AI, ADHD, And Humanness with Dr. Tracy Dennis Tiwary

The Anxious Achiever

Morra Aarons-Mele

Business, Careers, Management, Health & Fitness, Mental Health

4.7 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 18 November 2025

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Is your anxiety about AI actually trying to help you? In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Tracy Dennis Tiwary to talk about AI anxiety, overdiagnosis, ADHD, and why we’ve medicalized so much of our emotional life that we’ve lost sight of what it means to be human. Tracy shares why we were unprepared for the mental health fallout of social media, why we’re just as unprepared for AI, and how leaders can support teams through technological uncertainty without collapsing into fear or false certainty. Tune in to learn how to engage with AI without losing your humanity and how to work with your anxiety instead of treating it like an enemy. Check out our sponsors: Northwest Registered Agent - Protect your privacy, build your brand and get your complete business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes! Visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/achieverfree In this Episode, You Will Learn 00:00 Why AI anxiety is showing up differently for each of us. 06:45 Is AI an intelligence or just a (very powerful) tool? 10:45 How calling AI “smart” and human-like hides what it actually does. 14:00 Why we weren’t prepared for social media’s mental health impact. 15:15 Ways to use chatbots and therapeutic AI without getting lost in them. 21:00 ADHD, dichotomies, and how medicalizing mental health distorts what diagnoses can do. 26:00 Why treating symptoms isn’t the same as healing. 29:00 If mental illness isn’t just a broken brain, what is it? 30:30 Why there is no single biomarker for conditions like bipolar disorder or ADHD. 38:45 Why anxiety is tied to uncertainty, hope, and creativity. 43:30 Where does stress fit alongside anxiety and fear? 48:15 Advice to someone who has AI anxiety. Resources + Links Get a copy of my book - The Anxious Achiever Watch the podcast on YouTube Find more resources on our website morraam.com Follow Follow me: on LinkedIn @morraaronsmele + Instagram @morraam Follow Tracy: @tracydennistiwary

Transcript

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0:00.0	Are you launching a business? Get more from Northwest Registered Agent. Protect your privacy,
0:08.5	build your brand, and get your complete business identity in 10 clicks and 10 minutes.
0:13.6	Visit Northwest Registeredagent.com slash achiever free.
0:22.4	Today on The Anxious Achiever, we're diving straight into one of the biggest tensions shaping work and well-being and, well, everything right now.
0:31.0	How do we stay human in the tech age without going to extremes on either end? My guest, Dr. Tracy Dennis Tawari, has never
0:43.0	been afraid to challenge dominant narratives in mental health. She is a professor of psychology
0:48.1	and neuroscience. She is director of the Emotion Regulation Lab at Hunter College at the City
0:53.1	University of New York. She's co-founder
0:55.4	and CSO of Arcade Therapeutics, where she creates clinically validated therapeutic games for mental
1:01.5	health, and she's written one of my favorite books called Future Tense, Why Anxiety is Good
1:07.2	for You, even though it feels bad. Today, we talk about generative AI, we talk about teens
1:13.4	and social media, we talk about ADHD. And I think what you'll hear from Tracy is that we need
1:20.2	to get out of our false binaries in all of these difficult issues, especially to protect our mental health and our essential
1:29.3	humanness.
1:30.3	For example, there's a debate on whether ADHD is a hardwired medical disorder, a normal
1:37.3	variation in human beings, or if it's not even real at all.
1:42.3	The real issue, says Dennis Tuari,
1:45.3	is our deeply ingrained habit of medicalizing mental health,
1:48.6	reducing complex human experience to diagnostic categories, right?
1:54.0	And often missing the resilience, the identity and agency
1:57.8	that can come from inhabiting our differences.
2:00.8	If you listen to the show, you probably agree with that.
	...

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