There is a kind of tiredness that responds to sleep, and a kind that does not. Confusing the two has cost people I work with entire holidays.
The first is straightforward depletion. You went short, you catch up, you feel better. The second is what happens when the effort you are making has stopped connecting to anything you can see. Sleep does not touch it, because sleep was never the missing ingredient.
How to tell them apart
Ask what you felt on the Monday after your last proper break. If the dread arrived before the alarm did, the problem is not your recovery. It is the shape of the thing you were recovering in order to go back to.
This is not an argument for walking out. Most people do not need a different job so much as a different relationship to the one they have — a say in something, an end to something, a reason that holds up on a Wednesday.
But you cannot negotiate for any of that while you are still telling yourself you only need an early night.
