Diagnose before you decide
Before you draft any resignation letter in your head at 11pm, get specific. For two weeks, keep a very plain log: what you did each day, and a single word for how it left you. Most people discover that they do not hate their job. They hate about twenty per cent of it, and that twenty per cent has colonised everything else — usually one relationship, one meeting, one type of task, or one permanent understaffing problem.
That distinction matters enormously, because the remedies are different. A bad manager may be survivable if you can see an end date. A role that has slowly been redefined into something you never applied for can often be renegotiated, especially if you are the person they cannot afford to lose. A culture that asks you to be someone you're not, every day, for years, rarely changes because one person is patient about it.
Ask yourself one more question honestly: is this a job problem or a season problem? Caring for a parent, a hard year at home, poor sleep and ordinary grief all make work feel unbearable, and changing employers won't touch any of it. If you are exhausted in a way that sleep isn't fixing, or the flatness follows you into the weekend, that's worth raising with your GP or a therapist rather than solving with a career move.
