Don’t make promises when you’re excited or angry. Make them when you’re calm enough to keep them.

Strong feeling makes promises easy to give and bad to keep. Excitement signs you up for more than tomorrow’s version of you has time for, and anger commits you to things you will not want to carry out once the heat drains off. Either way the promise is made of your word, so what felt generous at the time is what turns you unreliable.

Put a gap between the feeling and the commitment: say you want to and will confirm tomorrow. Nobody objects to that, and it filters out most of what you would have broken. Keep the promises that still look sensible in the morning.