“This can make it feel more like we are ‘always at work,’ because work can call on us at any time,” she says. Emails and instant messaging mean employers can always be in touch. Long hours at the office aside, another part of the problem is that modern working patterns mean people find it harder to draw boundaries between work and home, says Ciara Kelly, a lecturer in work psychology at Sheffield University’s Management School. I want to be healthy but they stole my time. Yet her friends are often also awake in the middle of the night. Gu loved late nights in her 20s, but has started to think about adopting more “normal” sleeping habits.

“Even though I am tired the next day, I don’t want to sleep early,” she says. Gu Bing, a 33-year-old creative director at a digital agency in Shanghai, often works late and considers going to sleep before 0200 an early night. A recent report by state broadcaster CCTV and the National Bureau of Statistics said the average Chinese employee only had 2.42 hours per day when they were not at work or asleep, down by 25 minutes from the previous year. The tech companies who created 996 culture tend to be based in big cities, and their work practices have influenced other sectors. In China, a national survey in 2018 showed that 60% of people born after 1990 were not getting enough sleep, and that those living in the biggest cities suffered the most. People cited various reasons for this shortfall, including stress and their sleeping environment, but 37% blamed their hectic work or school schedule. The 2019 Phillips Global Sleep Survey, which received more than 11,000 responses from 12 countries, showed that 62% of adults worldwide feel they don’t get enough sleep, averaging 6.8 hours on a weeknight compared to the recommended amount of eight hours. A few hours of ‘own time’ is necessary to survive.”Įxperts have long warned that insufficient sleep is an unheeded global public-health epidemic. In a reply ‘liked’ more than 4,500 times, Twitter user Kenneth Kwok tweeted: “Typical 8 to 8 in office, arrive home after dinner and shower it’s 10 p.m., probably won’t just go to sleep and repeat the same routine. She described the phenomenon as when “people who don’t have much control over their daytime life refuse to sleep early in order to regain some sense of freedom during late-night hours”. The phrase, which could also be translated as ‘retaliatory staying up late’, spread rapidly on Twitter in June after a post by journalist Daphne K Lee. Rao was doing what the Chinese have called ‘bàofùxìng áoyè’ – or ‘revenge bedtime procrastination’. Often, Rao would stay up surfing the internet, reading the news and watching online videos until well after midnight. “I was deprived of all my personal life.” After her shift, which sometimes included overtime, she had a small window to eat, shower and go to bed – but she sacrificed sleep to eke out some personal time. Rao, who is originally from Nanjing, moved to financial hub Shanghai about five years ago to work for a multinational pharmaceutical company. Emma Rao spent almost three years on China’s notorious ‘ 996 schedule’: working from nine in the morning to nine in the evening, six days a week.

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