Okay, so let’s talk about burnout. Not in that clinical, detached way where someone lists symptoms and you nod along feeling vaguely seen but mostly empty. Let’s talk about it the way it actually feels, which is like you woke up one day and someone quietly scooped out everything that used to make you, you. Your motivation, your spark, your ability to care about things that used to genuinely matter to you. Gone. Or at least it feels that way.
If you’ve been there, you know it’s not just tiredness. Tiredness goes away after a good sleep. Burnout is something else entirely. It sits in your bones. It makes you stare at a task you’ve done a hundred times and feel nothing but dread. And the really sneaky thing about burnout is that it tends to find people who care too much, not too little. Overachievers. Givers. People who said yes one too many times for one too many years.
So. What do we do about it?
There are a lot of recovery strategies floating around out there, and most of them are genuinely useful. Sleep more. Move your body. Set boundaries. Get off your phone. All solid advice. But there’s one thing that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough, and that’s journaling. Not the fancy leather-bound, beautiful handwriting, perfectly curated kind. The messy, honest, brain-dump kind. And I want to make the case today that it might be one of the most powerful tools you have access to right now, for free, starting today.
Here’s why it works, and more importantly, how to actually do it.
Your Brain Is a Browser With Too Many Tabs Open
When you’re burned out, your mind tends to run on a kind of low-grade chaos. Thoughts loop. Anxieties compound. You replay conversations, question decisions, feel vague guilt about things you can’t even fully name. It’s exhausting in a way that sleep doesn’t fix because the noise is coming from inside the house.
Journaling works, in part, because it gets the noise out of your head and onto a page. There’s actually research behind this. James Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas, spent decades studying what he called expressive writing, and what he found was striking. When people wrote honestly about difficult experiences and the emotions attached to those experiences, they reported lower stress levels, improved mood, and even better physical health outcomes over time. The act of translating a swirling feeling into language forces your brain to organize it. And organized problems, even painful ones, feel more manageable than unorganized ones.
So the first thing journaling does is just, give you somewhere to put it. All of it.
You Don’t Have to Know What You’re Feeling Before You Start Writing
This is the part people get wrong. They think journaling requires self-awareness, requires you to already know what’s going on inside you so you can articulate it. But actually, the writing is how you find out. You start writing and the truth kind of catches up to you mid-sentence.
A good way to begin is just to write what happened today, or this week, without any pressure to make it meaningful. Just the facts at first. I woke up. I felt tired before the day even started. I had that meeting. I didn’t speak up when I wanted to. I ate lunch at my desk again. Something in my chest felt tight all afternoon and I don’t fully know why.
Just doing that, just narrating your own life back to yourself, starts to reveal patterns. And patterns are information. Information is power, especially when you feel powerless.
Ask Yourself the Questions Nobody Is Asking You
Once you’re a little warmed up, this is where journaling gets genuinely transformative. You start asking yourself the deeper questions. Not in a harsh, interrogating way. More like a curious friend who has all the time in the world and no agenda.
Questions like: What did I actually need this week that I didn’t give myself? What am I most afraid of right now, and is that fear telling me something real? What would I tell a close friend who was feeling exactly what I’m feeling? What did I used to love that I haven’t made room for lately? Is there a version of my life, even just slightly different from this one, that would feel more like mine?
You don’t have to answer these perfectly. You don’t have to answer them at all, really. The point is to sit with them, to let your pen wander toward something honest. Because burnout has a way of disconnecting you from your own inner voice, and journaling is one of the most reliable ways to find it again.
Let the Journal Be Where You’re Allowed to Be Honest
This is a big one. Most of us spend a significant portion of our lives managing how we come across to other people. We say we’re fine when we’re not. We downplay how much we’re struggling because we don’t want to be a burden, or because we’re not even sure we have the right to struggle as much as we do. We compare our pain to other people’s and quietly decide ours doesn’t count.
Your journal doesn’t need any of that. It doesn’t need the edited, polished version of you. It needs the actual you. The one who is exhausted and confused and maybe a little bit resentful and definitely grieving something, even if you can’t quite name what it is yet.
Write the things you’re afraid to say out loud. Not to harm anyone, not to vent in a destructive way, but to acknowledge what’s actually true for you. There is something deeply healing about being witnessed, even if the only one witnessing you is the page.
Track the Small Things That Still Feel Like Life
Recovery from burnout isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t announce itself. It’s not a montage. It’s tiny and quiet and it happens in the margins of ordinary days. And one of the most beautiful things journaling can do during this time is help you notice the small moments that still carry warmth.
A cup of tea that tasted exactly right. A laugh that surprised you. A song that made you feel something. The way the light came through the window at a certain time of day. These things matter. Not in a forced gratitude-journaling kind of way, but in the sense that your capacity to notice them at all is a sign that you’re still in there, still alive to the world, even a little bit.
When you write these things down, you’re essentially telling your nervous system: there are still good things. It doesn’t cancel out the hard stuff. It just reminds you that the hard stuff isn’t the whole story.
Make It a Ritual, Not a Rule
The last thing I want to say is this. Please don’t turn journaling into another thing you fail at. Don’t buy a beautiful journal and set a rigid daily goal and then feel terrible about yourself on the days you skip it, because that’s just burnout finding a new outfit to wear.
Make it gentle. Make it low stakes. Even five minutes counts. Even one sentence counts. Write when you feel called to it. Write when you feel terrible and don’t know why. Write when something good happens and you want to hold onto it for a second longer. Write in bed with bad handwriting. Write on your phone if that’s easier. The form genuinely does not matter. The honesty is the whole thing.
Burnout took something from you, there’s no point pretending otherwise. But the road back is real, and it’s built out of small, brave acts of paying attention to yourself again. Journaling is one of the most accessible ways I know to start doing that. To sit down, pick up a pen, and say: okay, let’s figure out what’s actually going on in here.
You might be surprised what you find.
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