, it's good to know. I feel better about my sleep than I did before. I think everyone's like secretly, yeah, ashamed of it. Like if you asked 10 people, how's your sleep? Nine of them would go, you know what I mean? Just about their own habits. There is a lot of shame of like. There's so much shame. A lot of it is around technology and using screens. Some of it is around our schedules. And I think it is normal to wake up in the middle of the night. It's normal to feel tired at different points of the day. I think there are these different types of rest as well, right?

Sleep is just one of them. But I think it's also important to take moments to reduce stimulation, to maybe listen to a meditation or a podcast or just kind of chill out and manage your daily stress in different ways. Best advice I ever got was from a career coach who was like work until six. Eat from like seven to eight, eight to nine, do something that has nothing to do with work that you enjoy. Nine to ten, get ready for bed and tidy up.

Ten, you're in bed. But it was like helpful to have it built in where it's like, do something you like doing for an hour before you go to bed. And I was like, oh, nice. That helped my revenge, bedtime procrastination a lot. Oh, that's great. I didn't get into bed being like, you, I still want to hang out. So if you don't build in relaxing, night guy is going to rob it from morning guy.

And in her 2025 clinical trial, Dr. Hill experimented with having subjects, look for me time during the day, like listening to a podcast or reading or watching a TV show. We tried to help them find opportunities to do this during their lunch break, during their work break, during their commute, straight after dinner, whatever it may be. to see if that would reduce the amount of time they spend procrastinating their bedtime. It did not work. You're so upset about this. It did not work, which is interesting in itself, right? Like, this is why in science we encourage people to publish negative results

because they still tell you something. Yeah. And the story that that told us is that there is something about this time before people go to bed where they need to wind down. down at that time, not at 12 p.m. when they're eating lunch, not at 5 p.m. when they're coming home from work, they need to do it at night when it's dark and when it's quiet before they go to sleep. And I just found that so fascinating. It's a good off-ramp. This is inspiring to me to look at and ask myself, what are we doing here? And are we getting the me time we need? Am I working on a puzzle? Am I reading a book

I want to read? Because a lot of times I say, no, you don't get that. And then I just procrastinate doing something that I don't like as much. Right. I just checked my phone because I kept a note of things that I thought of this week where I was like, oh, we could talk about that with Ellie. And it was just the most random note because I just had one thing on it, which said, what does it mean to be human? That's a pretty big question. The reason why I put that down is that I think we can really obsess over statistics and over numbers that we get from our sleep trackers, over the numbers that we see in sleep guidelines and on social media or whatever,

where we're just all stressing about getting eight hours sleep and getting to bed. And yes, that is all important in a way, except some of these things that we are doing at night, help us connect with other people, help us have a social life, help us find identity, help us live in different ways. And I think that it's important to protect that. Yes, we do need sleep for mental health and for our mental health and for, our mood and it helps strengthen our relationships and how we feel about ourselves and all the rest of it. But it's important that people are kind to themselves when they think about their

sleep. There is a lot of research that self-compassion is linked to greater sleep quality because when we find ways to be kind to ourselves and give ourselves a break, it helps us sleep better the next night. We all will have bad nights of sleep. We all will procrastinate our bedtime from time to time. But if you can come back and say, hey, that was just one night and tomorrow, it's a new day. It helps you get back into the rhythm of sleep health. Oh, that's so good to know. This makes me excited to just like go to bed with a book. Oh, I'm so happy to hear that. Yeah. I'm here for all of your questions. Every, all of the 37 pages of questions you have, people can ask me on Instagram and I'll reply. You'll reply it. I'll reply. I'll reply it.

midnight from bed. Exactly. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. This was rad. So ask smart people sleep-deprived questions and go to sleep. You deserve it. Evil billionaires don't want you to.

Take a shower, get in jammies, close your eyes. Think of the good things that happened today, even if it was a shitty day. Maybe you saw a butterfly. Read a book for five minutes. before you drift off, use the fancy nancy. Rich ghouls don't want you to be rested and stronger. That sucks. So thank you so, so much to Dr. Vanessa Nessie Hill for the work you do, the lives you change,

and letting us know that like 15, 30 minutes isn't too big deal. More than that, you might be getting screwed by hustle culture, in my opinion. So you can follow Nessie Hill via her substack, Nessie Hill, or her Instagram at Nessie Hill. She's on TikTok and YouTube under BrainCraft. You can like, subscribe, et cetera. We are at Ologies on Instagram and Blue Sky, and I'm at Allie Ward on both. I'm also pleased to report that my sleep procrastination plagued me again decades. It's pretty much nil these days.

The brick, the showers before bed, fake candlelight, and just straight up indignation have made me fall in love with sleep hygiene. So thank you to all the researchers in the past. I'm going to link their episodes in the show notes if this is something you want to fix in your life. Also, thank you to everyone at patreon.com slash ologies for supporting the show since before day one. You two can join for a dollar a month. Come and join our discussion chats. When the episodes go up, I love commenting back and chatting with you guys. Smologies are shorter kid-friendly versions of ologies that are cut down and g-rated.

You can find them by Googling S-M-O-L-G-I-E-S-Mologies. Ologies merch is at Ologiesmerch.com. Aaron Talbert, Admenziology's podcast Facebook group. We have been having slumber parties since we met at the age of four. Aveline Malick makes our professional transcripts. Kelly Ardwired is a website. Our bedtime is set by scheduling producer Noel Dillworth. Our executive function is administered by managing director, Susan Hale. And our son and Moon are editors Jake Chafee and lead editor, Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn wrote Theology's theme lullaby, and if you stick around until the very end, you know I may tell you a secret. Okay, I went to see the lovely fancy Nancy this weekend, and my sister Celeste and I were hunting for blackberries in my sister Janelle's yard. But they seemed to have peaked early this year, so most of the bushes just had like shriveled blackberry raisins. But we picked them anyway.

Honestly, I give them a nine out of ten. They were chewy, sweet, high fiber. and I think they would make a great addition to scones or pancakes or like baked goods. And I was so wishing I had a trash picker, like a clean trash grabber to get the clusters that were too far in the brambles. Also, I wish I'd done a batology episode earlier this season because batology is a real thing. It's about brambles and berries. You can look it up. So if you've got dried out bushes, pick them anyway.

They're pretty chewy and good. Okay. night night little sweetie bye bye