You promise yourself an early night… then keep scrolling, reading, or puttering because the day didn’t leave space just for you. That pattern has a name: revenge bedtime procrastination—delaying sleep to reclaim personal time, often on phones, which erodes tomorrow’s mood, focus, and health.

If you’ve ever crawled into bed intending to rest but found yourself an hour later still scrolling grim headlines, you’re not alone. “Doomscrolling” — compulsively consuming distressing news or content — increases stress and anxiety and can disrupt attention and sleep.

We’re trained to help, to fix, to make things better. And when something breaks — when a relationship falters, when a patient dies, when a child drifts — our hearts interpret it as failure.