Bedtime procrastination among college students is socially influenced by the need to belong, according to a new study at Sleep 2025.
Results show that sleep duration was more than an hour shorter on school nights when college students delayed their bedtime for in-person social leisure activities. On these nights, their bedtime was strongly correlated with the timing of their last objectively measured social interaction with friends. Students within the bedtime procrastination social network scored higher on the need to belong compared with students outside the network. The need to belong also predicted tie formation within the bedtime procrastination social network.
RT’s Three Key Takeaways
- Social interactions were strongly linked to delayed bedtimes and over an hour of sleep loss on school nights among college students.
- Need to belong significantly predicted who engaged in social bedtime procrastination, highlighting it as a key psychological driver.
- Peer influence in communal living settings can be as impactful as screens or academic pressure in disrupting healthy sleep routines.
“As far as we know, this is the first study to identify ‘need to belong’ as a potential driver of social bedtime procrastination and short sleep,” said principal investigator Joshua Gooley, who has a doctorate in neurobiology and is an associate professor with the Neuroscience and Behavioural Disorders Programme at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore.
According to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, sleep is essential to health. The AASM recommends that adults should sleep 7 or more hours per night on a regular basis to promote optimal health. Bedtime procrastination — choosing to go to bed later despite being aware of its potential negative consequences — reduces the opportunity to get sufficient sleep.
The study involved a sample of 104 university students in a residential college, including 59 women. They wore an actigraph and a proximity beacon watch for two weeks during the school semester to estimate their nocturnal sleep and track when they were near one another. Participants also completed daily diaries. The Need to Belong Scale assessed individual differences in the desire for acceptance and belonging.
Gooley noted that the strength of their findings was surprising. “We often think of sleep loss as being caused by screen time or work, but social needs, especially in group-living environments, can be just as powerful at influencing sleep,” he said.
