So I see on LJ that quite a few people on my friends list stayed up very late last night to watch the US election results come in.

I didn't; I went to bed as usual, and checked the result on the web when I got up (admittedly half an hour early) this morning. This is generally what I do with elections in my own country, too. My stated reason for this yesterday was that whatever the result turned out to be, I couldn't imagine my attitude to it today being improved by sleep deprivation. Other people responded that the sense of suspense would prevent them from getting to sleep until they knew the result. I thought, at the time, that I must simply not be feeling the suspense in the same way.

However, I think that in fact that wasn't the answer. What it was is that I did want to know what the result was – so I didn't want to spend several more hours of subjective time waiting to find out! By falling asleep, I got to effectively skip ahead to the bit where I find out who did it, instead of having to plod through the intervening pages one by one.