Beware "AI Depression": Without the Big Picture, the Brain Fries

Hand a job to AI today and several agents run at once behind the screen, stacking up finished work faster than you can read it. You go through all of it, check it, fix it, and hand over the next job. Repeat that for a day, come home, and your head is foggy; your child is talking and the words do not land. Some parents may be noticing more evenings like this.

Work has certainly gotten faster. And yet you are more tired than before. That feeling is not imaginary.

"Easier, but somehow more tiring" is spreading

In September 2026, NHK's commentary desk reported that more people say they feel drained every time they use AI, and that psychiatrists are urging caution. Psychiatric clinics in Japan have begun listing "AI depression" and "AI stress syndrome" on their websites. Neither is a formal diagnosis, but the terms are in use. In an April 2026 survey by CHOIX of 200 business people who use AI at work, 88.0% said AI had made their work easier, yet 62.0% said they "somehow feel tired." The top causes named were "repeated checking and judging" and "information overload."

A brain that tries to understand everything fries

With a gentle, browser-based AI like ChatGPT, where you ask a question and read the answer, this problem rarely appears, because what comes back fits within what you can read. With Codex or Claude Code, which take an instruction and then write code on their own, several agents running at once, the volume and speed of output exceed the speed at which a human can read. One early user of Gas Town, a system released on New Year's Day 2026 that runs dozens of Claude Code agents at once, wrote: "I had a palpable sense of stress watching it. Gas Town was moving too fast for me."

In a study of 1,488 full-time US workers, published by a Boston Consulting Group (BCG) research team in Harvard Business Review in March 2026, workers whose AI work required a high degree of oversight expended 14% more mental effort and reported 19% more information overload. A person without big-picture judgment still tries to read every line and check everything. Eventually the brain cannot keep up. The researchers defined the state as "mental fatigue from excessive use or oversight of AI tools beyond one's cognitive capacity" and named it "AI brain fry." Fourteen percent of workers using AI for work reported experiencing it. One finance director said they "couldn't even comprehend if what I had created even made sense" and "had to revisit the next day when I could think."

What follows matches the checklists on psychiatric clinic websites. Your mind will not leave the AI even on days off. You lose the sense that you are the one deciding. You cannot feel sure of your own idea until an AI has confirmed it. Eventually daily life is affected. No big picture, an attempt to understand everything, an overloaded brain, then a slide toward depression. That single chain is what "AI depression" really is.

AI chooses its people

The same survey, however, also found the opposite. Workers who used AI to sharply cut routine, repetitive tasks scored 15% lower on burnout. The people who do not fry are the ones who do not try to understand everything. Measured against the goal, is the direction right? Where is checking enough, and what can be left alone? Stop here, or keep going? Making those calls is big-picture judgment. Human attention is finite; the BCG researchers call it "a finite resource" and write that it should go to discernment and decision-making, the most valuable work there is. A site foreman who watches every carpenter's hands all day collapses; one who judges the whole from the drawings and a few key checks keeps the site running.

The more agents you run at once, the more this judgment matters. The BCG researchers name its components: "problem framing, analysis planning, and strategic prioritization." Few people have them. In OpenAI's 2025 analysis of enterprise use, the top 5% of users exchanged about six times as many messages with AI as the median employee (see our May column). For the few with big-picture judgment, AI multiplies their power. For those without it, AI is a tool that fries the brain. That is what it means to say AI chooses its people.

What to give children is not speed but the big picture

Today's children will work in a world where many AI agents running at once is ordinary. The foundation for being among the chosen is not the speed to keep up with the output but big-picture judgment. And that judgment grows out of the experience of deciding what to make, trying, fixing, and finishing it yourself. Someone who has built something from start to finish can tell, without reading every line of what an AI produced, where the crux is and where it will break.

The earlier a child starts building this judgment, the greater the advantage. Before letting an AI produce the answer, think for yourself, decide for yourself, make it with your own hands. Becoming a person who can think for themselves, as early as possible: that is the condition for being on the side AI chooses.

This is why Digital Kodomo BASE in Ota, Tokyo gives children time to decide and build for themselves, through Scratch, Minecraft and assembling PCs. We teach how to use AI too, but "think for yourself" always comes first. How to raise people with big-picture judgment is what we think about every day.