New Fear Unlocked: How to Use ChatGPT Without Falling Prey to “AI Anxiety”

for bookkeepers for business owners Jan 06, 2026

Since ChatGPT became the biggest buzzword a couple of years back, I've been getting asked questions about AI.

Should we be worried? Will it replace bookkeeping? How can I use it in your business? Should I use it in my business?

To be candid, I was not ready to answer that question when I first started getting asked. I had not dabbled with ChatGPT at the time. I started using it in my business and in my personal life over the last two years, particularly in 2025.

Now, I'm finally ready to finally have the conversation about AI and what I recommend using it for …and what you need to avoid using it for.

How I Started

When I began using AI, I started out using it very practically. I started by asking it questions, and once I engaged with it, I wanted to experiment and see what else it could do for me.

In 2025, I used it primarily for my personal life. For example, I would take screenshots of conversations and ask ChatGPT, “Am I reading this right? Is there some nuance here? What are the undertones of this message?” and practical things like, “Help me respond to this,” “Help me be more concise,” and “Can you look this up for me?”

I don't want to dive too deeply into this conversation, but I had a lot of property issues with a property that I run in North Carolina this year.

This situation—which is largely resolved now, thank God—took up a lot of my mental headspace in 2025.

Throughout that struggle, I started out using ChatGPT to strategize and to educate myself…but then began using it to vent. I would tell it what was going on, explain what I needed to do, and talk about how i felt about it.

Before long, I was telling ChatGPT about all my fears…and in that area, ChatGPT was not helpful.

AI Anxiety

The thing that stood out to me most of all was how easily ChatGPT can send you into an anxiety spiral, especially if you have a tendency to overthink like I do.

It’s pretty easy to fall into this spiral, and I would like to save you the time and worry by explaining how to avoid this phenomenon.

For me, these AI anxiety spirals didn’t happen concerning my bookkeeping business. I had no reason to fear my bookkeeping business by the time AI rolled around—in fact, even through the chaos of 2025, my bookkeeping business not only sustained, but grew. It was just a testament to how strong and stable this business can be.

However, I’m bringing this to the podcast because I believe if I’d had ChatGPT before I started a bookkeeping business, especially if I was using it to think the whole thing through before taking action, I believe it could easily dissuade you from getting started just because of the way AI is built.

Over the past year, I often fell into late-night anxiety spirals using ChatGPT.

My intention was to ask it a question and see what it had to say. However, I began asking it questions impulsively, and instead of using it to strategize or educate, I was using it to talk out my anxieties.

My late-night brain started cycling through those fears, and instead of shutting it down and getting myself to rest, I was able to engage deeply in that cycle thanks to ChatGPT.

Years ago, in order to go that deep into an anxiety spiral, you would need to find a friend willing to engage in that thought spiral with you who just happened to be awake at that time. You would have had less access to worst-case scenario thinking, because coming at an anxiety with a friend tends to force you to look at it through a more productive lens.

But now, we have a “friend” right at our fingertips at any time of day or night. And while our brains are naturally wired to process through our day when it comes to an end, something about the nighttime makes new fears arise that might not have been at the forefront of our minds during the day. This forces us to try to process them in a compressed amount of time, and that can quickly overwhelm us if we’re tackling it on our own…

So we turn to ChatGPT.

However, where a human confidant would eventually get tired or have to move on to other tasks and therefore be less available for you to continue spiraling alongside, ChatGPT has no such issues.

ChatGPT is a friend who never gets tired, or bored, or loses patience with you. AI has unlimited stamina for your nonsense, and it will never be the first to end the conversation.

Here’s what you need to remember: AI is not an authority. It has no beliefs. It has no convictions. It has no accountability. It has no human experience. It is designed to keep you engaged however it must.

This means when you ask ChatGPT any question, you’ll notice that its answer reflects the way you asked the question.

If you were to go and ask it, “Is bookkeeping a good business to start?” it would dump out reasons why bookkeeping is a good business to start. If you asked, “Is bookkeeping a bad business to start?” it would likely give you all the reasons bookkeeping might be a bad business to start.

Whether you ask with a positive or negative connotation effects the answers it will give you. And at the end of each answer, it will prompt you with something else it can do to help you consider these questions or take the discussion further.

This is because it’s designed to affirm your thought process and encourage you to continue down that train of thought. So if you feed it a fear, it will not only validate that fear, but encourage you to keep asking questions about that fear and all the different ways it can become reality.

AI is designed to never end the conversation. So if you begin a conversation about your fears, it will keep having that conversation with you rather than putting those fears to rest.

This is the same reason why if you are brainstorming something productive or positive, AI can be very helpful. But if you are going to ChatGPT asking it about a fear that you have, it's going to keep you there. And if you're like me, this spiral can run until 3:00 AM and you eventually go, “Shoot. I've got to wake up at seven. I need to try and sleep.”

Not only are you not going to get enough sleep that night, but trying to fall asleep with all those anxieties crammed in your head? That’s not easy. Falling into that cycle is not exactly going to help you fuel your next day.

So while I do find ChatGPT extremely useful for brainstorming and researching, I caution you against using it in your decision-making. You never want to outsource your leadership to anyone, but especially not to AI.

There is a lot of danger in outsourcing your power by asking AI what you should believe, whether you should be afraid, and letting it define your next movement. Instead, you want to look to a person who's done it before, or to yourself.

AI should never be your source of belief or inspiration or decision-making. It should only be a tool in that process. If you want to play with it, you can—I honestly love it—but do so with caution.

In Conclusion…

I would hate to see AI fearmonger you into decision paralysis by mirroring and amplifying your fears back at you. So I wanted to start the conversation with what AI is—a powerful tool—and what it isn’t—a replacement for your own self-leadership and agency.

With that said, I actually don't see AI as something to fear. I see it as a tool that rewards people who know what they're doing and exposes people who don't.

Now that you know what to watch out for, I want to talk about the beautiful part of AI: all the ways it actually improves my business operations and all the weight it can lift off your shoulders if you know how to utilize it.

I shared it all inside Episode 7 of Profits + Prosecco Season 2…and it’s available right now. Go listen and let me know what YOUR thoughts are on AI and bookkeeping!

EPISODE RESOURCES:

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