Seven minutes past three

It's seven minutes past three on a Wednesday morning. You know this because you looked at the clock.

You woke a few minutes ago for no clear reason. It might have been a noise outside, or you might have been a bit warm. For a moment your mind was blank and comfortable. Then, as if someone had been waiting for you to surface, the first item arrived.

The roofer's quote is four thousand eight hundred pounds, and you've got about half of that. You start doing sums. If you cancelled the holiday you'd save twelve hundred, and if you sold the car and got something cheaper you might save more. But then how would you get your mother to her appointments? Her hip operation is in three weeks, and you haven't sorted out who's driving her or who'll stay with her the first few nights. Your sister won't offer, because she never does. That leads on to the email you sent your manager on Tuesday, the one where you forgot the attachment. She hasn't replied, and she's probably noticed. There's a restructure coming. Then you remember your son saying at supper that nobody had picked him for the team at break, and that he'd said it lightly. You think he's being left out and that you haven't been paying attention.

By half past four you've decided several things. The car has to go. Your mother will have to move in with you, and you don't know how the house will take it. Your job isn't safe. You're failing as a parent. You're also calculating that if you fall asleep right now you'll get two hours and ten minutes, and that tomorrow is already ruined.

You drop off a little before six. The alarm goes at ten to seven.

At twenty to eight you're at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and a piece of paper, because the night has left you rattled and you want to get some of it down. It takes about twenty minutes. The roofer can be asked whether he'd take payment in two stages. If he won't, the leak is slow and the job can wait until spring. You'll ring your sister tonight and ask her straight out to do the first two nights. You send your manager the attachment with a one-line apology, and she replies at nine with "Thanks!" and nothing else. You'll ask your son about break time on the walk to school, casually.

Nothing has changed since half past four. They're the same problems on the same facts. In the night they added up to selling the car and rearranging your whole life. At the kitchen table they were four errands, and they took twenty minutes.

I'll use a few terms throughout. The waking is the moment you surface in the night. The night shift is the session of problem-solving that follows it, which can run from ten minutes to three hours. The three o'clock mind is the state your thinking is in during those hours, whatever the clock actually says. A verdict is a conclusion reached on the night shift, such as "the car has to go" or "I'm failing".

The night shift has some regular features. This list is my own observation and not a research finding.

It starts within a minute or two of waking, and it starts by itself. You don't decide to review your finances. They're there when you surface.

It moves from item to item without finishing any of them. Each problem hands you on to the next, usually a larger one.

It travels from the particular to the general. It starts with a quote for a roof and ends with your whole competence as an adult.

It produces verdicts and no actions. Nothing is written down, and nobody is telephoned. At the end of two hours you have nothing to show for it except the mood it's left you in.

And it looks different in daylight. Nearly everyone with this habit knows the experience of remembering, at eleven in the morning, what seemed so terrible at four, and being unable to get the feeling back.

Try one thing before reading on. The next time it happens, write down in the morning, in a few words, the verdicts you reached in the night. At midday, read them again and mark each one as still true, partly true or not true. A week of this is worth more than anything I can tell you. You're free to start using the pad from chapter 12 tonight. Nothing in this book needs you to go on having bad nights while you read it.