Here’s an experience we’ve probably all had: After a long, busy day, you’re getting ready for bed. You’re thinking about what tomorrow will be like—maybe it will be another long day of work, maybe you’re busy planning for a big event soon—and you’re absolutely dreading it. You already feel like tomorrow’s going to be terrible.
So, what do you do? Maybe you decide to “delay” tomorrow a bit. Maybe you watch more TV or scroll through social media. It might even be something healthier: Maybe you spend some time reading or journaling.
Regardless, it’s a way to try to find your own time in the middle of a day that doesn’t feel like it’s yours. You’re using the night to try to find something you can call your own. And, of course, you’re likely making tomorrow worse, since you’ll be going in without a real night of sleep.
Psychologists call this “revenge bedtime procrastination.” When you try to avoid going to bed to ‘take back’ whatever part of your day you’ve lost, you’re repeating this behavior. You’re trying to push back the part of your day that’s out of your control. The nighttime is the one part of the day that’s really just yours and nobody else’s.
Of course, this is not healthy behavior. You’re not really reclaiming your day this way. You’re making tomorrow worse, if anything. If there’s a problem, this is not the solution.
But this does seem like a real problem. Even if we don’t procrastinate this way, it’s certainly common to feel like we lack control over our time. Most of us probably have some way of trying to find “our time” throughout the day, even if it’s not in this same way. But what’s the best way to really take control of our time? How can we find a part of the day that truly belongs to us?
Why Do We Feel Out of Control?
Let’s start with a simple question: What makes us feel like the day’s out of our control? What is it that makes a day feel like it’s “not ours?”
Almost always, this comes back to one thing: Work. The majority of people who suffer from this problem likely dread going into work in the morning. (Or class—behavior is also very common for students.) Work is time that feels out of our control, and for some people, the nighttime is the best place to find some sense of control.
And there is some truth to this. Work, definitionally, is something that’s not done for its own sake. We work because there’s something we want to work for, not just because we enjoy working. For most of us, work is something that we need to do and something that we don’t have a lot of choice in. We are giving up some control when we clock in.
It’s easy to look at this cynically: This could just mean that work is going to leave us dissatisfied or that we’re ‘surrendering’ part of our day every time we go in. And maybe this means that we need to find a healthy way to reclaim time away from work—at the very least, something better than late-night television.
But is it true that we just lose all control over work? Is there nothing better to do than to decide that we don’t have control over work and look for how to minimize its effect on life?
We might feel that we don’t have any possession over work. But does this have to be true? What could we do to try to find a greater sense of ownership over work—and, by extension, over the whole day?
Finding Possession in Work
First, it’s clear that this feeling of a lack of control comes from a lack of independence at work. We can still feel control over work if we have the chance to approach it with freedom. If we’re given the opportunity to use our skills to deal with problems however we’re able to, there’s still a sense of control to be found in work.
It’s when a workplace fails to offer this independence that this lack of control sets in. When you’re faced with micromanagement or excessive supervision, it’s hard to feel that you have any real freedom at work. Even if you enjoy what you do, it’s hard to feel satisfaction when you have someone telling you exactly what to do at every step.
Learning to appreciate the value and virtue of your work is one way to begin reclaiming control over the day. When we find a sense of fulfillment in work, it’s no longer an obstacle but an opportunity. But it’s just as important to ask how we can take control of the rest of the day as well. What can we do to make every minute of the day feel like something you chose?
It's clear that there’s one main obstacle to this sense of control: Mindlessness. We’ve become incredibly good at distracting ourselves, much better than we are at paying attention. It’s easy to spend hours without ever really thinking about what we’re doing.
How can we “come to our senses” so to speak, and find a way to approach the day consciously and thoughtfully? How can we come to feel like an active player in every part of the day?
Real Freedom, Real Choice
Probably the worst sense of a loss of control outside of work comes from wasted time. It’s easy for us to look back at the day and wonder where it went. When we spent all that time on things that were done nearly unconsciously, how could we feel like we had control over the day?
It would be simple to say that we shouldn’t watch as much television or spend less time on social media. But these answers are not enough. We all know that these are problems, but knowing what’s right isn’t enough to do it.
An answer like this says that all we need is pure willpower. We just need to make the choice in the moment to reject these things and that will be enough. But it should be clear that that’s not the case. When we try to use willpower, we’re just trying to fight against our immediate desires, and that’s a difficult fight to win.
What we need, instead, is a rule to follow. The philosopher Immanuel Kant once claimed that you’re only really free when you follow a rule you set. It’s only then that you’re acting from something that you made. When we just do what we want, we’re really just listening to our desires and our inclinations and letting those control us.
If we want to control ourselves, we need to begin by setting a rule for life. We need to choose what we want to do, not just wait for the right thing to come along.
Nighttime procrastination is rarely something that we plan for. It’s something that just seems too hard to stop in the moment. We might want to get to bed early or wake up at a certain time, but when the moment comes, we make an exception for what we feel like doing.
So, here’s a suggestion: Become a morning person. Set a rule and follow it. Choose the time that you’re going to wake up and begin living by that. Try not to make exceptions or compromises. Learn to live by the rule that you made.
When you set your own rule, you have found real control. You’re acting from reason and choosing what you want to do. Our idea of control is often nothing more than losing control. It’s when we let the moment control us. But this is real freedom: Choosing exactly what rules you’ll live by.