How AI Could Make People More Anxious
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Why does the internet make anxiety feel worse?
A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer Charlie Warzell onto the David From Show. As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live. Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time. It's thoughtful, surprising. And a little uncertainty. In the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or watch.
I don't know about you, but often when I feel anxious, one of the first things I do is pick up my phone. And
that is
probably
the biggest way that I have lost hours of my life. I really never feel better after, but I continue to do the same thing.
I mean it is occasionally useful, right? Like if my cats eat something weird and I'm feeling anxious about like was it poison and I Google it and I find out no that thing is not poisonous to cats,
right.
That was helpful.
But it can be a very slippery slope because so quickly then it can turn into How much hair is normal to lose every day? What does 100 strands of hair look like? If I hung out with somebody who has norovirus before they got sick, am I still at risk of getting sick? When will I
get sick? For me, it's extreme weather. Is there a blizzard? Is it getting closer? Is it changing? Is it still gonna get here? That's not help. Like the weather is gonna weather, whether I look at it or not. I'm Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic.
And I'm Natalie Brennan, a producer at The Atlantic.
This is how to touch grass.
Natalie, according to the World Health Organization, anxiety is the most common mental health disorder. And even if we're not talking about clinical anxiety, many people report feeling anxious these days.
I guess I'm not surprised to hear that people are feeling very anxious, but almost half saying they're more anxious this year than last year does feel striking.
The thing that's changing lately though is for a lot of people, that instinct to pick up your phone and Google when you're anxious is morphing into an instinct to ask AI.
individuals now go to chatbots for well being purposes.
How are AI chat‑bots changing the way we seek reassurance?
So overnight these systems have become a go-to psychological provider essentially.
That's Elias Abugetti. Elias is a psychiatrist who heads the Anxiety Disorders Section and the OCD Clinic at Stanford University. His colleague Ashley Golden is a psychologist and professor at Stanford. We may be
encountering what you might call the perfect storm of Avoidant coping behaviors and this tech that reinforces those tendencies and disorders.
The two of them have worked in clinical practices and have also consulted for Silicon Valley tech companies. Elias and Ash recently co-authored a paper arguing that many AI chatbots are designed in ways that can feed OCD and anxiety and make them worse.
If you have an anxiety disorder already, then you are at risk of seeing that disorder exacerbated by some of these platforms. But we're also starting to encounter in our clinical practice individuals who were never diagnosed with anxiety, who are presenting essentially with de novo anxiety that seems to be directly related to them discovering these new platforms and starting to interact with them.
That seems like a really big deal. That people who aren't actually clinically anxious could start to exhibit more and more anxious behaviors and tendencies as they use this technology. I actually want to start a little ways in the past. It's now extremely normal today that if somebody has a concern, a worry, a question, the first and sometimes the only place they go is the internet. But that doesn't just mean Google anymore. Is this shift into the AI chatbot era that's underway now significantly different than the technological shifts of the past?
I mean to me, Google looks roughly the same now in twenty twenty six as it did in
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why does the internet make anxiety feel worse?
0:02–3:00
2
How are AI chat‑bots changing the way we seek reassurance?
3:00–6:53
3
What is “reassurance seeking” and why does it become a compulsive loop?
6:53–9:43
4
How does the Stanford paper say AI design fuels OCD‑like behavior?
9:43–14:11
5
Why can AI give a quick anxiety‑relief that feels permanent but isn’t?
14:11–17:25
6
What does therapy teach about sitting with uncertainty versus using AI?
17:25–21:49
7
How could AI be redesigned to interrupt avoid‑ant coping patterns?
21:49–25:21
8
What practical steps can listeners take to use AI responsibly for mental health?
25:21–28:10