# Protecting Your Mental Health in the Age of AI Course Canonical URL: ## Overview Federal work is speeding up and changing shape as agencies adopt AI, and employees feel that shift long before any policy describes it. This interactive half-day workshop gives government employees a practical way to protect their mental health and well-being while it happens. Participants examine why AI-driven change feels personal rather than merely technical, learn to recognize the early signs of stress, cognitive overload, and burnout in themselves and their colleagues, and rehearse strategies for managing attention, uncertainty, and technology that never switches off. The session is built on federal workplace scenarios, guided self-assessment, and live skills practice. Participants leave with a personal well-being plan, workable boundaries for using AI tools and digital communication, an approach for checking in on a coworker who appears to be struggling, and a clear sense of when and how to connect themselves or someone else to 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