That low hum of dread after another AI headline isn’t dramatic or irrational — it’s a documented psychological response researchers now call AI anxiety. Unlike a specific phobia, it’s diffuse: chronic restlessness, doom-scrolling tech news, a growing sense of irrelevance, and decision fatigue, often showing up all at once with no single clear trigger.

In this video, Rey NP, a dual-certified nurse practitioner, breaks down what the research says is actually driving it — fear of replacement, loss of control over opaque AI decisions, privacy erosion, and misinformation overload — and who it’s hitting hardest, particularly younger workers in creative and knowledge-based fields. He then walks through four research-based interventions: building basic AI literacy to reduce uncertainty, cognitive reframing to challenge catastrophic thinking, reclaiming a sense of control over how and when you use AI tools, and vagus nerve regulation techniques to calm the physical stress response.

Every major technological shift in history has come with widespread anxiety — and every time, people adapted by leaning into what makes them human. This one isn’t different. It’s just faster.