AI brain fry? Here's a 10-minute reset.

I was enjoying my very much needed morning coffee the other day, flipping through the July issue of Harvard Business Review, when I found a name for something I've felt myself more times than I'd like to admit: AI brain fry.

AI brain fry. That's such a good description of the pressure that can build up in your head after too many hours in front of a screen, isn't it?

A name for the fog

A research team at Boston Consulting Group surveyed 1,488 full-time workers in the US about how they use AI and how it affects them. Fourteen percent of those using AI at work said they'd experienced mental fatigue from the excessive use and oversight of AI tools.

They described it as fog. Buzzing. A mental hangover. One engineering manager put it beautifully: not physically tired, just crowded, like a dozen browser tabs open in your head, all fighting for attention.

If you work in marketing, you might recognize this more than most. Marketers reported it most frequently of all departments, at nearly 26 percent.

It isn't burnout

Here's what I found most interesting in the research: AI brain fry is not burnout.

When people used AI to take over repetitive, boring tasks, their burnout scores actually went down, by 15 percent in the study. AI genuinely removes toil, and that is a gift.

The fatigue comes from something else: the supervising. Checking outputs. Comparing tools. Deciding what to trust. Holding the full context in your head while three different assistants produce things faster than you can properly read them.

That kind of work draws continuously on attention, working memory and decision-making, and those resources are finite. The researchers found that people experiencing brain fry made more errors and reported 33 percent more decision fatigue. That number stopped me.

I use AI every single day, across all three of my businesses. I wouldn't want to work without it. But I know exactly the static they're describing. It isn't tiredness from doing the work. It's tiredness from managing the work.

What I made

I don't have the whole solution to that, but I did feel the urge to create something that I know can help, and it doesn't take more than ten minutes. So no excuse there. You can even do it during your commute: close your eyes and plug in your headphones.

So I made a 10-minute therapeutic soundscape, or meditation if you like, for exactly those moments: my voice, violin, sounds from nature and other therapeutic frequencies. Composed and recorded by me, a real human being. No AI-generated audio.

That last part matters to me. If human attention really is the finite resource the researchers describe, the antidote shouldn't add another layer of the same thing. When your brain is saturated from evaluating machine output all day, I wanted to offer it something with a heartbeat, like mine, or a bird's.

How to use it

This one is designed to fit inside an ordinary workday. You do not need a yoga mat, an app streak or a free evening. You need ten minutes and a pair of headphones.

Find a place where you probably won't be disturbed. Be creative here:

• your parked car
• an empty meeting room
• a bench outside the office
• a stairwell
• the toilet, honestly

I've heard of people booking a phone booth at their coworking space just to close their eyes. There is no wrong location.

Download the track (yes, I've enabled that), switch on flight mode, plug in your headphones, press play, and let your attention rest on one single thing for once: nothing. Just put the audio on and let me do the rest. If you drift off, that's totally fine.

When it ends, you go back. That's the whole practice.

It won't solve a badly designed workflow, and I would never claim it does. What it offers is a way back to clarity of mind, and that's what we all need to solve our biggest challenges.

I hope you enjoy the ten-minute break, and I'd love to hear how it works for you.

If you know anyone who could use a relaxing reset, feel free to share it with them. Thank you.

With love,

Aja