#26: Sleep: The Research

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Are you punishing yourself?

Recently, Aditi Nerurkar, MD, MPH a Harvard physician and best-selling author, reaffirmed a past point she made on the The Diary Of A CEO podcast, this time in the context of social media use.

My brain started firing as she talked about ‘revenge bedtime procrastination’ - how people delay sleep to reclaim a sense of control or “me time”, even though it backfires on energy, mood, and focus the next day.

Most of the time you delay sleep with your phone, and so it’s a double whammy.

As a person from the UK, I was intrigued to see how this may work in conjunction with British culture.

In 2025, 52% of UK internet users aged 18-54 said that their work life gets in the way of them having a more healthy lifestyle. (Source: Mintel)

When I read that as a person relatively new to the workforce, it intrigued me because overall health is a major factor in our sleep hygiene.

That statistic infers that many people feel as if they are caught in a wave and choose to stay on their surfboard so they can dismount on their own time, which in this case means trading sleep for pleasure.

Zooming out a bit more, and in a culture where difference isn’t encouraged and bonding happens through complaining, it begs the question:

• Is it really as easy as changing your cues and routines to introduce healthy habits, or are there other interpersonal factors at play?

To make change in an area that has seen so little feels like unearthing an entrenched pattern with the inertia of a truck.

That reminds me of my post on small wins where I said:

“when willingly operating in a different domain, it is our responsibility when we share our achievements to explain what the gravity of it is.”

In this case, the domain we’re operating in is one of day-to-day life where celebrating wellness distastefully undercuts the culture of complaining and relinquished accountability.

Back to the statistic, the aspirations under that umbrella of what we deem a healthy lifestyle eventually become the priorities we didn’t attend to and therefore ended up losing their importance.

These will be the priorities that become apparent when your health forces you to peer under the rug you’ve been sweeping under for so long.

So to develop this exploration further, I figured that ‘healthy lifestyle’ alludes to one of the most important facets of our overall health - exercise.

We will contrast this underlying principle with topics that describe behaviours that currently underpin our widespread struggle with sleep.

To read the full exploration, click here.

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