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I once lay awake until half past two deciding whether to buy a van. I did not, in the end, decide. I just stopped being awake. That's the thing nobody warns you about being the one who makes the decisions. I'm fifty-four. I've run my own small electrical business for the best part of twenty years — just me, a van, a good name in the area, and every single call about what to do next stopping at my kitchen table. And I was fine with that in the daytime. Daytime I'm decisive. It was the nights that had me by the throat. Because here's what happens. I fall asleep no bother — I'm on my feet and up ladders all day, I'm shattered by ten, out like a light. That was never the problem, and I want to be clear about it, because when I finally mentioned this to my doctor he started talking about falling asleep and I said no, you're not listening, falling asleep is the one part that works. It's the getting into bed with a decision unmade. That's the killer. The second the light goes off and there's nothing left to look at, my brain reaches for the biggest open question and starts turning it over. Should I take on the lad as an apprentice — I could do with the help, but that's a wage every month whether the work's there or not, and if it goes quiet in the winter like it did two years back, then I'm carrying him, unless I put my rates up, but if I put my rates up will the regulars walk, and if they walk then I need the apprentice bringing in new work, which is the thing I wasn't sure I could afford in the first place — and round I go, back to the start, because I've solved nothing, I've just been to the end of every branch and come back with my hands empty. New van or nurse the old one another year. Take the big contract that'd mean subbing work out to people I don't fully trust, or turn it down and watch it go to a competitor. Whether to finally get the website done or whether that's money after nonsense. None of it urgent. Not one of these needed answering at half past one in the morning. If any of it had been an emergency I'd have got up and dealt with it. But it wasn't — it was just the machinery running with no off switch, chewing the same problem to pulp and calling it "thinking it through." And I told myself that's exactly what it was. Being responsible. A serious man giving his decisions the consideration they deserve. That's the lie I want to warn you about, because it kept me at it for years. I thought lying awake meant I was working the problem. I thought if I just turned it over enough times, the answer would drop out the bottom. It never once did. Not once. In twenty years of this, I have never solved a single thing at 2am. I've only ever arrived at morning having made no decision and lost the sleep as well — the worst of both, every time. I tried the sensible things a sensible man tries. Making the decision earlier in the evening so it'd be "put to bed" before I was — but the moment the light went off my brain reopened the file to check my working. Writing the pros and cons on paper, which just gave the night version something to argue with. A nightcap, which put me down quicker and then had me wide awake at four with the same problem and a dry mouth. Cutting the coffee. More exercise, as if I wasn't up and down lofts all day already. Nothing touched it, because none of it was aimed at the actual problem, which wasn't my body. My body was ready. It was my head that wouldn't clock off. The low point was the van, funnily enough. Weeks — weeks — of lying awake going back and forth on a fourteen-year-old Transit and whether to replace it. And one morning I got up having lost another night to it, went out to the drive, and the decision was made for me: it wouldn't start. Turned over and died. All those hours of weighing it up, all that lost sleep, and in the end the van decided, not me. I stood there in the cold thinking: what exactly did all that lying awake buy me? Not the decision. Not the sleep. Nothing. I'd paid in nights and got change back in nothing at all. That was when I stopped being able to tell myself it was diligence. It wasn't diligence. It was a habit that felt like diligence, and it was costing me sleep I needed to actually run the business the answers were about. What changed it wasn't a productivity trick or a "decision framework" off some podcast. I came across a research page running a proper trial — 276 participants, four weeks, measuring the real things every night: how long it took to drop off, how often you woke, how you felt come morning. They wanted ordinary people, and the only thing that qualified you was being precisely my sort of tired: body finished by ten, head still in a meeting with itself at one. I signed up half-expecting to prove it wouldn't work. Blokes my age are good at that — assuming we're too set in our ways for anything to shift. I'll not pretend it was instant, because it wasn't, and I'd trust it less if it had been — twenty years in trade teaches you that the fast fix is usually the dear one later. The first few nights the only difference was that the meeting in my head was quieter. Still sitting, just not shouting. Then in the second week I got into bed, turned off the light, reached for the day's big open question out of pure habit — and the next thing I knew the alarm was going. I lay there genuinely thrown, because I couldn't remember the deliberation. There hadn't been one. Just off, and then morning. By the third week that was most nights. The stretch between light-off and gone had shrunk from an hour of pacing the same decision to the few boring minutes a tired man is supposed to get. The questions were still there in the daytime, where they belong — but they'd stopped following me under the covers to be re-argued in the dark. And here's the part that actually got me: I make the decisions better now. Rested, in the daylight, in ten clear minutes, I decide the thing that used to cost me a fortnight of nights. Turns out the lying awake was never helping me decide. It was just stopping me sleeping and dressing it up as care. I'm writing this for the other blokes — and it's mostly blokes who won't admit to this one — who fall asleep fine but get into bed with an unmade decision and hand it to a brain that won't clock off. Who've told themselves, like I did, that this is just what being responsible feels like. It isn't. Turning a problem over 200 times in the dark isn't diligence. It's a habit wearing diligence's coat, and it's robbing you of the very sleep you need to run the thing you're worrying about. I'm not going to name anything or tell you what to buy — that's not the point, and a man who's been sold enough "miracle" gear off the back of a van knows to be wary of it. But the panel wrote up properly what they tested, how they measured it, and which one came out on top specifically for people whose problem was a head that wouldn't switch off at night, not a body that wouldn't tire. It's all set out on the research page. Read it. Five minutes — you'll not decide anything worse for having the facts in front of you. Then make your own mind up, in the daylight, like the good decisions get made. Same page I found the morning the van wouldn't start, finally out of ideas.