How I Learned to Stop in the AI Era
Honestly, I was close to burnout last year. But the strange thing was — my mind wasn’t empty. It was the opposite.
I was in a constant state of hyperarousal. My brain was always on. Always processing. Always alert to the next thing. It wasn’t that I didn’t know what to do — I knew exactly what needed to be done. The problem was that I couldn’t stop doing it. Couldn’t stop scanning, reading, absorbing. Couldn’t turn it off at night, couldn’t turn it off on weekends, couldn’t turn it off when I was sitting with my family.
The loop that never closed
The pattern looked something like this.
A new model drops on X. I need to check it — not just read the headline, but understand what it changes, whether it affects what we’re building, whether my team should pivot. A new framework is trending on GitHub. I need to test it this week. If I don’t, I’ll fall behind. Everyone else is probably already integrating it. We need to move fast or we’ll miss the window.
That urgency felt real. In the AI industry right now, it often is real. Six months of lag can mean you’re building on assumptions that are already obsolete. So there was always a rational justification for the next thing I needed to check.
But that’s the real problem with information overload in the AI era. It doesn’t end at reading. When you read something, you feel like you have to act on it. When you don’t act, you feel anxious. When you feel anxious, you read more to figure out what you’re missing. The loop never closes.
By the time I’d get through my morning feeds, a new wave of things had arrived. X, GitHub Trending, GeekNews, Slack — each platform a different flavor of the same pressure. And unlike social media anxiety, this felt productive. I was staying current. I was doing my job. That made it harder to see the damage.
I was irritable. Sleeping badly. The moment I lay down, my mind would resume whatever thread I’d left unfinished. I’d wake up already in motion.
What I did
At some point, I stopped going directly to the platforms.
I set up an AI agent to filter and deliver only what I actually needed to see. Key accounts on X whose signal-to-noise ratio I trusted, GitHub Trending filtered by relevance, GeekNews highlights — instead of diving in myself, I receive a curated summary once a day. I read it, I close it, I’m done.
Slack was the same. I stopped living in the channels. I stopped treating it as a real-time stream that required continuous attention. I set up monitoring for the keywords and threads that genuinely needed my response, and checked in when something surfaced. Everything else could wait.
The underlying principle was simple: I moved the filtering upstream. Instead of putting myself in a river of information and trying to swim selectively, I built a system that brought only what was worth reading to my attention before I ever had to make a judgment call.
Everyone knows that once you open X, it’s hard to stop. That it’s designed that way — algorithmically optimized to generate the next click. So I stopped relying on willpower and blocked the entrance entirely.
What I got back
Happiness came back. Actual happiness, not just the absence of stress.
When talking with my team, I started feeling something I’d lost — a sense of shared accomplishment. The feeling of building something together, of moving in the same direction, of finishing things. When you’re running at maximum speed all the time, you stop noticing what you’ve done. Everything becomes a launchpad for the next thing. That reconnection to completion, to the people I was working with, was something I hadn’t realized I’d been missing.
And the most important thing — my family.
When I was living in hyperarousal, I was physically present but mentally somewhere else. My body was home, but my mind was still running tabs on things I needed to check, articles I needed to read, decisions I needed to make. My attention was never fully where I was. That changed. Not dramatically, not overnight — but it changed.
It sounds like a small thing. It isn’t.
The irony of the AI era
You can’t slow down the pace. That’s just true. New models keep dropping, new frameworks keep shipping, the competitive landscape keeps shifting. Anyone in this industry who thinks they can simply opt out of staying current is going to find out the hard way that they can’t.
But surviving inside that pace is a different question from consuming everything it produces. And I think a lot of people in tech — especially people who are genuinely curious, genuinely motivated — are confusing the two.
The speed isn’t optional. Your relationship to the speed is.
What I found is that sustainability requires a solid personal routine: clear rules about when to look, when to stop, and what to filter. Without that structure, the pace doesn’t just accelerate your work — it accelerates your depletion. You can run fast for a while without direction. You can’t do it indefinitely.
The direction is what you recover when you stop flooding your mind with input. The judgment — what to build, what to ignore, what actually matters — that comes back when you give it space.
It’s still a little ironic: in the AI era, the way I learned to use AI better was to use AI to filter out everything AI was producing. But that’s where I am. And it’s working.
Written on a day when I actually got enough sleep.