PhronesisThe capacity to allocate one's hours is a foundational dimension of psychological autonomy. In its calibrated form — the ground state S^0_ CTS of Calibrated Temporal Sovereignty — the agent distributes time across obligation and personal restoration in a way that sustains both daytime functioning and a durable sense of self-ownership. Revenge bedtime procrastination is formally reconceptualised here within the Displacement Framework as a wrong attractor W_ RBP in the landscape of temporal self-governance: a locally stable configuration in which the person delays sleep not from insomnia or physiological wakefulness, but from a deliberate, affect-laden reclaiming of personal time that was experienced as absent throughout the preceding day.
The night is the only hour that feels self-directed; staying awake is not passive but agentive — an assertion of freedom against a day of heteronomy. Three sustaining mechanisms are identified and formally characterised: (1) night-as-only-personal-time encoding, in which nocturnal wakefulness becomes the sole representational slot for autonomous experience; (2) delayed-consequence insulation, in which the costs of sleep deprivation are temporally displaced to tomorrow while the benefit of felt freedom is immediate, creating a reward structure that systematically favours staying up; and (3) sovereignty-through-wakefulness identity, in which remaining awake is experienced not merely as pleasurable but as constitutive of selfhood — the sleeping self is the self that gave in.
The paper develops a formal dynamical model in terms of autonomy perception A(t), accumulated sleep debt D(t), and daytime satisfaction S_d(t), demonstrating that late nocturnal wakefulness produces a brief elevation of A while monotonically accumulating D, which in turn depresses S_d over the following day, which intensifies the motivation to seek compensatory autonomy the following night — closing the positive feedback loop that constitutes the wrong attractor basin.
Nine propositions formalise the structural properties of W_ RBP, the basin geometry, and the return pathways to S^0_ CTS through daytime autonomy restoration, temporal boundary setting, and identity decoupling from wakefulness. The paper draws on Kroese et al.'s foundational bedtime procrastination framework, Exelmans and Van den Bulck's smartphone extension, Walker's neuroscience of sleep, Deci and Ryan's self-determination theory, Baumeister's self-regulation depletion model, and Steel's procrastination theory.