There is a peculiar, damp sort of misery that accompanies the realisation that your brain has decided to secede from the rest of your body at three in the morning. It usually begins with a thought of staggering insignificance—such as whether a stoat has ever worn a hat—and ends four hours later with you staring at the ceiling, feeling like a piece of bread that has been left in the toaster just long enough to become structurally unsound but not long enough to actually be toast.

To understand the sensation of functioning on forty minutes of fitful twitching, we must look toward the outer fringes of the observable universe. Specifically, we must look at the “Spaghettification” process occurring at the event horizon of a black hole.

Physics tells us that as an object approaches a gravitational well of sufficient density, the tidal forces become so wildly uneven that the front of the object is being pulled significantly harder than the back. The object stretches. It elongates. It becomes a frantic, structural scream of atoms trying to remember where they were originally supposed to be.

This is precisely how it feels to walk into a Boots at 10:30 AM after a night of involuntary wakefulness.

Your consciousness has become Spaghettified. Your eyes are already in the queue for the pharmacy, desperate for something that might chemically induce a coma, while your legs are still stuck somewhere near the meal-deal refrigerators, trying to remember the mechanics of a walking pace that doesn’t involve veering sharply into a display of sun cream.

The sheer gravity of the day ahead exerts a crushing force. Every minor task, answering an email, deciding between semi-skimmed or whole milk, acknowledging the existence of a staircase, feels like trying to launch a space shuttle using only a selection of damp rubber bands and a sense of mounting personal failure.

The universe, in its infinite and often quite rude wisdom, has decided that time is no longer a constant. In the grip of sleep deprivation, the Space-Time continuum becomes more of a Suggestion-Vague Anarchy continuum. Five minutes spent staring at a blank Word document can feel like a geologic epoch, yet the forty-five minutes you spent looking for your keys (which were in your hand the entire time, acting as a sort of metallic anchor to a reality you no longer inhabit) pass in the blink of a bloodshot eye.

There is a theory in quantum mechanics that particles can exist in two states at once. The sleep-deprived human is a living testament to this. You are simultaneously a solid object and a shimmering, translucent ghost. You are present in the meeting, nodding with the rhythmic desperation of a dashboard toy, but you are also hovering six inches above your own chair, watching yourself try to form the word “synergy” and failing so spectacularly that you end up making a noise like a badger being asked a difficult question about its taxes.

We are told that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, pushing everything further apart into a cold, dark void. This is comforting, because it means that eventually, the office, the meetings, and the man in the café who insists on talking about his “lifestyle journey” will be billions of light-years away.

But until that glorious heat-death occurs, we are forced to navigate the world in a state of atmospheric reentry. We are hurtling through the day, bits of our sanity breaking off and burning up in the friction of social interaction, hoping that we might eventually splash down into the cool, dark waters of a duvet.

Until then, we must simply lean into the gravity. If the universe is going to pull us into a long, thin strand of exhausted matter, the least we can do is try to ensure we’re pointing in the direction of the coffee machine.