Key points
- The demands of AI oversight, not AI use, are what’s exhausting leaders and degrading decision quality.
- Chronic stress physically weakens the prefrontal cortex, aka the brain that leads.
- Unplugging isn’t weakness—it’s the discipline that restores the thinking AI can’t do.
Over a decade ago, I wrote Rewired about our always-on, overwired world. I thought that I understood the costs, but AI changed the game again.
Like many clients, I felt AI moving closer to my business. The demands, pressure, and urgency mounted. AI’s ability to help you do more, faster, and better is seductively tempting. For a while, I ran harder and consumed more, all the while trying to adapt and recalibrate. The tools promised efficiency. What I experienced was a new exhaustion: the kind that a good night’s sleep can’t touch.
I unplugged from it all: the technology, my team, the constant stream of input, and even my family. I gave myself time in nature. Here’s what became clear to me: I was struggling to lead at all. I was managing a condition I’d created.
The research not only backs this up, but it also foreshadows something even more grim.
AI Is an Accelerant
For years, leaders have lived in a state of constant context-switching. AI added a new layer. Now you’re not just doing your job; you’re monitoring AI doing your job. You’re correcting its output. You’re deciding what it should and shouldn’t do. You’re continually pivoting between three modes of work, often simultaneously.
Rather than productivity, this is cognitive exhaustion masquerading as efficiency.
In March 2026, researchers at BCG published findings confirming what many of us feel: The mental fatigue isn’t from using AI. It’s from supervising it. Workers with high AI oversight loads reported 14 percent more mental effort, 12 percent more mental fatigue, and 19 percent more information overload than workers who actually delegated to AI.
There are neurological costs to all this switching. Every context shift forces your brain to shut down one framework and rebuild another. It consumes mental resources and elevates cortisol. Add constant AI monitoring to the mix, and you’re asking your brain to do something it wasn’t designed to sustain.
Productivity peaks at one to three AI tools. Add a fourth, and it drops.
What Chronic Stress Does to Leadership Capacity
Neuroscientist Amy Arnsten is an expert on the prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for planning, judgment, impulse control, and strategic decision-making. The part of your brain essential to leading.
Her finding is stark: Chronic stress weakens the prefrontal cortex. Under sustained pressure, your brain isn’t just tired—it’s stressed. It’s structurally different.
You are being asked to make more complex decisions faster, with less certainty, and to use tools that require constant oversight. Meanwhile, your nervous system is already running on cortisol rather than genuine energy. Chronic stress erodes the leadership capacities that built your success: discernment, pattern recognition, and judgment amid ambiguity.
You cannot think clearly when your brain is fried. We know this.
Organizations doubling down on AI without addressing this are reporting 39 percent more major errors and 33 percent more decision fatigue. This is a business problem, not a wellness issue.
The Paradox: FOBO Creates the Exact Condition It Fears
Underneath all of this is a new dread: “If I unplug, I’ll fall behind. If I don’t master the next tool, I’ll become obsolete. If I rest, someone else will surpass me.”
FOBO, fear of being obsolete, is producing the very condition that leaves you behind.
Leaders who can unplug will return with clarity. They make better judgments that compound over time. Running faster, you might make more decisions, but quality deteriorates. Fear of falling behind is actually falling behind faster.
Productivity Essential Reads
The Hidden Advantage of Ultra-Successful People
AI and the Attention Crisis at Work
Only 20 percent of employees globally are engaged at work (Gallup, 2026). Stress, anger, and sadness remain high. Companies report that 79 percent of employees don’t trust the organizational changes, including AI rollouts, that their leaders are implementing. And only 32 percent of leaders report achieving healthy adoption of major transitions.
As one researcher put it plainly: “AI is not entering healthy systems. It is entering exhausted ones.”
When I unplugged, my mind cleared. I realized how much decision-making I’d outsourced to urgency. I saw the ways my teams were craving more clarity and direction. Acceleration is one option.
What This Asks of Leaders Now
It’s a systems problem, not a wellness problem. Engage at each level.
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Individual:Protect what AI cannot do. Strategic discernment. Pattern recognition. Judgment that requires you to sit in tension and complexity. Unplug long enough to re-engage your prefrontal cortex. Notice where you’ve outsourced thinking. Your decisions matter too much for them to be made by a fried brain.
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Team: Make decision rights visible. Establish what gets delegated to AI and what doesn’t. Build cadences that include time for thinking. Protect conversations that require your actual presence. Your team is watching to see whether unplugging reads as discipline or weakness.
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Organization: Treat recovery as infrastructure, not a perk. Invest in psychological safety before the next AI rollout, not after. Develop your leaders for discernment alongside technical fluency. Build a culture where stepping back to think is seen as leadership, not laziness.
The data is decisive. Companies that invest in human capability before deploying AI see 2.8x higher ROI (Deloitte). Organizations with psychological safety are five times more likely to successfully scale AI (Microsoft). And 70 to 85 percent of AI transformations fail, not because the technology didn’t work, but because the human systems weren’t ready (McKinsey, Gartner, Kyndryl).
Better leadership doesn’t come from faster decisions. It comes from clearer thinking. Clear thinking requires a brain that isn’t fried.
Questions Worth Asking
For 20 years, we’ve asked: How do I get ahead? How do I move faster? How do I do more?
Ask better questions: What do I need to think clearly about? What attention is worth protecting? What do I want my business, my leadership, and my life to be built on?
When I unplugged, I came back sharper, more decisive, and more connected to what really matters.
This is the new discipline.
References
Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2648
Bedard, J., Kropp, M., Hsu, M., Karaman, O. T., Hawes, J., & Kellerman, G. R. (2026, March 5). When using AI leads to “brain fry.” Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2026/03/when-using-ai-leads-to-brain-fry
Deloitte. (2026). The state of AI in the enterprise: The untapped edge. Deloitte. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/what-we-do/capabilities/applied-artificial-intelligence/content/state-of-ai-in-the-enterprise.html
Gallup. (2026). State of the global workplace: 2026 report. Gallup. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx
Gartner. (2025, July 8). Gartner HR research finds just 32% of business leaders report achieving healthy change adoption by employees. Gartner. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-07-08-gartner-hr-research-finds-just-32-percent-of-business-leaders-report-achieving-healthy-change-adoption-by-employees
Gartner. (2025, February 26). Lack of AI-ready data puts AI projects at risk. Gartner. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-02-26-lack-of-ai-ready-data-puts-ai-projects-at-risk
Gartner. (2025, June 25). Gartner predicts over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by end of 2027. Gartner. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-06-25-gartner-predicts-over-40-percent-of-agentic-ai-projects-will-be-canceled-by-end-of-2027
Gartner. (2026, January 26). Why 50% of GenAI projects fail—and how to beat the odds. Gartner. https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/genai-project-failure
Kyndryl. (2025). The readiness tipping point: Kyndryl readiness report 2025. Kyndryl. https://www.kyndryl.com/us/en/insights/readiness-report-2025
Mayer, H., Yee, L., Chui, M., & Roberts, R. (2025, January 28). Superagency in the workplace: Empowering people to unlock AI’s full potential at work. McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/tech-and-ai/our-insights/superagency-in-the-workplace-empowering-people-to-unlock-ais-full-potential-at-work
Microsoft. (2026, May 12). Research drop: The human conditions behind AI value at work. Microsoft Community Hub. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/microsoftvivablog/research-drop-the-human-conditions-behind-ai-value-at-work/4518613
