The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study was to explore how graduate students describe self-care deficits and to understand how self-care deficits contribute to burnout, exhaustion, and stress at a private university in the Southeast. During semi-structured interviews and post-interview reflections, ten graduate students from private universities in the Southeast were interviewed for this research. Self-care deficit theory was used to guide this study. In order to collect data, two research questions were formulated. Students were asked to describe their self-care deficits in the first question. Students describe their self-care deficit in two ways, areas of their life they desire to fix, such as eating better, getting more sleep, and working out more, and an area they did not want to fix. The students described having a spiritual self-care deficit. However, the general sentiment from most students was that their spirituality, while crucial, was not an area of focus at this time. A second question investigated how self-care deficit contributes to burnout, exhaustion, and stress among graduate students. Exhaustion, but not stress or burnout, is attributed to graduate students' self-care deficit. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com.bibliotheek.ehb.be/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]