Margaret Ngumi
PMHNP-BC, FNP-C, Co-Creator
There is a particular kind of tired that does not go away on a weekend. You sleep eight hours and wake up still flat. You drink the coffee and feel nothing change. You sit at the edge of the bed for a few extra minutes before you can begin the day, and you have started to wonder if this is just your life now.
It is not your personality. It is not a character flaw. What you are describing has a name, and it has a shape, and it has a way out, though "way out" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, because the way out is not fast.
In my work as a psychiatric nurse practitioner, the people who arrive in my office describing this are almost never the ones you would expect to be falling apart. They are nurses and teachers and social workers and mothers and oldest daughters. They are the competent ones. The reliable ones. The ones who get told, "I don't know how you do it." And the honest answer, increasingly, is that they aren't doing it. They are surviving it, and the cost is showing.
This post is about how to use journaling when you are running on empty. Not wellness journaling. Not gratitude lists. Actual prompts for actual exhaustion.
What burnout actually is
The World Health Organization defines burnout as a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. Three pieces: exhaustion, cynicism or emotional distance from the work, and a sense that you are no longer effective. Notice that last one. Burnout is not just tiredness. It includes a creeping conviction that nothing you do matters, which is part of why it gets so much worse over time. The same effort starts to feel pointless, so you do less, and then the guilt of doing less drains you further.
What I have noticed in my work is that burnout in caregiving professions has an additional layer the WHO definition does not quite capture. The people who are most exhausted are usually still the ones holding things together, and they are exhausted partly because no one is holding them. There is no one upstream to absorb their distress, so it stays inside them.
Why generic prompts won't work
If you are burned out and someone hands you a journal that says "write three things you are grateful for," you will do it once, feel slightly worse, and not pick the journal up again. This is not a moral failure. Gratitude prompts assume you have surplus emotional bandwidth to notice the good. Burnout is the absence of that surplus.
The prompts below are built for a depleted brain. They do not ask you to be wise. They do not ask you to be hopeful. They ask one specific question at a time and let you answer it badly. (If you are new to journaling at all, this post on what to write when you don't know what to write is a better starting place.)
12 prompts for when you're running on empty
Pick one. Don't read all twelve looking for the right one. That is more work than your nervous system has to spare today. Pick the first one that snags on something and write until the snag is loose. Two sentences counts as a complete entry.
1. What did I do today that no one asked me to do, that I did because no one else would?
2. Whose feelings did I manage today besides my own?
3. What is something I used to enjoy that I have not had energy for in a month?
4. If I told the truth about how I am doing, who is the one person I would tell? What would I actually say?
5. What am I doing on autopilot that I used to do with care?
6. What is one thing I would stop doing this week if I were allowed?
7. What do I need that I keep telling myself is too much to ask for?
8. When did I last feel rested? Not "okay." Actually rested.
9. What is a thing I keep saying yes to that I want to say no to?
10. Who would I be if I were not the one holding everyone together?
11. What is the smallest possible thing I could do tomorrow that would feel like care for me?
12. If I could take one real day off, no guilt, no catching up after, what would I actually do with it?
A note on number 12. Most people, when they answer it honestly, do not say "spa day." They say "sleep" or "be alone" or "not be needed." That answer is data. It tells you what is actually missing.
How to use these when you have ten minutes a week
Don't try to make it daily. A daily practice you abandon in two weeks is worse than a weekly practice you keep for a year. Pick one evening. Wednesday is good. Middle of the week, when the depletion is loudest. Ten minutes. That is your appointment with yourself.
Write badly. Cross things out. Use fragments. Be petty. The page is not for the highlight reel of your emotional life. It is for the part you would not say out loud at work. Editing as you write is a way of staying performative even in private, which is the opposite of the point.
Notice patterns over weeks, not days. One entry will not tell you anything. Four weeks of entries will tell you the same drain showing up in a slightly new sentence every Wednesday, which is what burnout actually looks like on paper. Once you can see the pattern, you can start to do something about it. You cannot fix what you cannot name.
If even these feel like too much
If the idea of remembering twelve prompts and choosing one and writing for ten minutes is itself more than you can manage right now, that is information. It means your reserves are lower than you have been telling yourself. It is also why my best friend Eva and I built Just Write, a 180-page guided journal with the prompts already on the page. You do not have to choose. You do not have to remember. You open it to where you are. Grief and loss. Heartbreak. The version of you that has been over-functioning for years. And the question is waiting for you.
But the prompts above are free, and they work. The principle is the same whether you use our journal or a notebook from a drawer: when you are this tired, you do not need wisdom. You need a question someone else already wrote.
Margaret Ngumi, PMHNP-BC, FNP-C, is a dual board-certified psychiatric nurse practitioner and co-author of the Just Write guided journal. Learn more about Margaret and Eva →