How Revenge Procrastination Can Actually Help Your Mental Load

Catherine
Aug 24
3 min read

It's late. You're exhausted but glued to the couch.

Scrolling or bingeing another episode or both. Maybe there's a 600ml single serve ice cream tub involved, maybe not. Who's to judge.

YOU are! You're judging. And herein lies the problem.

You're caught in that mental loop of "I deserve to relax- but I'm too exhausted from all the hats I wear, to do real self care, so I'll do this and feel terrible about it."

You're feeling terrible about the social media or the Netflix bingeing, guilty over your snack choices, and resentful that you don't have enough quality time for real self care.

This form of late night night self care is revenge procrastination (sometimes called revenge balance). You know you should be off to bed, but instead you're hanging out with guilty indulgences. It’s your brain’s way of clawing back “me time” after a day of giving everything to everyone else.

And the energy cost is brutal. Not just in the moment, but in how you're setting up the next day, and worse: what you're contributing to your identity story.

The Human Energy Crisis

Burnout rates are at an all-time high. Deloitte reported that 77% of professionals have experienced burnout in their current role. Psychologists now talk less about “time management” and more about a human energy crisis.

The problem isn’t that we rest too little- it’s that the way we rest often doesn’t restore us.

Think of that famous study on stress: people who said they were stressed and believed stress was bad for them had the highest mortality rates. But those who said they were stressed and it was a good stress? Those people had the highest rate of survival (yes death record data was part of the study). 30,000 people were involved in this University of Wisconsin-Madison study and the difference in this mindset was a 43% increased risk of dying.

The stress wasn’t the killer- the belief was.

Your downtime works the same way. If you’re lying on the couch muttering “I’m exhausted… I’m failing… I have no discipline”- then no amount of rest is actually restorative.

The 2-Minute Game Changer for Balance

Whatever you choose for downtime- social scrolling, Netflix, a bath, a walk- it might be perfectly fine.

The real shift is this: the energy you bring to it matters more than the activity itself.

Glass-half-empty thinking (“I can’t even manage 30 mins exercise daily”) just deepens depletion. Glass-half-full thinking (“I walked 2,000 steps today, 15% more than yesterday- I’m building momentum”) recharges you, while quietly moving you closer to the ideal.

The Science on Balance (without the hype)

We’re told we need 10 hours of rest a day, including sleep + passive downtime. Most of us are closer to that than we think.
Headlines say social media causes poor mental health. In truth, the data is murkier. Correlation ≠ causation. Ice cream doesn’t cause skin cancer; sun exposure does. But people at the beach happen to eat more ice cream. Same deal with scrolling. It’s not the app, it’s the attitude.

So don’t buy the hype. Buy into the science. And however you're using your downtime: give yourself a little positive encouragement. You'll get to your ideal much faster that way.

Want to Dive Deeper?

Over the last 5 years, executive coaching has quietly absorbed a new truth: performance coaching without life coaching doesn’t work.

Not because COVID made life harder (correlation ≠ causation again). But because the pace of change, efficiency demands, and energy drain of modern work made it inevitable. COVID accelerated what we were already seeing.

Leadership coaches are often coaching relationship skills, performance coaches are helping humans improve the quality of their life habits, in order to maximise their work habits.

That’s why we’re unveiling The Workload Rebellion.

A rebel blend of psychologists, leadership coaches, and balance specialists helping you hit the mix of push and rest, success and celebration, growth and gratitude that allows authentic, complex, busy humans to thrive in a landscape vastly different to ten years ago and dramatically different to what it will be ten years from now.

Three ways to lean in right now for Peak Performance with Balance As Core:

Join a Work Life Balance Walk in Bondi or Manly if you're in Sydney.
Grab your spot in our free lunchtime webinar: “Leading When the Team Is Tired” (28th August).
Explore our Rebel Playbook series, blending leadership and life coaching.