Revenge Bedtime Procrastination
The compulsive habit of staying up far too late scrolling, watching shows or gaming, in order to reclaim a sense of personal time that the working day swallowed.
Definitions
The compulsive habit of staying up far too late scrolling, watching shows or gaming, in order to reclaim a sense of personal time that the working day swallowed. The phrase is a translation of the Chinese "报复性熬夜" (bàofùxìng áoyè) — literally "retaliatory staying up late" — that went viral on Sina Weibo around 2018 and crossed into English via a 2020 BBC article. It describes a vicious cycle: long, autonomy-poor working hours lead to late-night phone use, which leads to under-sleeping, which leads to a worse working day, which leads to more retaliation. Strongly associated with overwork cultures and the smartphone era.
I know I'll regret it tomorrow but it's 1am and I'm three episodes deep — revenge bedtime procrastination is undefeated.
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Related terms
Semantically related
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Spending an entire day in bed doing essentially nothing — scrolling, napping, eating in bed. Re-framed from "lazy" to "restorative self-care" by Gen Z.
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To lie in bed without engaging in activities, especially as a form of self-care (either adaptive or maladaptive).
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(internet slang, neologism) The act or practice of lying in bed without engaging in daily activities and chores.
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The English-language adoption of China's "tang ping" movement: a deliberate decision to opt out of hustle culture by doing only what's necessary to live, refusing extra hours, declining promotions and reducing material ambitions. Picked up by Western journalists and TikTok creators from 2021 onward, "lying flat" became a useful umbrella term for a cluster of related stances — quiet quitting, the lazy girl job, snail girl era — that all reject the assumption that career advancement should be life's organising principle. Some commentators frame lying flat as a soft labour protest, others as a personal mental-health strategy; in practice both readings overlap.
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Compulsively scrolling through bad news despite the negative effect on mood. The pandemic era made the term ubiquitous.