If praying feels like talking to the ceiling, keep talking. Feelings aren’t the measure of whether He hears.

Feelings are an unreliable instrument for measuring whether anything is happening. A flat, echoing sense during prayer is extremely common, and it says more about tiredness, habit and the state of your nerves than about whether you were heard. Carrying on without the feeling is not pretending. It is the ordinary experience of most people who have kept a practice for any length of time.

If it feels empty at the moment, keep the habit small and keep it anyway, without auditing how it went. Say the plain thing rather than the impressive thing. Ask somebody further along how long their dry stretches lasted.