Answering every 2 a.m. text teaches people that your sleep is optional.

People learn what is available from what happens, not from what you tell them. Answer at two in the morning a few times and it stops being an emergency channel and turns into a normal hour to reach you. Nobody is being cruel about it. They are responding to the pattern you have been showing them without meaning to.

Let some nights go unanswered and reply when you wake up. Real emergencies survive a few hours, and you can still judge those one at a time. What shifts is the default, and the default is the thing quietly deciding how your whole week feels.