Dawdling at dusk: Do negative affect and high arousal cause bedtime procrastination?

Why don’t people go to bed on time? Most research on bedtime procrastination has focused on individual differences (e.g., self-regulation, chronotype), potentially conflating between-person patterns with within-person mechanisms. To address this, we examined affective valence and arousal as proximal predictors of bedtime procrastination across three studies. In Study 1, we replicated cross-sectional associations between negative affect and bedtime procrastination in a Chinese community sample and expanded these effects to include high arousal. In Studies 2-3, we experimentally manipulated valence and arousal in separate week-long longitudinal bedtime interventions. Inducing negative affect (Study 2) or high arousal (Study 3) did not increase the likelihood of bedtime procrastination, though high arousal reduced its intensity among bedtime procrastinators. Overall, we found little evidence that negative affect or arousal directly causes bedtime procrastination, but it may indirectly increase it by lowering sleep self-efficacy.