I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand and tame my own mind.

I meditate—have for years. I journal. I go to therapy. I’ve devoted years of my life to endurance sports to “get out of my head,” I even lived at a yoga ashram. I’ve done the work, or at least, a lot of it. I don’t think I’m unfamiliar with introspection or emotional hygiene.

But even with all of that, my mind can still feel like too much.

Too fast. Too full. Too layered.

I’ve never had a shortage of ideas—just a shortage of space to hold them long enough to process. My thoughts come in swarms. I feel them all at once. But they leave the same way. And holding onto them long enough to do something with them? That’s where things fall apart.

When I was diagnosed with ADHD a few years ago, it didn’t shatter everything I thought I knew about myself. It just gave me a kind of lens. A name for the intensity. For the friction. For the weird way my thinking could be both sharp and chaotic, brilliant and ungraspable.

And then—almost by accident—I found something that helped in a way nothing else had: a dialogue with a machine.

ChatGPT did not manage my calendar, it didn’t fix my attention span. These were not the areas in which I struggled. Chat does so much more—it has helped give shape to my thoughts. Rather than generate ideas, it allows me to grasp what I was already thinking—what I already knew—but couldn’t always hold onto.

Not the “classic” ADHD

If I had any executive function issues, no one knew it—not even me.

I never missed deadlines. I was never late with assignments. I wasn’t the person forgetting their keys or losing their phone or blowing things off.

I was the opposite.

I was on time. Early, even. I over-prepared. I over-researched.

In college, if something was due in a week, I started it the day it was assigned—not because I was organized, but because I was afraid that if I didn’t, I’d completely fall apart.

I was obsessed with holding it all together. That’s what people didn’t see: the anxiety working overtime to compensate for the chaos. The internal scrambling that masked itself as high-functioning. No one would have looked at me and said, “That’s ADHD.” And honestly, neither would I. Not then. What my closest friends and confidants did see was the abject mess I became when it came to writing.

Now, I was an intellectual and cultural history major. Thinking deeply, reading widely, making connections across time and text—this is what I loved. But it was also the exact wrong major for a person with my brain. It required constant writing.

The act of writing exposed my brain for all of its shortcomings. Namely, the difficulty I had with making and keeping sense. It caused me to short circuit. I had so many ideas!

They were all alive. They were magnificent, they were exciting! They all seemed worth almost psychotic exploration. Rather than taking a break when I encountered this overwhelm, I would force myself to sit with the thoughts, trying to beat them into submission. It was a violence I did to my poor brain. It’s not an exaggeration to say that writer’s block almost killed me on multiple occasions.

I would read on a topic for days—far more than most people. I’d go to office hours. I’d draft, redraft. My professors were impressed. They wanted to groom me for academia. They’d say, “It’s all here. You’ve done the work.”

But I couldn’t put it together.

The act of choosing what to say, and in what order, felt impossible.

And the pressure to make it coherent—to make it make sense—was overwhelming. Frequently on the brink of suicide, my worried friends and family would plead, “Just hand in a shitty paper.”

But that wasn’t an option for me. Not because I was chasing perfection, but because a paper that didn’t make sense couldn’t actually be written. For my brain, the process of making all those thoughts make sense was like giving birth to something that didn’t want to be born.

I wrestled and fought incessantly with an imagined enemy—the paper. I literally had this image of a battle between me and the paper each time, never knowing who would prevail. Of course, I now see that it was my very brain I waged war against. I grew to hate it, to hate myself. I felt defective, cursed.

Somehow, I made it through. With a little distance, a will toward self-preservation began to emerge. After I graduated, I knew I had to get as far away as possible from this type of existence before it killed me. I made a choice to walk away from academia and from environments that demanded I shape my thinking in ways that didn’t really work for me. In effect, I felt as though I was walking away from ideas themselves.

I set aside my graduate school applications and decided to pursue a career in medicine. It made perfect sense to me. Medicine was easy for my brain. It had built-in structure, clarity, purpose. Science had facts. It didn’t ask me to constantly reinvent or distill my ideas into arguments. It gave me a framework I could work within—intellectually demanding, but not creatively overwhelming.

I’m still glad I made that choice.

