Nurse Burnout Warning Signs: A Midyear Check-In

Heather Strand
Jun 3
3 min read

By Heather Strand: Mindset Fitness + Self-Leadership Coach

Nobody is going to pull you into the break room, sit you down, and ask how you're actually doing.

Not your charge nurse. Not your manager. Not the hospital that handed you a gift card in May and moved on by June 1st.

So I'm doing it.

Right here. Consider this your midyear check-in—written for the version of you that has been holding it together since January and hasn't slowed down long enough to ask whether that's working.

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We're Halfway Through the Year… But Are You Halfway Okay?

In the ICU, we reassessed constantly. We didn’t chart once and walk away—we go back, we look again, we adjust. Because patients change. Situations shift. What was stable at 0700 might be a completely different picture by noon. Nobody just wrote a plan in January and hoped it still applied in December.

But that's exactly what most nurses do with themselves.

You set an intention at the start of the year—this is the year I take better care of myself, set real limits, stop taking the unit home in my head—and then February happened. And then a brutal March. And then a patient in April you still think about. And then May just... went.

And here we are. June.¹

So let's do what we were actually trained to do: assess.

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A Few Honest Questions Worth Sitting With

Not a quiz. Not a checklist. Just the kind of questions nobody thinks to ask you.

Emotionally—Are you still feeling things, or have you gone a little numb? Emotional exhaustion doesn't always show up loud. Sometimes it just looks like not caring about the things you used to love, or snapping at home over something small and knowing exactly why but not having the energy to fix it.²

Mentally—How loud is your head when you're off the clock? Is it quiet, or is it still charting? If you genuinely cannot remember the last time you had a thought that had nothing to do with a patient, a shift, or something you should have caught—that's data worth paying attention to.

Physically—Your body has been keeping a running tab on everything this year: The sleep that isn't restorative. The shoulders that never fully drop. The "I'll deal with this later" list that has been growing since February and you haven't dealt with yet.

Spiritually—Do you still feel like you? Not the nurse version of you, not the caregiver version—just you, the actual person? Because this work has a way of quietly consuming your identity if nobody is watching for it. And I believe we were not created to pour endlessly without ever being filled back up.

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What Are You Actually Carrying Right Now?

Research shows that up to 86% of emergency room nurses meet the criteria for compassion fatigue.³ Eighty-six percent. If that number showed up in any other clinical context, we'd have a rapid response team.

And here's the thing I've sat with since leaving the ICU: we don't just carry the physical weight of the job. We carry the deaths. The moral injury from having to make impossible choices in understaffed hallways. The patients we think about years later. The version of ourselves we had to set aside just to get through the shift.

And we carry it quietly, because somewhere along the way we were taught that was part of the deal.

(For the record—whoever decided nurses don't need to process things before their next shift has clearly never worked back-to-back in a unit that's three nurses short.)

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You Don't Have to Overhaul Everything… You Do Have to Be Honest.

The second half of this year doesn't have to look like the first half. But it won't change on its own.

You don't need a new year, a new unit, or a new job to start leading yourself differently. You just need one honest answer to one real question:

What is one thing—one boundary, one rhythm, one conversation with yourself—that would make the next six months feel different from the last six?

Start there. That's enough to begin.

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This is Your invitation.

If something in here hit close to home, it's worth paying attention to.

I work with nurses who are exhausted from surviving a calling they still love. If you're ready to stop white-knuckling the rest of this year and start leading yourself through it, I'd love to connect.

If something in here resonated, let's talk. Grab a spot on my calendar below—no pressure, no pitch, just a real conversation about what the next six months could look like for you. Here’s the link:

BOOK A CALL HERE »

Lead Yourself First 🩺

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