Four in the morning
Not the hour you feel worst. The hour when there is nothing left to cover it.
Anyone who wakes at four knows the particular quality of those thoughts: precise, final, and strangely convincing. At four in the morning problems have no solution, yesterday's conversations read worse, and every decision taken looks like the wrong one.
Why they seem truer
Because there is nothing else. During the day the same thought arrives while you are driving, answering someone, buying food — and it is interrupted constantly. At four it has the room to itself, and something nothing contradicts starts to look like a fact.
The practical rule is simple and it is not a trick: no decision made at that hour counts. If at eleven in the morning the thought is still there with the same force, then it is material to work with. It almost never is.
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