How to Use ChatGPT for Your Wellbeing as a Leader

If you’re a leader, there is a reasonable chance you’ve already asked ChatGPT to rewrite an email, summarise something painfully long, help you prepare for a meeting or make something you’ve written sound slightly less like you typed it while furious. But there is another way I think leaders can use it that gets considerably less attention: looking after their own wellbeing.

Before anybody gets alarmed, I am not suggesting replacing your therapist with ChatGPT, asking it to diagnose your mysterious chest pain or allowing artificial intelligence to make important decisions about your mental or physical health. ChatGPT is not a doctor, psychologist or substitute for professional healthcare, and health information generated by AI can be wrong. If you’re worried about your physical or mental health, speak to an appropriately qualified professional, and seek urgent help for an emergency.

What ChatGPT can be surprisingly useful for is something much more ordinary: helping you think. Leadership involves carrying an enormous amount of information around in your head. There are people problems, money problems, deadlines, decisions, conversations you need to have, conversations you wish you hadn’t had and that irritating thing somebody said in a meeting at 10.14am that your brain has inexplicably decided to replay at midnight.

Sometimes wellbeing isn’t about finding the perfect meditation app. Sometimes you just need somewhere to put all of that.

Give it the contents of your brain

One of my favourite ways to use ChatGPT is essentially a brain dump. You don’t have to write beautifully or even make much sense. Tell it everything that’s currently competing for space in your head and ask it to organise the mess.

You might type: “I’ve got three deadlines this week, I’m worried about cash flow, I need to have a difficult conversation with somebody tomorrow, I’ve promised to call a client, I haven’t exercised for four days and I keep thinking I’ve forgotten something. Can you help me separate what actually needs dealing with today from what can wait?”

That is a very different use of AI from asking it to run your company. You’re still making the decisions, but instead of trying to hold fifteen things in your working memory at once, you’ve put them somewhere you can see them.

ChatGPT can be useful as a structured thinking partner, helping organise ideas and turn a messy collection of thoughts into clearer choices. The final judgement, of course, still belongs to you.

Ask it what you’re actually stressed about

This is where it can get interesting because sometimes we know we’re stressed without knowing exactly what is causing it. You can tell ChatGPT what’s going on and ask it not to solve anything immediately. Instead, ask it to help you identify the different things that might be contributing to how you’re feeling.

For example: “I’ve been unusually irritable all week. Here is everything that’s been happening. Don’t diagnose me, but ask me some questions that might help me work out what is putting me under pressure.” The instruction not to diagnose matters. You’re not asking an AI system to tell you that you have anxiety, burnout, depression or anything else. You’re using questions to help you examine your own circumstances.

Sometimes the answer becomes embarrassingly obvious once you see everything written down. Perhaps you’ve had six hours’ sleep, haven’t had a day off for two weeks, are waiting for a large invoice to be paid and have a difficult staffing decision hanging over you. You may discover that you aren’t inexplicably losing your mind after all. You have simply had a horrible week.

Let ChatGPT argue with you

This might be one of the most useful things leaders can do with it. Instead of asking ChatGPT to tell you that your brilliant idea is brilliant, ask it to challenge you.

Try: “I am convinced I need to deal with this today. Give me three reasons I might be reacting emotionally and three reasons acting today might genuinely be necessary.”

Or: “I’m annoyed with an employee and want to send this message. Tell me how it could be interpreted by somebody who doesn’t know how frustrated I am.”

That pause between feeling something and acting on it can be enormously valuable in leadership. ChatGPT doesn’t need to make the decision for you; sometimes its job is simply to slow you down long enough to make a better one. It is particularly useful at the precise moment when you are absolutely certain that sending a 900-word email beginning with “For the avoidance of doubt” is an excellent idea.

Use it before the difficult conversation

A difficult conversation can occupy considerably more mental space before it happens than while it’s actually happening. You rehearse it in the shower, while driving, during another meeting and at approximately 2.37am when your brain decides this is the ideal moment to explore seventeen possible versions of how it might go. ChatGPT can help you prepare.

Explain the situation without including unnecessary confidential or identifying information and ask it to play the other person. Tell it how you expect them to respond and practise the conversation. You can ask it to challenge you, become defensive, ask awkward questions or point out where your explanation sounds unclear.

You can also ask, “What is the one thing I actually need this person to understand when this conversation ends?” That question alone can stop a difficult conversation becoming a tour through every frustration you’ve accumulated since 2023.

Ask it to help you finish the working day

Leaders are often physically finished with work long before their brains receive the message. You close the laptop, walk away and continue running the business internally for the next four hours. You remember something while making dinner, mentally rewrite tomorrow’s meeting while watching television and suddenly decide at bedtime that you urgently need to think about next year’s strategy.

A five-minute end-of-day ChatGPT routine can create a useful psychological full stop.

Tell it what happened that day, what remains unfinished and what you’re worried about forgetting. Ask it to turn that into tomorrow’s priorities and a short list of things that genuinely do not need your attention tonight. The unfinished work hasn’t disappeared, but your brain no longer has to keep reminding you that it exists.

Use it to notice patterns

This is another area where AI can be useful without pretending to be a healthcare professional.

