Tea at Trianon: Revenge Bedtime Procrastination

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, April 4, 2021

Revenge Bedtime Procrastination

From Medical News Today:

Medical News Today spoke to Sara Makin, M.S.Ed., NCC, LPC, founder and CEO of online counseling practice Makin Wellness, and Lee Chambers, M.Sc. M.B.Ps.S., an environmental psychologist and well-being consultant, to find out more about the possible reasons that might drive people to procrastinate on sleep.
Makin told us that “[r]evenge sleep procrastination is still a new concept, so there are still debates regarding the psychology of this.”
“There may be a connection between heightened daytime stress and bedtime procrastination,” she noted.
A study from the Netherlands that appeared in Frontiers in Psychology in 2018 aimed to answer the question as to why people may delay their bedtime on purpose, even when they are tired.
The study authors found that the more a person had to “resist desires” during the rest of their day, the more likely they would be a bedtime procrastinator.
This means that the less enjoyable things a person could do during the day, the likelier it was that they would try to reclaim that time at night and engage in the more pleasurable activities they had not been able to do during the day.
“One of the significant causes of revenge sleep procrastination is where our current working culture intersects with our personal and leisure time expectations in our p.m. bookend,” Chambers told MNT.
It all comes down to trying to reclaim that much-needed “me time,” he explained: “The desire to gain a level of personal freedom drives a desire to stay awake beyond a time that will provide an optimal level of sleep.” (Read more.)