Never rewrite your whole opinion of yourself at 2 a.m. Your brain at that hour is a terrible narrator.

Late at night your judgment is running on a tired brain, no daylight and nobody to check your reasoning against, which is why everything looks final and bleak at that hour. The thoughts feel unusually clear. They are not clearer, only unopposed, and the conclusions they produce would not survive a conversation or a night’s sleep.

Make it a standing rule that no verdict about yourself gets issued after midnight. Write it in a note, go to sleep, read it back in daylight. Most of it will have lost its authority.