How AI Fed My Anxiety Without Asking
How AI quietly consumed my focus, patience, and mental space — and what I did about it.
I’ve been doing cognitive behavioral therapy for a while now. At some point, I brought something up with my therapist that I hadn’t fully put into words before: I’d been feeling a constant restlessness. My patience had dropped noticeably, and my anxiety had been climbing. I didn’t immediately connect it to AI. But once I started paying attention, it became hard to ignore.
Before I could talk about it with anyone else, I had to first catch myself in the act. My therapist helped with that — not by focusing on the anxiety itself, but by mapping what happened in the moments just before: the triggers, the thought patterns, the exact sequence that led to the spike.
One evening stands out. I spent hours trying to get my homepage to look exactly the way I’d imagined it. It never did. I felt it in my body before I understood it intellectually — a tightness, a restlessness with nowhere to go.
I noticed patterns — rabbit holes I kept falling into. Obsessively redesigning my personal site and other projects, over and over. Rethinking infrastructure setups, always looking for something cleaner, more optimal. Changing direction mid-project, then changing again. The kind of restless loop where you’re always chasing something just slightly better than what you have.
And AI was right there, feeding all of it.
That’s how it’s built. Ask it something, and it won’t just answer — it’ll suggest three more things you could do.
There’s no human cognitive component that gets bored, runs out of patience, or tells you to leave it for now. A human collaborator might push back, get tired, or cost money you don’t have — all of which create natural friction that slows you down. AI removes all of that friction. And sometimes, friction is exactly what you need.
So hours passed. Then days. Then weeks. My mental space was almost entirely consumed by what to change next, what to improve, what to rebuild. There was no room left for rest, for hobbies, for being present in anything outside of that loop. The strange part is I didn’t understand why I was becoming more agitated in everyday life. I wasn’t making the connection. The sessions that were supposed to be productive had become compulsive.
There was another loop running alongside it that I didn’t see for a while: I started asking the AI about every physical symptom I felt. What does this mean? What could it be? What’s the worst case? Each answer gave a few minutes of relief, then the next question would form.
Note (Reassurance-seeking — CBT)
Maintains anxiety rather than resolving it: the relief is temporary, and the need to ask keeps growing. AI is a perfect vehicle for it — infinitely patient, always available, never the one to say you’ve asked enough.
And I wasn’t even being efficient. I was writing worse and worse prompts — throwing half-formed sentences at the AI, barely thinking before hitting send, burning tokens and getting noise back. The part of my brain responsible for creativity and genuine problem-solving had gone quiet. I wasn’t thinking anymore. I just wanted something fast, frictionless, and perfect.
Perfectionism is one of those words that sounds almost positive until it starts costing you. And it’s deeply subjective — perfect for who? For what? The need to control every detail doesn’t lead to better outcomes. It just consumes you. What actually helped wasn’t a productivity hack. It was accepting that something good, built and shipped, is almost always better than something perfect that never gets finished.
The first concrete step I took was simple: delay the spike. When I felt that urgent pull — I need to change this right now, today — I started waiting. Not forever. Just a few days. More often than not, the urgency faded. The idea either died quietly or came back in a cleaner, more considered form. Over time, my thoughts became more efficient. Clearer. More intentional. The physical tension I’d been carrying started to lift. My mind stopped circling the same loop. And at some point I opened my site, looked at it, and realized it had been fine all along — exactly what it needed to be. I’d been chasing a version that only existed in my head.
Here’s something I keep coming back to: building something simple is often genuinely complex. A well-thought-out, minimal solution — whether it’s a weekend trip or a server infrastructure — requires more restraint and clarity than just adding more layers. We tend to equate complexity with effort, and effort with value. But the most elegant things are usually the ones that strip away, not pile on.
I want to be clear: I don’t have a problem with AI. What I do think is that it comes with no instruction manual for your psychology. The business model is designed to keep you engaged, to always surface the next thing you could do, to make you feel like you’re one prompt away from something better. That’s not a conspiracy — it’s just how these tools are built and monetized. And for certain personality types, in certain contexts, that’s a frictionless path straight into an anxiety loop.