The great irony of this entire thing is that I couldn’t fall asleep last night because
I knew the text line was going to break overnight while I was asleep and there was nothing I
could do about it.
Okay, you’re probably wondering what on earth I’m talking about.
Let me explain…
​​I don’t know about you but I get so many spam text messages and phone calls, and
they’re so annoying.
And one day when I was reading “Hello!
You earned 2 points buying bread!”
I thought, is there a way these can be used for good?
So, I spent the last three months, a lot of time, and a fair bit of money creating a text
message bot.
But instead of annoying you it’s actually designed to help improve your sleep.
And I’m about to find out if it actually worked.
This all started about a year ago, when I set up a Google Alert for Bedtime Procrastination
– a phenomenon where you put off going to bed, in favour of the short-term benefits
from late night activities, like gaming, watching TV or scrolling through your phone.
You might justify it to yourself at the time, so you can have more time to yourself, some
“me” time.
You deserve it!
Or you might just be on autopilot and not even realise you’re doing it.
Basically I wanted to make a video about this, so this Alert emailed me when new research
or articles came out.
And then… things exploded.
Bedtime Procrastination became such a hot topic that every media outlet wrote about
it.
Now these articles focused on what we know about Bedtime Procrastination –
It's linked to shorter sleep, poor sleep quality and being fatigued the next day – which
is bad for your mental and physical health.
So it became the missing link in our collective languishing, the new thing we could identify
as bad and, potentially, feel guilty about doing.
But like everything, it’s nuanced.
Sometimes bedtime procrastination isn’t that bad for you, because you might be able
to push back what time you start school or work the next day, so you get the same amount
of sleep.
For some people, you really need that “me time” because it’s the only time you get
to yourself all day – you can do whatever you want and you’re kinda taking revenge
on your busy schedule that you don’t get control of.
But for others, bedtime procrastination is a real problem and it leads them to be chronically
sleep deprived.
And the one thing that bothered me was that, for those people who do want to change, there
wasn’t a lot of info out there on how you can do that.
Many of these articles just gave a laundry list of sleep hygiene, like “put away your
phone” or “stick to a routine.”
It may seem counterintuitive, but a list of tips is one of the worst ways to get people
to change their behaviour.
In research, providing information about your health doesn't lead to change.
It also presumes that all of your behaviour is coming from a place of self-control, like,
you just need more of that self-control to go to bed on time.
And a big list of things you’re not doing is kind of overwhelming!
So for those who want to change, it’s important to note that it isn’t a problem of willpower
or self-control, but a problem of strategy.
And luckily, there are plans and strategies that we can implement to tweak our behaviour.
And this is where the hotline comes in.
I wanted to try to help you create a strategy specific to your goals and life, but in a
way where I could communicate with you more generically (through the text line) and then
you could take away something more personal and meaningful.
One way this has been done successfully in research is when people create an Implementation
Intention.
This is basically an If/Then plan that you create to have a cue to tweak your behaviour
and even form new habits.
For example, say you want to write a short story.
You might create a plan like, “If I’m drinking coffee, then I will write 300 words.”
Or you want to get fit, so you say “If I open up the reddit app, then I will pause
to do two sets of lunges.”
The possibilities are endless, but the point is that you’re more likely to act on your
intentions with a specific plan in place.
In the context of sleep, you might create a scenario that says, “If the clock strikes
11pm, then I will stop watching YouTube and start brushing my teeth.
So I’m trying to figure out how to get you to devise an implementation intention through
text messages and there’s a couple of challenges:
The messages I send can only be 160 characters Emojis take up 2 characters so I had to scrap
all emojis, which is sad, because normally I text like a 70 year-old-woman so it’s
about 50% emojis I have to pay per text message that I send,
about (cost) so I’m trying to not go broke.
I want to try to do this well but in as few messages as possible
I don’t want to collect all of your personal information, and it’s actually hard to use
a mass text messaging service in a way that keeps your information anonymous
I need to use the right language and cue your thinking in a particular sequence so this
can actually work I’ve currently been doing this for 2 months,
and because I’m travelling you’re going to see me in maybe 5 different locations trying
to make this work
Which segues us to our next location, and a very important side note.
So, text message marketing services are designed to capture as much of your information as
they possibly can.
