AI existential dread: how to stop doomscrolling about the future

It is late, you meant to go to sleep an hour ago, and you are still reading. A tech founder says AI could end humanity. A thread predicts the collapse of whole professions. A video promises everything will be fine, and the replies say otherwise. You put the phone down with a heavy, shapeless feeling that something enormous is coming and there is nothing you can do about it. If that sounds familiar, you are describing something many people now call AI anxiety, or AI existential dread.

Is AI anxiety a thing?

Yes, as an experience. It is not a formal diagnosis, and you will not find it in the clinical manuals. Researchers have started to study it, and psychologists see it in practice: worry, fear or dread focused on artificial intelligence and what it might mean for work, society and the future. For some people it is mostly about their job. For others it is bigger and harder to name, a sense that the ground is shifting and that the future they imagined may not happen.

These are real questions, and thinking about them is reasonable. The trouble starts when the thinking becomes constant, circular and mostly happens at midnight.

Why doomscrolling makes the dread worse

Your brain is built to pay extra attention to threats. That was useful when the threat was a predator. It is less useful when the threat is abstract, global and updated every few minutes by feeds designed to hold your attention, which tend to reward the most alarming content.

Scrolling also works like a safety behaviour. Each check promises that the next article will finally tell you how worried to be. It brings a flicker of relief or a jolt of alarm, then more uncertainty, and the urge to check again. Over time, the checking keeps the anxiety going rather than settling it.

Doing it in bed adds a second problem. Worry and screens both keep your mind alert, and if the bed becomes the place where you worry, it gets harder to fall asleep there. Some people find the pattern tips into ongoing insomnia.

How to stop worrying about AI quite so much

Concern about the future is reasonable. The aim here is to stop it running your evenings. These are techniques drawn from cognitive behavioural therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy that many people find helpful:

• Move the charger. Keep your phone out of the bedroom, or at least out of reach. It is a blunt fix, and for many people it works better than willpower
• Schedule worry time. Give yourself 15 minutes at a fixed time earlier in the day to read, think and worry about AI. When the dread shows up at other times, note it and postpone it to that slot. Worry postponement has been studied for decades, and many people find the urge weaker by the time the slot arrives
• Name the thought. Try saying ‘I’m having the thought that everything is going to collapse’. It sounds small, but stepping back from a thought, rather than arguing with it, often takes the edge off. ACT calls this defusion
• Swap the question. ‘What will happen?’ has no answer tonight. ‘What matters to me today, and what is one thing I can do about it?’ usually does
• Act where you have influence. Learning a tool, joining a professional conversation, supporting a campaign or talking to your family about how you use technology are all ways of turning dread into something you can do
• Talk in daylight. Big questions about meaning and the future deserve proper conversation with people you trust. They get distorted when you carry them alone at night

When dread becomes something more

Sometimes existential worry about AI is part of a wider pattern: persistent worry about many things, or a low mood where the future feels bleak whatever the topic. Signs worth taking seriously include feeling hopeless for weeks, losing interest in things you usually enjoy, sleep that has changed a lot, or thoughts that life is not worth living. These can point to depression, and they deserve proper support.

If you are in crisis or having thoughts of ending your life, contact your GP, call Samaritans on 116 123 (free, any time), call NHS 111 and choose the mental health option, or call 999 or go to A&E in an emergency.

How therapy can help

Therapy will not tell you what AI will do, and it will not ask you to stop caring about the future. It can help you step out of the loop of checking and catastrophising, tolerate uncertainty better and spend more of your time on the life in front of you. Our page on AI anxiety therapy explains how we work, including acceptance and commitment therapy and mindfulness-based approaches.

The Online Psychologists are HCPC-registered clinical psychologists working online with adults across the UK. If the dread is taking up more of your life than you would like, you can get started whenever you are ready.