The call with head office ends at close to midnight. You close the laptop, and the last forty minutes of it keep playing back. Somewhere this week, someone well meaning will tell you that you need better boundaries.
The part of this that is not yours to fix
A study of one large global company, built from actual communication logs rather than survey answers, found that close to half of all real time messaging inside the firm happened outside normal business hours. Every additional hour of time difference between two offices cut the amount of live, back and forth communication between them by roughly a tenth, and whoever was not at head office absorbed almost all of that shift. If you report into an office on the other side of a time difference, you are, structurally, the side doing the shifting. The late call is not evidence that you cannot switch off. It is what the org chart looks like once you draw it as a clock.
The advice that usually follows this is to set a firmer boundary. A separate study looked at whether companies with a written right to disconnect policy actually changed how pressured employees felt to stay reachable, and found no meaningful difference. What did predict the pressure was the unspoken expectation, policy or no policy. A memo was never going to be the thing.
What is actually yours to move
None of this changes how much lands on your side of the time difference. What it does change is what happens at the seam, the exact moment the call ends, the moment the laptop closes, the moment a work app opens on a day that was not supposed to be a work day. That part is small, and it is genuinely yours.
Before closing the laptop after a late call, write one line, not a list, naming the single thing you will pick up first tomorrow and where it lives. Research following the same group of employees for several months found that unfinished tasks at the end of the day predicted a specific kind of rumination, and that rumination tracked with worse sleep. Worth knowing before you lean on this too hard: a separate trial found that a full goal setting exercise did not beat doing nothing, and made things slightly worse for people who already plan everything in detail. If that describes you, skip the exercise and keep the one line.
When you send the last message of your day to a counterpart in the other timezone, end it with when you are next at your desk, in their time, and nothing else. No apology attached. What drives the anxious, always on feeling is not actually the number of messages arriving. It is the uncertainty about whether you are expected to answer. Removing that uncertainty for the other person removes most of it for you too.
When the last scheduled call of the day ends, sign out of the work chat app on your phone specifically, not the laptop. For most people in this position, the phone is where after hours work actually arrives. One study of employees found that staying connected to work outside hours predicted lower psychological detachment, which in turn predicted more exhaustion, and a much larger study of tens of thousands of workers found the same pattern. The detail worth sitting with is that people who most wanted a clean separation between work and everything else were the ones harmed the most when they could not get it.
Where to start
The first time you open a work app on a day off, read only. Reply to nothing. Write down the one thing you opened it to check, then close it. Nobody sees a read.
Reading exactly how much of your evening is actually structural, versus how much is a habit you could change on your own, is something you will judge more accurately than an article can. What this gives you is a small number of moves at the exact seam where the day is currently leaking into the night, none of which require anyone's permission.
There is a specific way to have this conversation with a manager who does not realize how much of it is landing on your side of the clock, and it is worth having ready before the next quarter's calendar fills in.