Heard But Unresolved: A Cute Little Workflow

Have you ever finished a long conversation with an AI chatbot, felt completely understood, closed the app, and then woken up two days later with the exact same feeling?

That's what this episode is about.

In Heard But Unresolved: A Cute Little Workflow, Gabby Turner gets into something nobody is quite naming yet — the difference between feeling heard and actually processing something. After her therapist asked whether there was anything she had been bringing to Claude that should have been coming to therapy instead, Gabby started paying attention to a pattern: she had been outsourcing her emotional processing to AI like it was a workflow, and the feelings just kept coming back.

This episode covers what happens when instant gratification meets human emotion, why the pressure release valve that AI provides can quietly replace real emotional work, and what changed when Gabby stopped using Claude as a confidant and started using it as a tool. Spoiler: her productivity went up, her clarity got sharper, and she finally had something to actually bring to therapy.

Gabby also unpacks the shame and brain rot narrative around AI use, the 10-80-10 rule, and why even feeling the need to explain how she uses AI says something about the moment we're all living in right now. As a Black podcaster navigating digital wellness in real time, this episode is as much about self-awareness as it is about technology.

Whether you're someone who journals, someone who has tried to journal, or someone who has been doing their emotional processing in an AI chat window at 1am — this one is for the big feelers, the overthinkers, and anyone who has ever thought "I did the work" when what they actually did was move the feeling somewhere more convenient.