But it’s important to note, and I really want you all to know, that I designed an anonymous
survey so I didn’t actually collect anyone’s data, or information, or phone number.
All I could see was the locations that they were coming from, so the area code basically.
This whole process was opt-in, so it was not my intention to spam people.
Just wanted you all to know that.
And after a few more weeks of testing, refining the language and convincing all of my family
and friends that they should text “SLEEP” to a random number to see what happened, the
text line was up and running.
I told you all about it through one of these #shorts and we were up and, well, you broke
it.
Kinda.
In a good way.
Hi!
I'm a current customer and I'm interested in upgrading my plan.
So when I set up the hotline I thought it was a cool thing to do, but I didn't think
it was going to be that popular.
So I bought 500 text messages, and they ran out in 2 hours.
I underestimated all of you and for that, I'm sorry.
I wanted to upgrade to the one that's 2000 messages a month.
I've tried to do it a few times yesterday and today, but I keep getting an error message.
Okay. great thanks so much, so you're going to call me in a moment?
Cool, thank you.
Maybe it's going to be fixed?
We don't know yet.
This is a good time to thank my Patrons, for supporting not only my channel, but these
weird experiments that I get to do.
There are two things that we discovered today.
One is that people are far more interested in bedtime procrastination and participating
in my weird experiments than I would have expected.
And the second is that bedtime procrastination is a byproduct of capitalism.
The plan has upgraded.
Okay, time for the results…
So, overall, everybody thought about their evening routine more frequently, which is
pretty expected.
If you fill in a survey or receive text messages talking about your evening routine you’re
probably going to think about it more straight after.
About half of the people who participated reported making a change to their evening
routine, which is kind of incredible…
Now, this had a stronger effect closer to when people took the survey, and what I mean
by that is people who took the survey less than a week ago or a week ago, the majority
of them reported making a change to their evening routine.
But those who took the survey two weeks ago, or more than two weeks ago, reported not really
making a change.
So, there was kind of a fading of the effect of doing
the survey.
And this is why a laundry list of solutions is not effective for real behaviour change,
and often just results in us feeling bad about not reaching a goal.
And, now, thanks to the message bot and your responses, I know exactly what late night
activities are keeping you all from going to bed.
Youtube, Instagram, Watching Youtube videos on end, Tinder, watching your videos, playing
video games, reddit, discord, watching BrainCraft, books, porn, vacuuming.
Who wants to vacuum?
Ever?
Needless to say, you all are procrastinating sleep but keeping the algorithms very alive.
Now the one thing that we can’t tell is if people got more sleep.
I didn’t measure sleep, maybe we’ll do that next time.
I think it is just incredible that people are thinking about their evening routine,
that they’re trying to have healthier behaviours, and I’m going to take that.
I’m happy with that.
Okay so for the rest of you guys who want to stop procrastinating so much in the evening,
if that is a goal that you have, think about tweaking your environment in a way that's
conducive to you achieving that goal.
You can start by thinking through your evening routine and try to identify those activities
you're using to procrastinate.
I think it's YouTube... for a lot of you.
I just have that feeling.
I'm not saying stop watching YouTube, obviously, but you might just set some reasonable parameters
around that of how much time you want to spend doing that every evening.
And if you do want to stop procrastinating before you go to bed, you can set your own
if/then plan for that.
Remember to be really specific.
So you might say, "when my bedtime alarm goes off at 11 o'clock I'm going to put my phone
in the kitchen, turn it on do-not-disturb, and start my nighttime routine."
Which is what I try to do, and I do it like three nights a week, so it's moderately successful.
This is really hard, okay?
The worst thing you can do is to feel bad about not doing the right thing, because at
the end of the day there is no correct way to have an evening routine or to get the best
sleep really.
You just have to do what works for you.
And that’s okay.
As Matt Haig has said, find a routine that is baggy enough to live in.
Thank you so much to all of my patrons (What absolute legends!) that support BrainCraft,
and also these weird experiments that we can do.
I have actually set up a BrainCraft Discord server, so if you join at the $2 tier, you’ll
be able to participate in planning, and designing, and even executing the next experiment that
we’re doing.
It’s my goal just to do these weird experiments on the internet because I love them.
They’re so fun, and we find out such cool things about human behaviour.