Abstract
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 processes. To address this, we examined whether affective valence and arousal predict bedtime procrastination within people, between people, or both. In Study 1, we replicated cross-sectional associations between negative affect and bedtime procrastination in a Chinese community sample. In Studies 2–3, we attempted to manipulate valence and arousal in separate week-long diary experiments; the manipulations produced limited shifts in affect and did not significantly change bedtime procrastination. Across both diary studies, however, analyses of self-reported affect revealed a consistent pattern: people who generally felt less positive were more likely to procrastinate, whereas evening-to-evening fluctuations in affect did not predict whether they procrastinated on a given night. Exploratory analyses in Study 2 suggested that this between-person association was partly indirect through feeling less able to go to bed. Taken together, these findings suggest that whether people put off going to bed may be more closely tied to how they typically feel than to how they feel on a given evening, highlighting the importance of separating between-person and within-person levels.