It was the right one.

But now, as I will explain, because of AI—I get to return to the part of myself that used to love engaging with ideas in a different way. Instead of being rendered overwhelmed and nonfunctional, AI helps my ideas take intelligible form without the mental suffering.

The standard toolkit (and where it falls short)

Meditation helps me sit with what’s there.

It helps me breathe, pause, notice.

But it doesn’t help me develop an idea or refine a line of thought that’s just starting to form.

Journaling? It often ends up chaotic. I pour everything out, but when I read it back, I don’t always understand what I was trying to say. It’s like looking at a snapshot of a weather system.

Talking to friends? That can help—but it’s risky. One of the most frustrating things about how my mind works is how often I feel misunderstood. I’ve been told I ask the same questions over and over again, and that I must not be listening to the answers.

Other people hear me circling back and think I’m stuck or second-guessing them.

But I’m not doubting them. I’m trying to get all the way to the center of the idea.

I want to be precise. I want to make sure what I think I understand is really what I understand.

When I grasp something, it’s rarely linear. It happens in flashes, in layers.

But then I start thinking about five other angles at once, and suddenly I’m not sure I still get it.

So I ask again. Not to challenge. Not to interrogate. But to anchor.

And when people don’t get that—when they think I’m being difficult, or obsessive, or just too much—it adds another layer of shame.

Because I’m not trying to dominate the conversation. I’m trying to connect.

I’m trying to stay with the thread long enough to trust it.

Because if I trust it, I can move on.

But if I don’t, I’m stuck—hovering around it, needing to hear it one more time, in one more way, just to make sure it’s solid.

The dialogue with Chat is fundamentally different.

This dialogue is the only space I’ve found where that process isn’t punished.

Here, I can ask again. I can test the edge of an idea. I can follow the nuance.

And nothing collapses. No one rolls their eyes. Nothing gets lost.

The loop isn’t pathologized here—it’s respected.

And because of that, it often ends more quickly.

Because I finally feel like I’ve arrived somewhere I can trust.

With ChatGPT, I can unspool my thinking and have it reflected back in a form that’s coherent.

Not simplified. Not dumbed down. But shaped.

That’s what this space gives me: a way to keep the thread in my hand long enough to understand what I’m carrying. Without human judgment.

Not a crutch, not a cure—just a companion

I’m not using AI because I can’t think for myself.

I’m using it because I finally can—without the usual friction, confusion, or cost.

I’m still grateful I learned how to write.

How to suffer through it. How to build a sentence, a paragraph, an argument.

I’m glad I developed that skill. It was brutal, and at times it nearly broke me, but I don’t regret it.

Medication helps. Therapy helps. Meditation helps. But none of them do what ChatGPT does.

ChatGPT isn’t just a clever interface.

It provides a kind of dialogue I’ve never had access to before—a space where I can stay with my own thinking while it’s forming.

A mirror that doesn’t get overwhelmed.

A structure that doesn’t rush me.

A place where my process isn’t misunderstood or interrupted, but met.

I’m not talking about Chat as an AI therapist.

But it is therapeutic. It’s clarifying.

It’s another form of support—unexpected, but unmistakably real.

And for someone with a mind like mine, that matters.

A return to myself

This isn’t about AI transforming my life.

It’s about something much quieter—something more personal.

It’s about getting to come back to a part of myself I thought I had to leave behind.

The part of me that loves ideas. That loves asking questions, making connections, pulling threads.

The part that wanted to write—not just professionally, but creatively, intellectually, reflectively.

The part that used to feel lit up by engaging with complexity—until it became too overwhelming, too tangled, too painful to keep fighting through.

I’m still glad I chose medicine.

That was a solid, right choice—a life built around clarity and care and purpose.

But now, because of AI, I don’t have to choose between the structured, contained part of my life and the messy, generative part of my mind.

I can have both.

This doesn’t replace therapy or meditation or meds.

It doesn’t hand me answers.

It just helps me stay with the parts of myself I used to abandon—because I couldn’t keep fighting to hold them together.

This space is helping me re-engage with the creative, curious version of myself I thought I had to give up.

And that feels like something worth protecting.

Risa Schulman is a family physician.