# Protecting Your Mental Health in the Age of AI Course (Self-Paced) Canonical URL: ## Overview AI is changing how fast federal work moves and what that work actually consists of, and those shifts land on people well before they land on an org chart. This self-paced course treats the experience as a workplace condition to be managed rather than a private shortcoming. You will examine why AI-driven change registers as personal, learn to spot the early markers of cognitive overload and burnout in yourself and in the people around you, and practice concrete methods for protecting attention, tolerating uncertainty, and working alongside tooling that never switches off. The course runs on federal workplace scenarios, guided self-assessment, and skills practice, and it closes on a well-being plan written for your own situation. Along the way you will set workable boundaries with AI tools and digital communication, learn how to check in on a colleague who appears to be struggling, and locate the line between ordinary adjustment stress and a concern that warrants professional support. This course builds workplace well-being skills and is not a substitute for clinical assessment, diagnosis, or treatment. ## What you'll learn - Explain how AI adoption is changing the pace, content, and experience of federal work, and why those changes affect mental health and well-being - Recognize early signs of stress, cognitive overload, and burnout in yourself and your colleagues in AI-enabled work environments - Apply evidence-informed strategies for managing uncertainty, workload, and attention in an always-on technology environment - Set practical boundaries with AI tools and digital communication that protect focus, rest, and recovery - Respond supportively to a colleague who appears to be struggling and connect them to appropriate agency resources - Distinguish ordinary adjustment stress from concerns that warrant professional support, and build a personal well-being plan ## Curriculum #### Module 1: Welcome & Why AI Change Feels Personal - Establish a shared, plain-language foundation for how AI is changing government work and why those changes register as personal rather than purely technical - Examine the specific features of AI-driven change — speed, uncertainty, role ambiguity, and constant re-learning — that make it a recognized workplace stressor - Explore how AI-related job and role uncertainty functions as a workplace condition to be managed rather than a personal shortcoming - Complete a confidential self-check on current workload, focus, sleep, and stress levels to establish a personal baseline for the session - Clarify the scope of the course, including the difference between workplace wellbeing skills and clinical mental health care - Normalize the full range of reactions to AI adoption — curiosity, fatigue, relief, loss, and fear — and establish ground rules for a psychologically safe discussion - Reflect on how AI has already changed participants' own work in order to frame the skills built across the remaining modules #### Module 2: How AI-Enabled Work Affects the Mind and Body - Examine how AI changes the texture of daily work, shifting effort from producing output toward directing, reviewing, and verifying it - Recognize verification fatigue and sustained-attention demands as genuine sources of cognitive load, and locate them in participants' own workflows - Analyze the stress effects of accelerated expectations, compressed timelines, and always-available tooling in AI-enabled offices - Identify how the loss of craft, mastery, and professional identity can drive disengagement even when measured workload goes down - Explore the isolation risks of AI-mediated collaboration and reduced peer contact, with particular attention to remote and hybrid staff - Distinguish ordinary stress responses from the behavioral, cognitive, and physical indicators of burnout - Map personal stress triggers and early warning signs onto a simple private tracking tool participants can keep using after the course #### Module 3: Building Your Wellbeing Toolkit - Apply practical strategies for protecting attention, including focus blocks, notification limits, and deliberate single-tasking - Set sustainable boundaries with AI tools and digital communication that preserve rest, recovery, and genuine off-duty time - Practice reframing and uncertainty-tolerance techniques that reduce rumination about shifting roles and job security - Use brief, evidence-informed regulation practices — paced breathing, movement breaks, and micro-recovery — that fit inside a federal workday - Evaluate appropriate and inappropriate uses of AI chatbots for personal support, including privacy, accuracy, and government-device considerations - Rebuild sources of meaning, mastery, and connection at work through mentoring, peer learning, and purposeful human collaboration - Assemble a personalized toolkit of two or three practices participants will realistically sustain, and plan for the obstacles most likely to derail them #### Module 4: Supporting Others & Your Path Forward - Identify what supervisors and coworkers can do to build psychological safety during AI adoption and technology change - Practice a structured, low-risk check-in conversation with a colleague who appears to be struggling - Recognize the limits of a peer or supervisory role, including when and how to hand off to trained professional help - Locate the support resources available to federal employees, including the Employee Assistance Program, Federal Occupational Health services, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, and agency reasonable-accommodation processes - Address the stigma and confidentiality concerns that keep government employees from seeking help - Build a personal wellbeing plan with specific practices, checkpoints, and named sources of support - Commit to one team-level action — a meeting norm, a workload practice, or a conversation with leadership — that improves collective wellbeing ## Pricing **Tuition:** $675