Everything looks worse when you’re exhausted. Sleep on the big conclusions.

Tiredness does not arrive labelled as tiredness. It arrives as a clear-eyed assessment that your friends do not really like you, that the season is a write-off, that you are behind in a way you cannot fix. The thinking feels unusually sharp at midnight, which is exactly the hour it should be trusted least.

There is a difference between work and verdicts. Finish the task if it has to be finished, but refuse to decide anything large about yourself after about ten at night. Write the conclusion down and read it at lunchtime tomorrow, when it will usually look like a smaller and more fixable problem.