Nerd Church - We Don't Make Good Decisions When We're Tired, OK?

'Three in the morning is never the time to try and sort out your life.'

- Matt Haig, Reasons To Stay Alive

Most of us have been there - it's a ridiculous time in the night, you're utterly shattered, and you're still trying to get things done.

You inevitably make a mistake -

because you should be sleeping 

- and you decide that your entire life is a sh**-show, and you need to leave everything you know behind and move to the mountains and breed chinchillas or something equally random.

(...Unless that's a long-held ambition of yours, in which case don't let me stop ya!)

But before, in your fit of tired delirium, you put a down-payment on that chinchilla farm, you might wanna pause.

Chill. Take a break. Maybe get some sleep.

...And don't put any bids in until you've had time to think this through. No matter how much your brain is yelling at you to Take Action Now!

There's actually research that says we make less accurate decisions later in the day, because - to highly paraphrase the scientific phrase 'cognitive fatigue' - we're tired and grumpy.

It's uber-easy, when you're either a) tired, b) alone in the middle of the night, or c) both, to catastrophize the f**k outta everything.

(Catastrophizing, as I've explained before, is a type of cognitive distortion which turns small problems into Big Freaking Problems™)

It's actually a natural thing*, imho - way back in pre-history, more hooman beans survived if they thought the shadows were tigers than if they thought the tiger was a shadow.

That's probably also why we feel like we've got to take action at midnight, after a tough day of work, to reserve that shipment of chinchillas** - 

the humans who took action and either moved away from the danger, or investigated and found there was no tiger, had a higher survival rate than the ones who ignored the problem.

But in our modern lives, it can be pretty unhelpful - especially if you're working on problems or tasks which have more nuanced factors and outcomes than tiger vs not-tiger.

*dependant on your stance on various aspects of evolutionary psychology and my personal theories of it 😎😘

**since this analogy is continuing for longer than I originally intended, I'd like to assure everyone that I've never tried to buy a chinchilla farm 😅

Basically: we don't make good decisions when we're tired, OK?

Neither do we make good decisions when we don't think we're tired, but it's also three in the morning and we haven't slept all day/night.

We make poor decisions late at night in general.

There are exceptions, of course, every generalisation has an exception

(...including this one 😅 #Paradox)

There are people who can make very good decisions at night and/or when they're tired. There are people who work at night and sleep in the day and make a good job of it.

But for most of us?

Night isn't the time to try to sort your life out. At best, you're gonna make zero sense, and look back at it in the morning like: ...WTF?

You can also get yourself worked up into all sorts of not-so-fun thought spirals. Trust me, I've been there and done that.

And you might even end up ordering a bunch of chinchillas - who knows? 😅

TL; DR:

• Take time to think things through

• 3am thoughts are rarely reliable

• It's true what they say: it'll seem better in the morning

• Get some sleep!

So, do you cease to make sense when you're tired?

Or are you one of the magical people who can somehow make decisions when exhausted?

Talk to me! 😀💬

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Related Reading:

• Nerd Church - A Simple Sleep Game To Help You Get A Good Night's Snooze

• Nerd Church - Bad Luck vs Catastrophizing

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