Staying in Bed Without Choosing
The Psychological Cost of ‘Can’t Be Bothered’
From Footnotes for Flourishing – reflections on psychology, personal development, and growth.
This morning, I really didn’t want to get out of bed. Not in a dramatic way, and there wasn’t anything I was particularly dreading about the day ahead. But I’d not slept well, it was cold outside, and I was feeling comfortable. So I reached for my phone and filled the time with small, inconsequential things. Puzzles. Email. Social media. And a few minutes turned into half an hour. What made this experience unsettling was not staying in bed, but the strange state I found myself in of both wanting to get up and wanting to stay in bed, while not being prepared to choose either.
My internal dialogue went something like this: “I want to get up. I can’t be bothered. Just one more video. Oh that was even worse than the previous one. Why am I still in bed? I should be getting on with things. Grrr.” This was not a restful or even a neutral state. I had the clear intention of getting up, but just couldn’t match it with action. So I stayed in bed, feeling more and more negative about things, including me.
The problem wasn’t what I was doing. It was my inability to take ownership of it. I wasn’t prepared to take responsibility either for getting up or for staying in bed. I was already in bed, and my discomfort came from passively continuing that behaviour whilst refusing to decide to do so. If I had actively chosen to stay in bed and accepted that as a valid choice, my actions may have been exactly the same, but the feelings quite different.
It might look like procrastination, which is normally framed as a failure to act. But in this case, the problem wasn’t inaction, but staying in bed without explicitly choosing to do so. This mismatch between doing and not taking responsibility for that behaviour carries a clear psychological cost. We drift when we don’t decide, and that can be very uncomfortable.
Schrödinger’s cat, while locked in a closed box, is both alive and dead at the same. When the box is eventually opened and the cat observed, these future possibilities collapse, and the cat ends up being alive or dead, but no longer both. In a similar way, I was stuck between two futures, getting up or staying in bed. And it was that superposition, fuelled by not choosing, that felt unpleasant.
So I shifted from scrolling to discussing this with ChatGPT, which I have already described as an interlocutor and reflective mirror, to help me make sense of what was happening. That conversation allowed me to reframe. Staying in bed was acceptable. Getting up was acceptable. What was not acceptable was not being prepared to make a choice. By reclaiming agency, even grudgingly, I was able to interrupt the situation and get up.
Agency and authorship are powerful, particularly when we realise they have slipped. Staying in bed was not about productivity, or discipline, or even about procrastination. We can choose ease and delay, or action and effort. What matters is having the agency to make that choice, and refusing to choose can be corrosive.
What I learnt from this small event is that I am allowed to choose anything.
But letting my actions continue without owning them comes at a cost.
Image credits:
Via ChatGPT
"But letting my actions continue without owning them comes at a cost" -brilliant! I love this because the element of cost really is true, more true than we realise in the present, and there’s the acknowledgment that if you don’t use conscious agency to guide your actions they’ll continue autonomously.
You described that liminal non-committal space very well - not consciously choosing anything so unconscious/base instincts start to guide behaviour. I suspect that’s the space a lot of people are in when they sit scrolling on social media for a long time. I think I am in that space when I procrastinate and delay doing a workout. It’s not a deliberate choice either way, caught in a conflict!