AI will increase mental health problems, expert says

Mental health concerns are set to get worse as artificial intelligence (AI) ramps up, according to one expert.

Katerina Lengold said she suffered burnout as a young space tech entrepreneur, which caused her to switch gears and develop the Neurointegration Institute.

She now spends her time teaching others tools to beat anxiety and burnout.

“We've all seen that there is a dramatic increase in the number of people who experience burnout, depression, anxiety,” Lengold told CTV News.

“I think that 67 per cent of people in the US experienced burnout so it's a pandemic, for sure. And I'm concerned that this is about to get worse with AI.”

Research done by Robert Half found that 38 per cent of Canadians report feeling burned out.

“I think that the biggest problem that we're about to face with AI is not robots taking over the world, but instead it's the amount of change that this technology is about to bring in our life,” she said.

She said uncertainty often sparked a high level of tension in the brain.

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“When there's a lot of uncertainty, and this is exactly what we're experiencing right now, the amount of stress just skyrockets.”

She said there are some things that people can do to prevent potential burnout.

“I'm a big believer that if people learn about the brain, they understand their stress response. They understand what's influencing it, and they can create and create islands of predictability in their daily life,” Lengold said.

“Weekly rituals, daily rituals, how you spend your morning, how you spend your evening, how you spend your lunch break, you can create those islands of predictability in this ocean of chaos that we are facing.”

At the Neurointegration Institute, they instruct people about the ‘imbalance spectrum’ to help people reduce their feelings of stress. Watch Lengold talk about it in the video player above.

“I think there's a lot of work that needs to be done at schools and companies across the world to help people understand and build stress resilience because we're about to face unprecedented speed of change.”