While I've Got You is a short-form podcast about culture, identity, and the moments worth noticing. New episodes monthly.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I'm Gabby and you're listening to While I've Got You. Let's start the show. Hello everybody and welcome back to the podcast. So right before I graduated from therapy recently, congratulations to me, cute confetti and fireworks, champagne spritz for everybody. A few weeks ago, before I graduated from this round of therapy, my therapist asked me such a crazy out-of-pocket question that I didn't think she would ask, but like was probably necessary. It's been very helpful. She did her big one on that. My therapist asked me if there was anything that I was talking to Claude about that I should be bringing to therapy. And I'll be honest, I'd noticed how many times I'd said and then I talked to ChatGPT, which of course eventually turned into Claude. Because saying and then I talked to ChatGPT sounds so cringe to me. I just never actually thought I should be keeping track of the things that I had already basically processed with ChatGPT and save them for my bi-weekly therapy sessions to talk with the person that I was paying to do talk therapy with. Things are still, I think, a little too new for anyone to be able to give like a clear warning, any clear data or research that says AI specifically is bad for your mental health. And so, of course, for some of us, including myself, talking through feelings with AI is sort of like a pressure release valve. And it feels like emotional work because you're talking back and forth, what could have just turned from a quick, you know, I noticed that this is how I was feeling today, to a 45-minute dissection of the nuance of the very particular thing that you're feeling starts to feel like emotional work, but I'm here to sadly, sadly argue that it's quietly replacing it. Now, if you know me, if you've ever been around me, or you've got a Cancer Sun, Cancer Moon, Capricorn rising in your life, then you know that we are big feelers and we're usually pretty private about our our emotions. Our emotions are a lot, mine are sort of always right under the surface. And when one bubbles up, it's like a gut punch. And I want it addressed and placated as soon as possible. Especially because I have anxiety, my brain and ADHD. She's got them all. My brain will hyper focus on that feeling, will hyper focus on what I could have done better, how I could have handled it. If I do this, then this will happen, and it just won't shut up. So I want that feeling like addressed as soon as possible. And because I was doing therapy bi-weekly, I didn't feel like I necessarily had the time or the patience, probably a little bit more on the patient side, to like hold that emotion or sit in that discomfort for two weeks. Two weeks at a time. I'm supposed to just be like, my body looks weird, and I don't know whose body that is, and that's uncomfortable for me. For two weeks. At 1 a.m. on a Wednesday while I'm standing in my bathroom, having the big feels, waiting for my shower to heat up, and then I'm gonna go to bed well rested because I mean I did the work, I named them a feeling, I talked about it. What I noticed much later, and only after my therapist like prompted me with that question, and I made the very brave decision to go out into the unknown and start processing these feelings in a journal only, that I was processing the same things over and over and over again. I would stand into my bathroom at 1 a.m. on a Wednesday and talk about whatever was going to be keeping me up that night, would somewhat resolve it, and then I'd go talk to my therapist. Didn't have anything to talk about because I'd already dealt with that issue a couple days prior. We'd talk about traders and summer house, not to discredit my therapist, she's an amazing therapist, she has given me more tools than any therapist I've ever had, and I have had quite a few. That's why I have a podcast now. It wasn't until after that conversation and realizing that flexing the muscle of instant gratification through this like instantaneous understanding that AI just has that it was probably gonna cause me to develop like really unhelpful habits. Instant gratification is the best until you become dependent on it. I didn't want to develop unhelpful habits, so like I said, I braved the wild, the unknown, went out on a journey, and I decided to altogether stop talking to Claude about my sadness, about my body dysmorphia, about my anxiety, and about my depression, and I directed my feelings to a journal where I could both name the feeling and sort of document and keep track of the triggers. And when I was journaling, because there's no response back, I could only respond to myself. I could only say this is what I'm feeling and this is what I think that means. But it kind of required me to sit in those feelings instead of pushing them aside. And from there, I pretty much have altogether stopped chatting about those sparks of like intense emotion. Basically, those feelings that come out when it's dark outside. I stopped talking about those with an AI chatbot all together. And imagine what that opened up for me. It's allowed me to really instead focus on new ways to use AI to do AI things. The title of my upcoming TED Talk. Even at work this week, I've had such a cool week setting up reports teaching Claude how to read reports, do research, kind of do my job the way that I do it, just not as well. Because some of the best wisdom I've ever gotten is I'll teach you everything you know, but I'm not about to teach you everything I know. And that's how AI should be treated in the workplace. So I got to set up reports, I standardized Slack messages, I pulled data for presentations. It really helped me be more productive, and I also got to outsource it to things like my skincare routine, my budget, reconciling my bank account, all of those things were opportunities that I wouldn't necessarily have discovered if I had spent more time just processing the big gut punches with chat. I'm obviously not here to tell you how to use AI, that's not the vibe of this podcast. Like I mentioned, it is an opportunity and kind of a great resource to me, especially Claude, to utilize. If you don't have a trusted adult, if you don't have a therapist, if you don't have someone that you can talk to, use AI. If you don't have the resources, we work with the tools that we have, and Claude is really good about that. I really like that if you get into nitty-gritty territory, Claude will say, Have you considered a therapist? Which is good. And if you're talking to Claude because you need a therapist and don't have access to one, ultimately unhelpful. I'm not here to tell you how to use AI, and I personally think that they can pry my best friend Claude out of my cold dead hands at this point. I'm hooked. That's the homie. I also feel that with so much of the conversation being that AI is ruining people's creativity. Nobody has a personality, it's all AI. Nobody's autonomous, it's just all AI. Nobody can use critical thinking skills, they only use AI. I want to clarify right now how I use AI. When it comes to how I show up in the world, I use the like 1080-10 rule. So I have to gather all the information, create the necessary tools, resources to give to Claude. I ask Claude to do a thing. Claude does 80% of that thing. And then I go back in at the end with another 10% of human touch and zhizing for things to be the way that I like. And that's for most things. I want to be so clear. This podcast is all me. When it doesn't go out for a month, that's all me. Okay? Just to be clear. I obviously wanted to talk about this topic, and I'm also noticing in real time that because there is shame around using AI, I think it's getting a little bit better. Like more of my algorithm is people being like, This is how you can find a job in an economy where no one's hiring, use AI. This is how you can hack social media, use AI. This is how you can connect it to Google Calendar, use AI. While I'm seeing more of that in my algorithm and things are getting a little bit better, there's still a level of like brain rot associated with it that I am realizing that even me feeling the need to explain how I use AI is based in insecurity. Ooh, sit in it, hello, is based in shame and is based in like a desire for people to still see me as creative and to still see me as capable, which adds a layer to this conversation, and it's one that we're not gonna get in today, folks. So now that I'm saving my emotional processing one battle at a time, not one battle after another, one at a time. Now that I'm saving my emotional processing and like my mental health work to a professional and to a classic old pen to paper, I am spending so much more time looking for opportunities to outsource things to my AI assistant. And I'm trying to be better at being mindful that the space I created for myself to feel and to notice things is not getting filled up in the name of productivity. I don't want the source of all of my podcast ideas, which is just me noticing and responding to the world around me, to get pushed out by trying to like life hack my individuality into oblivion. And I'm just a girl, so it's a work in progress. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll catch you all in the next episode. Bye!