Tuesday Reset
Have you ever considered using an AI Chatbot to calm down???
Not real proud to admit this but I caught myself the other night typing how I felt into a chat box. Everyone was asleep … the house quiet, some knot in my chest I couldn’t name, and instead of sitting with it for 30 seconds I opened an app and started asking a robot “why do I feel like this” at 11 at night. It answered and I’ve gotta admit, it was a pretty good answer.
RAND surveyed young people 12 to 21, and 19.2% of them said they go to AI chatbots, ChatGPT and the like, when they’re feeling sad, angry, nervous, or stressed. That’s about 8.2 million kids. A year before it was 13.1%. So it’s climbing fast, and I don’t think that’s because the kids are broken. I think it’s because when the wave hits, the fastest thing in the room is the phone, and the phone always answers.
And I’ve gotta say, I’d rather them turn to that than many of the other options and at least they’re feeling the feelings and not just numbing out.
BUT… THEY (we) still need to do work from there… because an AI chatbot can hand you words but it cannot take the breath for you. Regulating your nervous system is a physical event. Your body settles when you exhale long and slow, when the animal part of you finally gets the signal that the threat has passed. No paragraph does that for you. You do that.
And look, I’m not anti-AI, I use the stuff every single day (I’m literally using it right now to clean this up - clean it up… not write it for me!). But there’s a difference between asking a tool to help you think and asking it to do your feeling for you so you don’t have to. When I’m keyed up and I grab the phone, I’m usually skipping the one rep that works: the pause. The gap between what happened and what I do next.
So here’s the reset. Next time the heat climbs, before you type it into anything, give your own body the first 60 seconds. One long exhale, feet flat on the floor, feeling it. Then go ask the robot, if you still want to. Most nights I’ve already handled it by then.
Respond instead of react. The tools are fast. Your nervous system got here first, and it still does the part that matters most.
Now… ironically… here’s access to our Free Awareness Self Assessment… it can tell you where you may need to do some more work … and then our Focus App can give you some of the tools to use! Check them both out below.