It’s 11:30 PM. You’re staring at your laptop screen, three paragraphs into an email you probably shouldn’t send. Your direct report missed another deadline, and this time it made you look incompetent in front of the executive team. Your fingers are hovering over the keyboard, and you’re drafting something that sounds like “accountability” but feels a lot like revenge. You’ve justified every word. You’ve cited company values. You’ve told yourself this is about standards, not your bruised ego. But here’s the question you haven’t asked yet: when did you last eat? How much sleep did you get last night? Are you actually angry about this deadline, or are you still carrying frustration from the argument you had with your spouse this morning?

Before you hit send, before you make the decision, before you convince yourself this is righteous leadership, you need to run a diagnostic. Not a spiritual one, not yet. First, you need to check if you’re just a biology experiment gone wrong. This is where the H.A.L.T. Method comes in, and it’s the first filter in the AUDIT phase of the Watchman’s Protocol. Yesterday we talked about the core question of AUDIT: are you turning Inward or Upward? Today we’re going one level deeper, because sometimes the answer isn’t spiritual at all. Sometimes you’re just hungry.

H.A.L.T. stands for Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired. It’s a diagnostic tool borrowed from the recovery community, specifically Alcoholics Anonymous, and it’s brilliant in its simplicity. These four states compromise your judgment more than almost anything else, and yet we routinely ignore them. We treat ourselves like machines that should perform consistently regardless of input. We tell ourselves that professionals don’t let physical or emotional states affect their decision-making. We lie to ourselves, in other words, and then we make terrible calls and wonder why.

Hungry means low blood sugar, and low blood sugar looks exactly like righteous indignation. When your body is running on fumes, your brain goes into threat mode. Everything feels urgent. Everything feels personal. The rational part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex that handles judgment and impulse control, starts shutting down to conserve energy. What you think is moral clarity is often just your body screaming for glucose. Angry means you’re carrying unresolved frustration, and it’s looking for a target. Maybe it’s from the previous meeting, maybe it’s from something that happened days ago, but it’s still there, simmering. And now someone has given you a socially acceptable reason to unleash it. You’re not holding them accountable; you’re using them as a punching bag for something that has nothing to do with them.

Lonely means you feel isolated, disconnected, and defensive. When you’re lonely, you interpret neutral actions as attacks. You read malice into mistakes. You start operating from a scarcity mindset, convinced that if you don’t assert yourself now, you’ll be forgotten or steamrolled. Tired means your resilience is gone. Fatigue doesn’t just make you sleepy; it makes you a coward. It strips away your ability to be patient, to think long-term, to extend grace. When you’re exhausted, every molehill becomes a mountain, and every inconvenience becomes a crisis.

Here’s the genius of the H.A.L.T. Method: it forces you to name what you’re experiencing. You cannot govern an emotion or a state you refuse to acknowledge. The Watchman standing at the gate of your mind can’t do his job if he’s pretending the threat doesn’t exist. So the first step in AUDIT is not to spiritualize the problem or to dive into motive analysis. The first step is to ask a very simple, very practical question: Am I H.A.L.T.? If the answer is yes to any of those four, the protocol is clear. Do not send the email. Do not make the decision. Do not move forward until you’ve addressed the basic biological need.

This is where most leaders push back. They say, “I don’t have time for that. The decision needs to be made now. I can’t wait until I’ve had a nap and a sandwich.” But urgency is rarely the Holy Spirit, and most decisions that feel urgent are not. What feels like a crisis at 11:30 PM usually looks manageable at 8:00 AM after a full night of sleep and a decent breakfast. The leader who insists they can override their biology is the same leader who wonders why their team walks on eggshells around them, why their relationships are strained, why they keep making decisions they regret.

Scripture backs this up in a way that should humble all of us. In 1 Kings 19, the prophet Elijah has just called down fire from heaven, defeated 450 prophets of Baal, and then immediately runs for his life when Queen Jezebel threatens him. He collapses under a tree and asks God to let him die. This is one of the most dramatic emotional crashes in the Bible, and how does God respond? Does He rebuke Elijah for his lack of faith? Does He give him a motivational speech? No. God sends an angel with food and tells him to take a nap. Twice. Elijah needed rest and sustenance before he could hear God’s voice again. If Elijah the Prophet, who literally called down fire from heaven, needed to address his physical state before making decisions, you are not stronger than Elijah. Eat the sandwich. Take the nap.

The H.A.L.T. Method is the biological layer of the AUDIT phase, and it’s foundational because it eliminates the most common false positives. It keeps you from mistaking hunger for conviction, fatigue for urgency, loneliness for clarity. Once you’ve cleared the H.A.L.T. diagnostic, once you’ve eaten, rested, cooled down, or reconnected, then you move to the second level of AUDIT: the motive check. That’s where we ask the question, “If I do this, who gets the glory?” That’s where we distinguish Ego from Righteousness. And that’s what we’ll explore tomorrow.

For now, here’s your action step: the next time you feel the heat rising, the next time you’re about to make a decision or send a message that feels urgent and justified, pause. Run the H.A.L.T. diagnostic. Ask yourself: Am I hungry? Am I angry? Am I lonely? Am I tired? Name it. And if the answer is yes, do not move forward. Address the need first. Govern yourself before you try to govern others. Because the Watchman who refuses to acknowledge his own state is not protecting the gate; he’s leaving it wide open.