I’ve been trying to figure out why I stay up so late.

It’s not because I’m stressed. My days are actually quite chill lately. I’m not dreading tomorrow, either; I’m generally optimistic about the future. Yet, every night, I find myself scrolling through feeds, refusing to go to sleep, even when my eyes hurt and my body is exhausted.

The standard explanation is “revenge bedtime procrastination”—the idea that you stay up to reclaim time you lost during the day. There is some truth to that. I do feel like my days are sold to other obligations, and the night is the only time that belongs to me.

But that doesn’t fully explain the mechanism.

For a long time, I thought the problem was the quality of what I was consuming. I felt a sort of “information hunger.” I told myself that I was scrolling because I hadn’t found anything satisfying yet. I believed that if I just watched a really good movie, or read a meaningful chapter of a book, I would feel “full” and be able to sleep.

So I tried that. I forced myself to watch long, high-quality videos and read books.

It didn’t work. I didn’t feel satisfied. In fact, I felt impatient. I found myself wanting to switch back to the endless, mindless feeds.

That was the moment I realized I had the causality backwards.

I’m not staying awake because I’m hungry for information. I’m keeping myself hungry so that I have an excuse to stay awake.

The hunger is fake. It is a defense mechanism. Deep down, I simply don’t want the day to end. Sleeping feels like admitting defeat, or at least admitting that this specific day is over. As long as I feel “unsatisfied,” I have a valid reason to keep the lights on.

My brain rejects the “closure” of a movie or a book because closure implies it’s time to stop. The endless feed of short videos is perfect not because it’s interesting, but because it has no bottom. It guarantees I will never be full.

I used to think the solution was to find better things to watch. Now I realize the solution is much simpler, though harder to do.

I have to go to bed hungry.

I have to accept that the feeling of “needing something more” is a lie I’m telling myself. I won’t find that satisfaction in another video, because I’m actively preventing myself from finding it.

The only way to fix it is to just turn the lights off, unsatisfied.