To AI or to not...

It's 1 am and I've been scrolling on my phone for a while...

I know I shouldn't be doing this...

I should be sleeping by now...

Gosh I have to wake up early tomorrow but I can still clock in 6 solid hours of sleep if I go straight to my first session of the day as I wake up...

Just one more minute...

It's almost like back when I would watch porn for hours until the sunrise and I wasn't able to stop. Only that this time I'm not scrolling through explicit pictures and videos like all those many years ago but I'm scrolling through houses and apartments looking for the “perfect one.”[1] I had Google's search AI open on one browser window and the apartments on the other and when I found a “good one” I'd ask AI about that one neighborhood.

Sounds useful, right?

It was quite useful until I began discharging all my emotions into that AI chat! I began telling it about how I want a place where my fiancée can live well and secure and walk to places, where she can be in a nice neighborhood and be close to our family 'cus she's moving there 4 months before me and has no car at the moment. I began to disclose my fears and my desires to this AI chatbot and the more I did so, the more it seemed to tailor its answers to my needs, but as I read I became more and more anxious. It would say things like: “If you choose this one place, she'd be in a beautiful prison[2] with no way to move or go somewhere else! Don't choose it.” Only to moments later say: “I think this one option[3] is the best choice you could make because blah blah blah...” I was drowning in fear, feeling like I had to choose right then in that moment!

Maybe you've been in a situation like this or went to AI for some type of advice about how to tell your spouse so and so, or how to stop feeling anxiety. Whatever the reason, I wonder if you realized how you were feeling after disclosing your deepest longings, fears and emotions to an AI chatbot? I have countless stories just like the one above where I went to AI for answers to my fears and sufferings and left way more anxious than before. I also have clients who have done the same and report feeling more anxious, but it's not just me and my clients, it's also people all over the world!

There was a 1-year-long study done across 4 different countries with more than 2,000 people that found that when people went to AI for personal matters because they felt emotionally isolated, drum roll please..., it didn't cure their isolation but worsened it (Folk & Dunn, 2026).

Also, another massive study done in the US with over 20,000 people linked significantly higher rates of depression and negative emotional distress to those who used AI daily (Perlis et al., 2026). However, this was only when the people used AI for personal life and emotional matters, not for work or school.[4]

The first time I felt an itch toward researching AI use for emotional regulation and anxiety, I had just finished listening to a voice message from a client. She had been so dysregulated that she hit her husband and was experiencing panic attacks. Weeks earlier she had told me how she had been chatting with ChatGPT about her emotional state and it had told her that she had some sort of severe trauma that made her nervous system so reactive. As the weeks passed by I watched her embody those words and become more and more anxious and dysregulated. Was it the AI's fault? I mean, it's ChatGPT, it's meant to give good answers and to be extremely intelligent and helpful... right?? I wonder what would have happened if she had opened up about what she was feeling with another human being instead of AI? Would the anxiety have spiked up to the point of hitting the person she loves the most? I have no idea, but this thought was enough to get me going in my quest of finding out if AI was helping people in their emotional distress or worsening it.

After some thorough research using AI itself to find things faster and listening to a very good NotebookLM podcast about the sources that I found,[5] I realized that we are relying on AI chatbots for tasks that are impossible for them! We humans connect through reciprocal self-disclosure.[6] This is something AI can't do. It has no real backstory or experiences, it's a machine and it has no way of relating to the human experience (Folk & Dunn, 2026). Therefore, it can be great at turning my drawing of a stick man into a cool animation or making a picture of how I would look in the 80s,[7] but it won't be able to relate to me when I talk about my fear of not finding the right home or my hurt when dad just gave me a still face because he was busy when I was trying to tell him something important. It has no way of relating to us, but it acts like it does.

What if we are going deeper into psycholation when we choose to open up to AI instead of to the people around us? Psycholation is Dr. Glenn's term for psychological isolation,[8] which is when we don't share our inner world with anyone and therefore suffer alone. We don't coregulate and so we use way more energy trying to regulate ourselves and sometimes fall in pits of despair where “no one understands me” and “I don't matter here.”

Emotions like shame are what we call social emotions because they have to do with the fear of how someone else will perceive me (Scheff, 2003). Shame is also an emotion that can only be processed when shared with others, hence the need of shame is unconditional love. It is receiving unconditional love from a human being in an area where I think that if another human being knew what I feel or think, they'd think less of me or be disgusted by me. We get hurt in community, but we also heal in community.[9] That means we need people to heal from the damage done to us by people! Sometimes these people can be the same or different from the ones who caused the damage, but it is imperative that we remain in community to heal our deepest wounds. Chatting with Claude in the middle of the night will not heal anything inside me, it will only make me more aware of what's wrong with me and give me no real empathy or compassion.[10]

If anything, this blog post is a call to human connection. It's a call to take the risk, put your phone down and share your heart with the people who love you and care about you the most! It is also a call for quiet and silence. Can we learn to not need an answer to our problems right away? Can we learn to make space to listen to the voice of God inside of us again instead of trying to get a fast answer from ChatGPT about how I can stop feeling so anxious when yada yada? Can we learn to say “I feel fear!” to our spouse or close people and know that they will be a safe place for us?

I know that this is easier said than done as I sit on my fiancée's comfy couch and sip the hot ginger tea she just made for me,[11] and that's why I am choosing to use these paragraphs to invite you to train in becoming a safe person for those around you and to create a culture of safety in your home. I know no better place to start for this than with our Connected Marriage course! But if you don't feel like you want to buy a course after bearing my writing for the last 8 minutes, then you can come join our free community and start learning right away!

Also, I want to challenge you this weekend to make space to be with no phone or screen around you! It can be just 10 minutes, an hour, 6 hours, maybe the whole day?! Let's begin making intentional time to connect with ourselves, God and the people we love the most. Let's practice connection, human connection.

PS: I'll keep using AI for work but I'm no longer opening up to it about my fears of housing, I might end up watching rental house porn again, no thank you...

Notes

1. As if there was such a thing! But in my mind, in that moment, there was, and it was just one scroll away!

2. A phrase I started using afterwards when explaining why not to some houses...

3. Yes, the beautiful prison. *rolls eyes*

4. Phew, I thought I was screwed for a moment when I first read that article. I'm using AI to organize my ideas for this very post!

5. Yes, yes, I used AI to write a post against AI.

6. A fancy term for telling our deepest, darkest secrets to our best friends after they told us theirs.

7. Ehm... of course I don't use AI for those sorts of silly things, what are you talking about?

8. Right, you probably had already guessed that.

9. This is a phrase I heard in the community practice course at practicingtheway.org. I cannot recommend these courses enough!

10. This is probably why we end up being way more anxious after talking with AI about our greatest fear or shame.

11. Thank you babe, I lysm!

References

Folk, D., & Dunn, E. (2026). How does turning to AI for companionship predict loneliness and vice versa? A four-wave longitudinal study across four countries. Psychological Science, 37(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976261427747

Perlis, R. H., Gunning, F. M., Uslu, A. A., Santillana, M., Baum, M. A., Druckman, J. N., Ognyanova, K., & Lazer, D. (2026). Generative AI use and depressive symptoms among US adults. JAMA Network Open, 9(1), e2554820. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.54820

Scheff, T. J. (2003). Shame in self and society. Symbolic Interaction, 26(2), 239–262. https://doi.org/10.1525/si.2003.26.2.239