People who don’t have diabetes often imagine the hard part is giving injections or checking blood sugar. Those things become routine. The harder part is that diabetes decisions never stop. You go to the grocery store, and your bell goes off. You go to the movie, you can’t have the buttered popcorn or Coke. You go to dinner with family, no chicken-fried steak for you. It’s the middle of the night, your alarm goes off, you get up, and take insulin to lower your numbers or glucose gummies to raise your numbers.
Some mornings, you wake up already tired, and nothing dramatic has even happened. The insulin pump is working. The CGM is behaving. Your blood sugar might even be fine. But you’re tired physically, and you are especially tired of making diabetic decisions. Should I bolus now? Can I drink this coffee? Did I remember enough insulin? Will this meal spike me? Should I change my infusion set today, or can it wait one more day? People with diabetes make hundreds of decisions all day long, and many of them carry serious consequences.
That’s what diabetes burnout feels like. It isn’t quitting. It isn’t laziness. It’s decision fatigue mixed with the knowledge that tomorrow you’ll wake up and do it all over again.
Some days, the best thing I accomplish isn’t a perfect blood sugar. It’s simply showing up for another day.
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