How to manage thoughts and feelings in the age of AI
Let’s face it: being human comes with no user manual.
Egg meets sperm, the magic begins. Day one runs on pure instinct: eat, sleep, pee, poop. Newborns sleep roughly 14 to 17 hours a day. Efficient. Next phase: copy and paste. We imitate everything we see. Then trial and error. Hot stove? Ouch. Lesson learned.
Then school, society and social media arrive, and suddenly everybody has an opinion about who you should be. Mom’s voice. The teacher’s voice. That one ex. The influencer. A whole chorus, and nobody asked for it. Thousands and thousands of thoughts a day, and the mind wanders almost half of our waking hours.
We learned the capital of Peru. But what to do with that quiet background hum of “not enough” that most of us don’t even know we’re carrying? Nobody mentioned that.
Who arrives first?
Reflexes: the body clicks in. Zero thinking. A newborn “knows”.
Feelings: hungry = scream. Held = bliss. Very clear, very direct.
Habits: copy, paste, repeat. We function like Pavlov’s conditioned dog: saliva comes with the sound of a bell!!
Thoughts: arrive last, many scientists say. Like a commentator who tries to make sense of it all.
The commentator talks the loudest. But the game started long before he got the microphone.
The commentator
Around age two, words arrive, and with them the little word “I”. Now the mind can compare, judge and tell a story about who we are. No songs, no jokes, no newsletters without it.
The trouble starts when we believe the story is the truth. Take “I’m not enough”. Most people never think that sentence out loud. It hides in the background: in the tension after a small criticism, in the urge to prove, please or perfect. It feels like a fact, it comes semi undercover, so nobody questions it. And the more we feel it, the more proof the mind finds for it, highly creative, just matching the stories. Round and round it goes.
Add habits (roughly 40% of what we do each day), and a lot of life runs on autopilot.
People have been sitting down to meditate for thousands of years: to discover that the thinking mind is a tool, not who you are. A brilliant tool. But a tool you can pick up and put down. A thought is a visitor, not the landlord.
Autopilot means well. It wants you safe, and familiar seems to equal safe. So when something touches an old pattern, it feels like shit and it sounds the alarm: a knot, a tightness, a heat in the chest. Often unnoticed.
Uncomfortable? Yes. Dangerous? No.
To unlearn being bound to past habitual reactions, it takes a moment between trigger and reaction. Maybe just one breath. That’s the freeing moment.
Dare to explore: What does it feel like in the body, before the story starts? Stay a moment longer. Curious, not running (snacking, smoking, scrolling).
The spark under the noise
Remember the moment you lost track of time? That quiet “yes” in your chest? That wasn’t a thought. It was there before the thoughts arrived. No reason, no plan, no strategy. It’s what aliveness feels like, and it never left. The noise just got louder.
Enter AI
AI answers in seconds, never gets tired, never rolls its eyes. A fantastic tool. So here’s the real question, and it’s not “Will AI take over?”
It’s: Who do you ask first?
Not long ago, the world was slower. Fewer voices, fewer screens, more empty moments at the bus stop or the window. Kids grew up without mobiles. Boredom was an everyday exercise in staying with an uncomfortable feeling, and seeing what comes up. Today every gap is filled. Feeds know what keeps us scrolling. Notifications ring before a feeling has finished arriving. And AI answers before the question has taken a breath.
Here’s the sneaky part: it sounds so sure, it’s so friendly, and it tends to agree with us. That feels like clarity. But it’s borrowed clarity. Every time we ask the machine before we ask ourselves, a little piece of agency walks out the door, quietly, politely, with a smile.
AI predicts the next word. You are the one living the life. When the world has an answer for everything, knowing what is actually yours (this feeling, this thought, this quiet “yes” or “no” in the body) is the one thing that can’t be outsourced.
AI is a tool. So is the thinking mind. Brilliant ones. The trouble starts when we give away our agency without even noticing.
Some things can’t be just thought or read. They have to be walked. Experienced.
There’s a reason people go for a walk when their head is full. A Stanford study found that walking boosts creative thinking by around 60%, and a 90-minute walk in nature quiets the brain activity linked to rumination, unlike a walk along a busy street.
Science is the boring part. The interesting part happens somewhere between the pines and the sea, when you experience something different from autopilot, and you notice it. That’s where agency comes back. Or at least you notice how easily it slips away: to nonstop thinking, to endless scrolling, to AI answers that arrive before your own.
Walking is a great way to interrupt the autopilot. Laughing at it is another great way.
Picture a stage, where the inner critic finally gets a microphone, and a whole room laughs, because everyone knows those annoying voices. Awareness meets music, improvisation and a lot of perfectly useful uncomfortable truth, played with instead of fixed. That’s the heart of The Golden Shit Show.
And suddenly the question changes: What if that uncomfortable shit is gold, like manure to a field of possibility?
Imagine it’s true that there are endless possibilities, and that how kindly you meet your feelings, your thoughts and your habits makes all the difference in a situation.
Written by someone who is used to asking unexpected questions for a living. Mostly on a trail.
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