You’re not staying up late because life is too exciting to sleep through. Quite the opposite, actually. A new study set to be presented at the SLEEP 2025 conference in Seattle has found that your nightly ritual of ignoring sleep to compulsively do literally anything else in outright defiance of what your body is telling you to do is closely linked to some unsavory personality traits. Your refusal to get to bed on time is turning you into a disorganized asshole, in other words.Researchers at the University of Utah found a consistent pattern after studying 390 young adults with an average age of 24: bedtime procrastinators scored higher in neuroticism and lower in both conscientiousness and extraversion. Those who purposely delayed sleep and occupied that time with meaningless fluff experiences tended to be more anxious, disorganized, and less likely to seek out fun or social experiences.They found that night owls aren’t typically social butterfly extroverts who are out clubbing until the wee hours of the morning. They are much more likely to be people in low-power mode, forcing themselves awake to watch just one more TikTok video or just one more episode of a show.The study’s lead author, Steven Carlson, said these late-night procrastinators reported fewer positive emotions and more depressive symptoms. They weren’t putting off bedtime to have fun, meaningful experiences. They were, essentially, numbing themselves as a form of self-protection from stress, sadness, and anxiety — negative feelings they would, ironically, have a better chance of avoiding if they got more sleep.The researchers adjusted for chronotype, a person’s natural inclination for getting to bed at a certain time, and found that bedtime procrastination was tied to mood and personality, not just biology. Over two weeks, participants logged their sleep habits, and the link between negative emotional states and delayed bedtimes shone brightly in the resulting data.We, even the most ardent sleep procrastinators, know that sleeping is important. We know that we should be getting at least the seven hours of sleep recommended by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. Actually convincing ourselves to stop self-medicating with frivolous time fillers is another matter entirely, though, and a kind of self-sabotage that could lead to a bevy of negative long-term mental and physical health problems.So, how do you actually solve a problem that we all low-key knew existed and now have the scientific research to prove it? Carlson and his team think this is less about bad habits and more about mental health. They think that future research could help explore how emotional regulation techniques could curb this behavior. Maybe it’s not that the algorithms dominating our modern lives have sunk their teeth into you. Maybe you have unresolved anxiety that’s keeping you from doing the one thing that could help make it go away.The post Sleep Procrastination Is Ruining Your Personality appeared first on VICE.