Japan’s economy has rocketed into the headlines this year as inflation returns for the first time in decades, workers win wage gains and the Bank of Japan raises interest rates for the first time in 17 years. But there’s another, longer-running trend happening in the Japanese economy that could prove interesting for American policymakers: Female employment has been steadily rising. Working-age Japanese women have been joining the labor market for years, a trend that has continued strongly in recent months as a tight labor market prods companies to work to attract new employees.

The jump in female participation has happened partly by design. Since about 2013, the Japanese government has tried to make both public policies and corporate culture more friendly to women in the work force. The goal was to attract a new source of talent at a time when the world’s fourth-largest economy faces an aging and shrinking labor market. Still, even some who were around when the “womenomics” policies were designed have been caught off guard by just how many Japanese women are now choosing to work thanks to the policy changes and to shifting social norms.

It’s a surprise that could serve as an important reminder to economic officials around the world. Economists often try to guess how much a nation’s labor force can expand by extrapolating from history — and they tend to assume that there are limits to how many people can be lured into the labor market, since some are likely to stay home as caretakers or for other reasons.

But history has served as a poor guide in Japan over the past decade as social standards, marriage rates and fertility rates have shifted. And the lesson provided by the Japanese experience is simple: Women may be a bigger potential labor force than economists typically count on.

Those changes came about for several reasons. The Japanese government made some important policy moves, for one thing, such as increasing child care center capacity. The nation’s changing attitudes toward family also played a role in freeing up women for work. The average age of people marrying for the first time has been steadily rising, and fertility rates are at record lows. “Delaying marriage, delaying childbearing years, not getting married at all — that’s the big societal backdrop,” said Paul Sheard, an economist who has long been focused on the nation. But there have been limits. There is still a tax penalty for second earners in the nation, and the quality of jobs women hold is not great. They are often lower-paid and for limited hours. Women are also largely absent from leadership ranks in Japanese companies.

Once I finally tuck my kids into bed, clean the kitchen, and shoot off my last work email of the night, it’s “me” time. It’s also, cruelly, bedtime. I know I should sleep, but instead I stay up way too late binge-watching Love Is Blind or mindlessly scrolling on Reddit. I need rest, but I push it off. This is my only uninterrupted time, and I want to maximize it. This phenomenon is so universal that there’s a scientific name for it: “bedtime procrastination.” According to the researchers who coined it in a 2014 study, bedtime procrastination is “failing to go to bed at the intended time, while no external circumstances prevent a person from doing so.”

People with stressful days and little control over their time are the ones most likely to procrastinate going to sleep, says Lynelle Schneeberg, a sleep psychologist at Yale University. Parents with young children, students, or people with extra-demanding jobs fall into this category. Schneeberg says it’s also common—not surprisingly—in people with insomnia, people who already procrastinate in other areas of their lives, “night owls,” and people with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). So—a lot of us.

We often delay sleep because we want to regain the control—and time—we lost during the day. “When you don’t have the sense that you can manage your own time, it’s really frustrating,” Schneeberg says. Experts believe our addictive electronics have made this problem infinitely worse. “Scrolling, online shopping, social media, TV shows you love—they give you a little hit of pleasure,” Schneeberg says. Repeat this nightly for weeks or months, and “then you're looking for [it], instead of the boredom that comes with signing off and going to bed.”

Another reason we stay up late? We’re dreading the next day. In one study published in 2023 in the British Journal of Health Psychology, researchers interviewed young people in the workforce about their bedtime habits. One sentiment stood out: they tended to feel a sense of apprehension at starting the next day, which researchers called “tomorrow aversion.”

But here’s the paradox: Instead of getting more control over our days, bedtime procrastinators end up sabotaging them. When I stay up too late, I’m exhausted and groggy the next day. I feel like I’m on autopilot, and I have less energy to do the things I love, like going for a run or playing outside with my kids. The effects are physical, too: my face is puffy, my appetite is poor, and I’m more likely to catch one of my kids’ colds.