Digest 20260301: Has AI actually helped me with my anxiety?

Wow, it’s been a month since I last wrote a non-book-review post! And you may have noticed 3 of those were yesterday, so sorry for the feed spam, I’m just trying to catch up on my backlog before the month’s end!

Why’s it been so long? I’m trying to remember the last month, and I think the answer is that I still have been struggling with anxiety. I had a headache for about a week (maybe anxiety-related, maybe a bug), and I’ve been focused on other things if I did find myself with bandwidth. 

Last update I was on a high after a successful trip to London, which proved I’d made myself sick with anxiety for nothing. I’m still thinking about that train station sushi; it’s weird what form victories take.

That was great, but it was just one thing I’d had on my mind, and everything else was still swirling in there. I have been getting into avoidant patterns that just make everything worse. Like avoiding sorting out the car insurance because it means a phone call to haggle on the renewal. Or putting off booking a guy to refit our skirting boards because he also insists on a phone call to quote.

I got to a point last week when I realised that with physical symptoms lasting so long, I’d been existing way above my usual baseline for a while, and I knew I needed to do something about it.

An experiment with ChatGPT

We watched a YouTube video of Hannah Fry talking about her new BBC documentary on AI, and this inspired me to try asking ChatGPT for advice. It had never occurred to me to do this before. I’ve used AI tools to help me with coding and sometimes suggestions for reading lists (it’s not the best at this), but I’ve stayed away from talking to it about personal things.

I’ve seen videos of that Kendra woman from TikTok with her crazy eyed AI induced psychosis and been deeply disturbed by it (and the comments egging her on). I’ve read the news reports of people who were encouraged to end their lives. You’ve got to be very careful with your mushy human brain.

Still, with due wariness I prompted it for advice on how I could start to deal with my anxiety, especially as it’s been causing more physical symptoms. I was very surprised by how well it was able to guide me into identifying a neat list of my specific worries, which really helped dissipate the big, suffocating cloud that I’d been carrying around. I’ve tried to do something similar before with pen and paper exercises by dumping my brain out, then sorting through it, but this AI tool could prompt me with questions or observations I wouldn’t have connected myself because I’m too much in the middle of it.

My biggest source of anxiety right now is about my elderly Nan, her failing health, the loneliness and depression I feel in her, how this affects everyone else in the family, how we’ll all feel when she dies, my guilt and shame over not knowing how to help, and my complicated feelings about our relationship. I’ve been going to see her every other weekend lately, and every time I do, it triggers another loop, and I’m off kilter for days.

I also have other things on my mind, but this is the heaviest load.

Fortunately, this exercise helped me to recognise what it is, write it down, and acknowledge how much of it is outside of my control and therefore not my responsibility. ChatGPT also gave me some other tips for managing my feelings during and after visiting. I found the advice to plan myself a post-visit recovery strategy particularly helpful, which is basically to do some exercise or take a warm shower and/or to journal my feelings.

I’m not going to magically stop being anxious about these things (and the web of offshoot issues), but I think this has helped me manage it and keep visiting my Nan without it overwhelming me for days. What is most important is that I go and spend some time with her. I don’t have to fix anything.

I went this morning, I felt calmer about it, and I did some gardening afterwards that helped to ground me. It was nice.

I still have a distrust of these AI tools, but I think if you have a good level of self-awareness and scepticism of them (and you are not in a crisis), they can be helpful to sort through this sort of lower-level stress or anxiety issues that I think a lot of people suffer with and don’t know how to process.

I doubt if it’ll be any help with my social anxiety issues which have more complicated causes and no simple solutions, and I’ve already researched to death over the years, but I might give that a try some time and see what comes out of it.

But also OpenAI can fuck right off

Of course, the day after I used ChatGPT for this, I saw the news about OpenAI signing a contract with the United States Department of War (what a cringe name), and I won’t be using it anymore!

Instead, I tried using Claude, because Antropic told the DoW to fuck off, so they seem like the less-bad option. I tried the same prompts, and it basically took me down the same path. I also feel like it had a better vibe.

We watched the first episode of Hannah Fry’s BBC documentary AI Confidential, which focused on the case of the young lad who broke into Buckingham Palace to try to assassinate the Queen after his Replika AI girlfriend gassed him up and helped him plan it. I remember that being on the news, but I didn’t realise an AI chatbot was involved! She also talked to a guy who makes AI chatbots of dead people so you can have a phonecall with a deceased loved one. I feel very conflicted on that one, my initial reaction is that this has to be unhealthy but then I’ve never experienced the loss of anyone close to me so I don’t know what it’s like.

Telly

• I watched all of Line of Duty which I’m like a decade late on, but it is good! Series 1-3 are top tier, 4 is good and then it gets a bit silly but still enjoyable. I am tempted to make a Ted Hastings embroidery with one of his many catch phrases.
• I’m back into Law and Order: SVU since season 14 onwards is on Disney plus and I’ve not seen most of it.
• For light relief we are rewatching Parks and Recreation.
• We finished Wonder Man, I thought it was brilliant! I loved Simon and Trevor.
• Husband made me watch Lincoln which was too long, too much boring politics and too many characters who all looked the same to keep track of. I got lots of embroidery done though!
• Rewatched The Big Short. I enjoyed that. I hope this AI fever isn’t going to lead to another crash like that…

What else?

• We’ll be painting the living room next week. I got some paint colour samples and we decided on Dulux Blissful Blue (third from the left in the photo).
• This video on conservatism and Romantasy was well done by The Plant Based Bride. She  thoughtfully explains the many things that give me the ick about this (to me inexplicably) popular genre.
• 🌷 Spring bulbs are blooming. It doesn’t feel a bit early, but still the lighter days and the splashes of colour are such a lift.
• I need new glasses 🤓 and it’s proving to be impossible to find any I like. I think my face is smaller than average so most glasses just look too wide. I’ve tried three places so far, my phone is full of photos of me trying them in, and I’ve not found the pair yet. I could buy the same frames as my current ones, Glasses Direct still sell them! But I feel like I should have a change after 5 years
• I’ve been slack with consistent running and strength training, but I’ve managed at least once a week. I ran for almost 20 mins without a break the other day, so that’s still good progress!
• After the skirting boards were removed we found we had a damp issue rotting the flooring joists against the exterior wall (some tit in the past concreted up to the damp proof course down this side of the house).  So the small skirting board job has become much bigger! Oh, the joy of home ownership. Thank God we decided to replace it rather than just painting or we’d not have discovered this until they gave out and the furniture fell through! The joists are in such a state I don’t think it’d have been many years from happening.
• I’ve been enjoying learning the basics of  philosophy on ethics, per my Personal Curriculum and reading How To Be Perfect. It’s been slow going because of other things happening and I want to give it proper time and thought, but I am making progress!