Perhaps every Sunday evening you feel tense about Monday. Maybe particular meetings consistently leave you drained. Perhaps you become much less patient during weeks when your diary has no gaps, or you notice that every time you say yes to a particular type of commitment you regret it afterwards.

Keep simple notes and occasionally ask ChatGPT to help you look for patterns. You could say: “Here are my notes from the last four weeks. What situations seem to be creating the most pressure, and what seems to make my weeks feel easier?”

Treat the response as something to consider rather than a clinical assessment. AI can miss context and draw the wrong conclusions, but it can sometimes notice repetitions that are harder to see when you’re living through them.

Get it to remind you that you are, in fact, a human being

Leaders can become remarkably good at scheduling everything except themselves. Meetings get calendar invitations. Clients get follow-ups. Reports get deadlines. Employees get one-to-ones. Meanwhile, lunch apparently becomes an optional extra to be consumed over a keyboard at 3.46pm.

ChatGPT can help you build small wellbeing routines around the working life you actually have rather than the imaginary one where you wake at 5am, meditate for an hour, journal beside a lake and somehow arrive at work glowing.

Tell it what your day really looks like and ask for realistic suggestions. If you have back-to-back meetings from 9am until 4pm, a wellbeing plan requiring three hours of free time isn’t particularly helpful. A ten-minute walk, protecting twenty minutes for lunch, moving one unnecessary meeting or creating a proper finishing time might be.

The best wellbeing routine is not necessarily the most impressive one. It is the one you might actually do.

Make it your anti-catastrophising assistant

Leadership brains can be spectacularly talented at turning one problem into the collapse of civilisation.

A client hasn’t replied, therefore you’ve lost the client. One employee is unhappy, therefore the entire team is about to resign. Sales are down this week, therefore the business will be bankrupt by Christmas and you’ll presumably be living in a tent by February. When you notice yourself doing this, give ChatGPT the facts and ask it to separate what you know from what you’re assuming.

For example: “Here is what has happened. Create two lists: facts I actually have evidence for, and conclusions I am currently jumping to.”

That doesn’t mean ChatGPT gets to tell you everything will be fine. Sometimes there genuinely is a problem. The useful part is separating the problem you actually have from the twelve imaginary problems your stressed brain has built around it.

Ask better questions instead of looking for reassurance

There is a temptation with AI to keep asking the same question until you receive the answer you wanted.

Leaders can do this particularly easily because reassurance feels wonderful when you’re uncertain. If you ask enough variations of “Do you think I’ve made the right decision?”, you can probably end up having a very comforting conversation.

Comfort isn’t always what you need.

Try asking questions such as: “What information am I missing?”, “What assumption am I making?”, “What would make this decision wrong?”, “What would I advise another leader in exactly the same position?” or “What part of this situation can I actually control?”

That turns ChatGPT from a machine you use to validate yourself into something considerably more useful: a tool for examining your own thinking.

Talk instead of typing

If staring at another screen is the last thing you want after a long day, you don’t necessarily have to type. ChatGPT offers voice conversations, which can make brainstorming or talking something through feel much more natural.

There is something quite different about saying, “Right, this is everything that’s going on and I need you to help me sort through it,” while walking around the block rather than sitting at your desk composing another perfectly structured prompt.

You don’t need to speak to AI as though you’re programming a spaceship either. Explain what’s happening in ordinary language, interrupt, change direction and ask follow-up questions. The usefulness often comes from the conversation rather than some mythical perfect prompt.

Know when to close ChatGPT and talk to an actual person

This might be the most important use of ChatGPT for wellbeing: recognising its limits.

AI can help you organise your thoughts, prepare questions, explore options, practise conversations and make sense of information. It cannot notice everything a doctor, therapist, trusted friend or person sitting opposite you might notice, and it can confidently get things wrong.

If you’re struggling with your mental health, experiencing symptoms that concern you or feel that you’re no longer coping, AI shouldn’t become a reason to delay professional support. OpenAI itself describes its health tools as supporting rather than replacing medical care and says they are not intended for diagnosis or treatment.

There are also plenty of wellbeing problems that don’t need technology at all. Sometimes the healthiest response to a difficult day is to close the laptop, put the phone down, go outside, see somebody you love, eat something decent, sleep and deal with the problem tomorrow.

ChatGPT doesn’t need to become another thing you optimise. Used well, it can simply be somewhere to empty your head, challenge your thinking and turn a chaotic collection of thoughts into something you can actually deal with.

And for a leader whose brain currently has 47 tabs open, three are frozen and nobody knows where the music is coming from, that can be surprisingly good for your wellbeing.

Medical disclaimer: This article is for general information and wellbeing purposes only and is not medical or mental health advice. ChatGPT and other AI tools can make mistakes and should not be used to diagnose or treat a physical or mental health condition. If you are concerned about your health or wellbeing, seek advice from an appropriately qualified healthcare professional. In an emergency, contact your local emergency service.

Keep looking after you

Wellbeing looks different for everyone, and sometimes the most useful thing is simply finding the right information at the right time. Explore more from Daily Round with our dedicated Women’s Health, Men’s Wellbeing and Wellbeing for Leaders sections, or head to the Leaders Library for our latest book recommendations, ideas and inspiration for life in and outside work.