Your 2am Thought Was Correct

Career · Mindset

By Feras Asakrieh · 5 min read · Issue #41

The question took about eight seconds to ask.

We were in a monthly business review. Numbers on the screen, fifteen people on the call, the usual rhythm. I had just finished walking through my section. Then the VP of the department asked about one of the teams I led.

She wanted to know if the performance was the learning curve, or if there was something more to it. She mentioned it had been fourteen months since we built the team.

Then she moved on. The meeting kept going.

I said something reasonable. I do not remember what.

What I remember is the drive home.

Because by then I had run that sentence back four times, and the fourth time it stopped sounding like a question about a learning curve. Fourteen months is not a number you reach for by accident. Fourteen months is a number somebody looked up.

I did not sleep well that night. Or for the several weeks after it.

Sixty days later my boss told me over lunch. The team was in question. The people above me had concerns about performance.

I had been right on the drive home.

And in those sixty days, I had done nothing about it. No email. No question. No conversation with anyone.

I Was Right The Whole Time

Here is what I told myself during those weeks. I am overthinking this. I worry about everything. This is just me being me.

And that part was true. I do worry a lot. It is one of the things I know about myself.

But here is what nobody tells you about being a worrier. When you worry about everything, you lose the ability to tell the difference. The real signal shows up wearing the same clothes as the noise. You have had a hundred 2am thoughts that came to nothing, so the one that actually means something gets filed with the rest of them.

I had a real warning. Delivered in a real meeting, by the person who would make the call, with a number attached to it.

And I treated it exactly the way I treat every 2am thought. I turned it over and over and never once said it out loud.

Most advice about worry starts from the idea that your fear is a distortion. Calm down. You are catastrophizing. It will be fine.

Sometimes it is fine.

And sometimes you are the only person in the building who noticed something true, and you talked yourself out of it because you are the kind of person who notices things.

Why Worrying Feels Like Doing Something

That is the part that cost me the sixty days.

Worry has the texture of work. It is effortful. It is tiring. You end the day worn out from it. It happens at night, in private, while everyone else is asleep, which makes it feel like responsibility.

But nothing moves. You cannot show anyone a night of worrying. Nothing changed in that organization because I lay there.

Listen to the sentences that keep it running.

"I'm probably overthinking this." Maybe. You are also the person closest to the work, and you noticed something. That is not overthinking. That is proximity.

"I don't have enough to go on yet." You have a question from a VP with a number in it. That is more than most people ever get.

"I'll bring it up at the next one." There is always a next one. That is exactly what makes it such a comfortable place to put things.

"If I raise it and I'm wrong, I look paranoid." You will not look paranoid. You will look like someone paying attention to their own team.

"I need to think about it more." That is the one that got me. It sounds like preparation. It is not. It is a lap.

Read them again. Every one of those is a reason to stay in your own head for one more day.

Thinking about a problem and working on a problem feel almost identical from the inside. That is the whole trap. One of them is a rehearsal, and a rehearsal is not a rep.

Here Is What I Should Have Done That Night

1. Write the worry down as one flat sentence.

Vague worry is immortal. It can grow all night because it has no edges.

So put it in one sentence, plain words, the way you would say it to a friend.

Mine would have been this. "The VP thinks my team is underperforming and I do not know what she is comparing us to."

That sentence took me sixty days to arrive at and about nine seconds to write. Once it is on paper it stops being a mood and becomes a thing with parts. Parts can be handled. Moods cannot.

2. Ask if it is true before you ask how to feel about it.

Everyone skips this. They go straight from worry to coping. Breathe. Reframe. Keep it in perspective.

Ask a different question first. Is this accurate?

If it is false, you can put it down and you get your nights back. If it is true, then you do not have anxiety. You have information, earlier than anyone else has it, about something that is going to matter.

Mine was true. I never asked.

3. Find the one person who has the answer and go get it.

This is the step that ends it.

Almost every worry at work has exactly one person who could resolve it in ten minutes. You usually know who that is. You have known the whole time.

For me it was the VP. One email. "You asked about the fourteen months in the review. I want to make sure I understand what you were seeing. Can I get fifteen minutes?"

That is it. That is the entire fix for sixty days of not sleeping.

The reason people do not send that email is that it might come back with an answer they do not want. But that is the answer worth having, because it is coming either way. The only question is whether it reaches you while you can still do something with it.

4. Give it a decide-by date.

Some things you cannot resolve this week. Fine.

But worry without a deadline runs forever, quietly, in the background, for years.

So put a date on it. Two weeks. A month. Whatever fits. On that date you act on what you know instead of waiting for what you might learn.

The date is what turns worry into a decision. Without one, waiting feels like a strategy. It is not a strategy. It is just what happens when nobody picks a day.

Final Thoughts

That team made it another year. Then we laid off all of them.

I have thought about those sixty days more than I want to admit. I do not know that speaking up would have saved them. It might not have. There were things moving above me that I could not see and probably could not have changed.

But I never found out. That is the part that stays with me.

I had the warning. I had the time. I had the access. I had a question from the person who would make the call, handed to me in front of fifteen people, with a number in it.

And I spent it lying awake.

That is what worry does when you leave it alone. It takes something you could have used and turns it into something you survived.

The size of the fix is never the size of the worry. Mine was sixty days and one email I never sent.

Your 2am Thought Was Correct

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