Most people don't ask "am I burned out?" until they already are. These prompts help you ask sooner.
Founder at Anticipate
Published:
Safety note: These prompts are designed to help you reflect — not to replace professional advice. AI tools can surface useful patterns, but they can’t diagnose burnout or any medical condition. If your results raise concerns, bring them to a doctor or licensed therapist. Use what follows as a starting point for self-awareness, not a final answer.
Burnout hides in plain sight because people rationalize each symptom individually. Bad sleep? Busy period. Irritable? Need a break. Can’t focus? Too many tabs open. An AI tool doesn’t rationalize — it follows your thread of thought and asks follow-up questions you might avoid asking yourself.
The problem with most burnout self-assessments is that they’re one-time quizzes with a score. A conversation with an AI tool lets you describe your situation in your own words, explore patterns you hadn’t connected, and get structured output you can take to a doctor or use to start tracking.
These prompts are designed to be copied and pasted into any AI tool. They work with ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google Gemini, or any conversational AI.
These prompts help turn a vague feeling of exhaustion into a better understanding of the patterns behind it.
I’ve been feeling exhausted and unmotivated at work for the past [weeks/months]. I’m not sure if it’s normal stress or something more. Ask me questions about my sleep, mood, energy, work habits, and physical symptoms to help me understand whether this could be burnout. Go one question at a time.
Here’s what a typical week looks like for me: [describe your routine, work hours, sleep, exercise, social life]. Based on this, what patterns do you see that might indicate burnout? What follow-up questions would help clarify?
I’m experiencing these symptoms: [list what you’ve noticed — e.g., can’t sleep, dreading work, headaches, short temper, brain fog]. Can you help me map these against the WHO’s three dimensions of burnout (exhaustion, cynicism/detachment, reduced effectiveness) and tell me which ones align?
Once you suspect burnout, these prompts help you dig into the root causes.
I think I might be experiencing burnout. Help me identify what’s driving it by asking me about my workload, relationships at work, sense of control, recognition, fairness, and values alignment. These are the six areas from the Maslach burnout model. Go one area at a time and help me rate each one.
I want to build a timeline of when things started getting worse. Ask me about the last 3-6 months — key work events, life changes, health changes, and shifts in how I feel. Help me see where the turning point might have been.
Walk me through a work-life audit. Ask me about my average work hours, commute, breaks, time off taken vs. available, after-hours messages, weekend work, and how often I think about work when I’m not working. Summarize what you find.
Burnout overlaps with other conditions. These prompts help clarify what you’re dealing with.
I can’t tell if what I’m feeling is burnout or depression. Ask me questions that help distinguish between the two — specifically whether my symptoms are tied to work or spread across all areas of my life, whether I still find joy outside of work, and whether removing work stress would likely change how I feel.
Help me understand the difference between chronic stress and burnout. I’ve been stressed at work for a while, but lately it feels different — more like I’ve stopped caring. Ask me questions to figure out whether I’m still in a stress phase or have crossed into burnout territory.
I’m on medication for [depression/anxiety/stress] and I’m wondering whether what I’m feeling is a medication side effect, burnout, or both. Help me think through this by asking about when my symptoms started relative to my medication timeline, whether they’re worse on work days vs. days off, and whether my prescribing doctor is aware of my work situation.
These prompts move you from identification to action.
I think I’m experiencing burnout and I want to talk to my doctor about it. Help me prepare for that appointment. Ask me about my key symptoms, how long they’ve been going on, what I’ve already tried, and what I’m hoping to get from the visit. Then summarize everything into a one-page brief I can bring to the appointment.
Based on what I’ve told you about my work situation, suggest 3-5 specific boundaries I could set this week to start protecting my energy. Make them realistic — I can’t quit my job or take a month off. Focus on things I can actually control.
I want to start tracking my burnout patterns but I don’t know where to start. Based on my symptoms, suggest what I should track daily (e.g., sleep, mood, energy, work hours, specific triggers), how to log it simply, and what to look for after 2-4 weeks.
What they can do: Help you organize your thoughts. Surface patterns you haven’t connected. Prepare you for a doctor visit. Give you structured questions to reflect on. Break through the “I’m fine” autopilot that burnout creates.
What they can’t do: Diagnose you. Replace a therapist or doctor. Account for your medical history. Provide consistent, ongoing monitoring. Catch patterns across weeks and months the way tracking tools can.
AI tools can help you reflect, organize your thoughts, and fill gaps in your understanding of what may be happening. They can surface patterns, ask useful follow-up questions, and help you connect things you may not have noticed on your own. But they still depend heavily on memory — and burnout rarely develops in a single day. It’s usually a gradual process that unfolds over weeks or months, which makes it difficult to fully describe or recognize in hindsight.
If you’re not sure what to look for, start with common symptoms of burnout in the workplace — then let Anticipate help track how those patterns may actually show up in your daily behavior over time.
Your phone already contains signals that tell part of that story: changes in sleep, movement, activity levels, routines, travel patterns, and even external factors like weather. On top of that, there are personal triggers you can log manually, like alcohol consumption, stressful events, medication usage, or changes in your work schedule.
That’s where Anticipate is designed to help. Instead of relying only on reflection after things get bad, the app acts more like a co-pilot for understanding your patterns over time. It combines passive behavioral data from your device with the context you choose to track manually, helping surface early signals that may point toward burnout before the situation becomes overwhelming.
The goal isn’t to diagnose you. It’s to help you build context around what’s changing in your life, energy, and recovery over time — and create a history you can return to later when reflecting, making decisions, or preparing for a conversation with a doctor or therapist.
1. World Health Organization (2019). Burn-out an 'occupational phenomenon': International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11). WHO News Item.
2. Maslach, C. & Leiter, M.P. (2016). Understanding the burnout experience: recent research and its implications for psychiatry. World Psychiatry, 15(2), 103–111.
3. Eagle Hill Consulting (2025). Workforce Burnout Survey. Eagle Hill Consulting.
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