A while back I learned something important from my therapist, and since I was trying to recount it anyway to share with a friend, I thought I would bring it to y'all as well.
We have all had at least one of those days where we've stayed up way too late doing something fun but we just don't want to stop doing it. Logically I figured that's just because "well yeah I don't want to stop, I have to go to sleep then to work and those suck compared to it."
Except then that starts happening often and you feel bad about always staying up every night, but then you feel worse and get more stressed because you know you're doing something you're "not supposed to", but because you're more stressed you want more fun time... endless cycle.
But as I was talking about it all and told her I thought I was self-sacrificing, the therapist had a very useful question for me:
"How do you normally know it's time to stop having fun? Like you know it's time to finish work because your shift's over, you know it's time to stop doing the dishes when they're all done or the washer's full, what is your signal to stop having fun?"
And I had to search for a while to answer.
"When the activity is done" - okay sure, but many games and books and series, or doing your own creative thing, "done" may take days upon days or even be non-existent.
"When I had to pass the controller" - obvious and easy one! If you knew you had a finite turn then the defined end is readily there, and you're also prepared for it! But requires pre-arranging the limits.
"When I got in trouble for it" - ding ding ding, we found the big problem.
When you grow up with "fun" being a forbidden activity you're only allowed to do after everything else is done to 100% perfection, then you learn to sneak it in where you can fit it. And you need that shit, seriously - you cannot get through life without some source of enjoyment, some tiny glimmer of joy among the tedium.
Many of us learned to read under the covers, or to play our gameboy in the bathroom and hide it under the sink, or that we could get away with running around the backyard for another 20 minutes if we just learned which intonation of "come inside" was the actual trouble line, or whatever other ways to cram in as much joy as we could before the hammer came down, for whatever severity that meant in your house.
And so that feeling of "I shouldn't be doing this, I'm going to get caught, but if I'm going to get in trouble anyway I might as well get as much out of this as I can" becomes part of what you expect to feel when you're having fun. And you only know how to stop having fun when you feel that way when you get in trouble for it - and in absence of anyone else controlling your behavior, that means the bad guy becomes either whatever task pops up to remind you responsibilities exist, or your significant other pointing out it's really late and they wish you'd come to bed, or your boss yelling at you for being tired all the time... or it becomes you.
If you don't learn that fun isn't a forbidden activity, if you stay stuck in the mindset that it's something you have to cram in in secret and hide that you're even doing? It becomes so so easy to hate the voice of reason in your head that's trying to encourage moderation and we're going to regret this tomorrow.
And that escalates. You keep being too tired the next day. You keep feeling even worse when you sit down to enjoy yourself the next night because now you're already tired, so stress gets to you faster, and now you feel guilty about how late you're staying up so you're not really enjoying playing your game or scrolling Tumblr or whatever anymore, you're just nervously glancing at the clock, "have I spent too long yet? How much longer can I do this before I get in trouble?"
Even though now you're in your 20s or 30s and it's been a decade since the last time anyone else told you it was bed time.
Learning that you're allowed to have fun isn't easy; guilt and shame are emotions that run very, very deep. And neither is learning to have a healthier relationship with saying "okay, that's enough for today".
For one, you have to stop threatening yourself. "Tomorrow is gonna suck" and "You're going to regret this" and "we're going to get in trouble at work" don't work. You already feel bad, you already know it's gonna suck, so why wouldn't you try to cram in one more hour now while it's not the day that's going to suck yet? Punishment is not incentive.
Because by now you're in a situation where sleep is a horrifying punishment that ends any fun, but you're not enjoying your fun anyway because you're tired all the time on top of feeling ashamed for doing something fun, and you're spending the entire time beating yourself up for being an idiot with no self control who can't even handle going to bed on time like a normal human being...
You will hear a lot of people give advice on how to get rid of the idea of having to "earn" sleep or fun or happiness by doing "enough" other things. To learn to accept that just being alive is enough reason to "deserve" to do those things. That will work for some people, but for others it just ends up one more thing to scold yourself about, especially when you're already in the habit not of denying yourself entirely but instead of doing it and feeling guilty the whole time.
But learning to set limits ahead of time, so that you're not anticipating some unknown time that a nebulous authority figure is going to finally have their horror monster timer run out and leap out at you but instead know when and what to expect? Holy shit it helped.
Don't get me wrong, it hella felt like depriving myself at first, like I was being grounded, and I looked at my phone beeping saying it was bedtime quite often and got annoyed.
But then I stopped treating fun as something that had to wait until the end of the day and everything else had to be done first. It is way easier to stare down sleep and go "I don't need you", especially if you have any kind of insomnia making the idea of being in bed a dreadful one on top of it. It is harder to say that about dinner, or calling a friend, or walking the dog. Plus then the day isn't over yet, so giving up on your fun isn't also accepting that as the defining moment of the end of your day!
So you have to start practicing looking for places to squeeze in a little more fun -
"I've got an hour before dinner, that's perfect to make some tea and watch two episodes."
"My favorite youtuber just put up a new video, why don't I take a break to watch it before I finish this homework?"
"I need to go grocery shopping tomorrow anyway, and if I leave an hour early I could go kick around the bookstore first."
And once you do, fun starts to feel less shameful.
Don't get me wrong, if your issues run deep enough it still does sometimes. But when you get to have these moments of joy that you don't feel the need to hide or apologize for and where punishment isn't part of the routine, then fun stops feeling like something you have to dig your claws into for fear of having it taken away from you once someone catches you with it. And that means that finishing a level and glancing over at the clock is something you do because it actually managed to click a satisfaction switch in your head and you wondered if it was a good note to end on for now, instead of something you do with your breath held and the berating words already cycling in your mind.
I am not offering this advice expecting it to work for everyone or be easy or anything like that. I am someone with Depression, ADHD, and pretty severe PTSD sharing a technique that one therapist told me that really happened to click for and help me specifically, in case it might help someone else be a little nicer to themselves today, too.
