Tired people miss details. Rest isn’t a reward. It’s how you see straight.

Rest gets treated as something you earn after the work, which gets the order backwards. Accuracy is the first thing tiredness takes: the misread question, the step skipped, the tone in somebody’s voice you did not catch. Sleep is not the prize at the end of the effort, it is a condition of the effort being any good.

This changes what counts as working hard. An hour of sleep is sometimes a better investment in Monday’s exam than a fourth hour of studying at midnight. Try the swap once, deliberately, and compare how the paper actually goes rather than how virtuous the night felt.