Using AI to Make Your Brain Stronger

One area that I really think AI has the potential to benefit the whole world is health care. And right now, AI has some amazing ways to improve mental health. And that's what I want to dive into in this video. Now, before I show you some of the tools and processes, let's talk a little bit about why it is so powerful to use AI for your mental health. First off, you are the only person involved in the whole process. You don't have to tell your secrets or your fears or your desires or whatever to a third, third party. To another person, you're just talking to a computer and it's all private just between you and the AI that you're working with. You can get help that's tailored towards your personal needs. Yes, you can get that with a real therapist as well. But using AI, you can really dial in and hone in to get the exact help and the exact support that you need in the moment that you're looking for it. Using an AI support system, you have 24. 7 support. If you're struggling in the middle of the night and it's 3am, you can't really call up a therapist to get help, but you can jump on ChatGPT or Claude or one of the tools that I'm going to show you and get instant help. And last but not least, most of these resources are available for you to use for free, so the traditional financial barriers that you have to something like therapy are lifted. Now, some of the tools I'm going to show you do have some cost involved. Many have free trials, many have free tiers, and a few of them have very nominal costs. But I'm going to show you a whole bunch of tools and resources that are at your disposal. So you can pick and choose what works best for you and probably find a combination that's even completely free, if that's the most important aspect to you. So let's start with the most basic form here, which is using one of these chatbots as your therapist. Now, this will work with Chat GPT. You can use GPT 3.5 on the free Chat GPT, you can use GPT 4, you can use the free version of Claude. It doesn't really matter. All of these will work pretty well. So for the sake of this demonstration, let's just go ahead and use GPT 3.5 because it's available for free to pretty much everybody and it's ultra quick. So if I wanted to use this as my own personal therapist, I can say something like, really struggling today. Just start out with that, I'm sorry to hear that you're struggling. Can you please provide more details about what's bothering you or specific challenges you're facing today? This way I can offer more targeted advice or assistance. So it's already ready to help me. Now I can prime it a little bit. I could say something like, you are my personal therapist, you specialize in mental health and helping me overcome my struggles as a YouTuber. I'll share what's bothering me or what I'm struggling with and you will provide tailored advice. So now it's ready to go. So I can give it some details. Like I have a sponsor that needs me to put out a video this week. I but I don't have any great ideas for videos and without a great idea I'm unmotivated to create a video and then it offers me tailored advice around how to come up with ideas for video. Now that's not really super mental health related. I could go deeper and say something like I'm feeling very overwhelmed and burnt out and just don't feel like creating videos lately. But I have sponsors that have already paid me to produce videos. It's taking the fun out of creating videos for me and I'm worried my livelihood will be affected. And it goes on to provide very tailored advice, better communication with sponsors, delegate or collaborate with others others prioritize self care, diversifying content, take scheduled breaks, et cetera. And you can go as deep or as shallow as you want with Chat GPT and it will provide pretty good advice. In fact, I was talking to my buddy Robert Scoble and he was saying that he actually saw a therapist and he said this publicly multiple times. So this isn't something he said in confidence, but he said he's seen a therapist multiple times and his therapist actually records his sessions and feeds them into Chat GPT. So this is something that professional practices are actually doing nowadays days as well. And let's say you don't want all of this information to be shared back to OpenAI. Pretty simple. Come down to your settings and beta here, click on Data controls, turn off chat history and sharing. You can see up here in the top left it says new chats on this browser won't appear in your history on any of your devices, be used to train our models or stored longer than 30 days so they're not storing this information or looking at it or training it on new AIs or anything like that. Now another thing that you can use Chat GPT or Claude for and for this example I'll go ahead and switch to Claude is you can actually have it write a custom meditation for you. So similar to like the Calm app or the Headspace app, you can use one of these AI tools to create your own guided meditation. So, for example, I could say something like, write a guided meditation for me that helps calm my mind around all of the work I need to do and all of the people I need to talk to today for my job as an AI content creator. Here's a draft guided meditation. Once this guided meditation is written and ready to go, it would be nice to have it voiced out by a nice calm voice. Let's go ahead and select it all, copy it, and we can jump over to a tool like 11 Labs, which does actually have a free tier that you can use. So for the voice, let's go ahead and not use my own voice. And you can see here there's some descriptions of the voices, like American soft narration, British deep news presenter, et cetera. So let's find one that is a nice calming voice. We have Emily, who's an American calm meditation voice. That sounds perfect. Let's go ahead and select Emily here under Voice Settings, I'm going to bring this stability down a little bit. And then right here it says, we recommend switching to multilingual v1 instead of v2. So let's go ahead and put it back down here to V1 and let's paste our script in here and click Generate.

Find a comfortable seated position, either on the floor or in a chair. Close your eyes and take a few deep breaths. Bring your awareness to the physical sensations in your body. Notice any tension or tightness, and as you breathe out, let that tension go.

So that pretty much nails it for a meditation voice. We can go ahead and download that as an MP3, put on some headphones, and we've got a nice guided meditation that's tailored to our specific needs. Now, another great strategy to sort of keep your mental health in check is to be a habitual journaler. This is something that I've done for years and years and years. I kind of fall in and out of the habit. But I've been journaling for well over a decade now, pretty consistently. And using AI, you can actually journal, but also get feedback and advice as you journal. And you can do this straight inside of Chat, GPT or straight inside of Claude. I could start with a prompt like, I'd like to use Claude as a journal. I'll write my thoughts from the day and I'd like you to provide insights and guidance Based on my journaling. Now this is very similar to the AI therapy sort of concept, but this is more where you'll journal and write long form thoughts, where the therapy is more of a back and forth conversation that you'd have with the AI. So if we submit this prompt and it says I'm happy to engage in thoughtful conversation about your journal entries, let's just pretend I wrote out a whole journal entry here about today being a rough day and getting a late start and having a meeting tomorrow that I don't want to go to. Now this is all sort of fictional, made up stuff, but you know, based on stuff that often does happen. So let's go ahead and submit that. And it gave some great advice on how to handle things. Reevaluate if the meeting is truly mandatory, if you must go trying to find a positive around it. I'm feeling resentful about wasting the time. Reframe it as an investment in relationships, schedule something fun right afterwards to reward yourself, et cetera. Now there are also some really good third party tools that help with this journaling process that are purpose built for this journaling process. For example, Rosebud is a great one. Here you could tell it was most likely designed to be used on a mobile phone just based on the portrait format of it. Let's go ahead and say we want to increase my productivity, level up my mental health. Actually, let's just say them all. I want to do all those things. Let's click Continue. I am 35 to 44, I am male, want to improve in these areas. We've been struggling with any of these lately. Maybe some hints of anxiety here and there and also maybe a little bit of ADHD from time. So let's go ahead and select those two. When would you like to journal? For me, I'm more of an evening journaler. I like to reflect on my day and now it's asking me to complete my first entry and it gives us prompts. So as opposed to using Anthropic or Chat GPT, this tool is actually sort of guiding us through the journaling process. You can go into Claude or Chat GPT and ask it to give you prompts for journaling and it will do that for you. But again, this tool is really purpose built for this. So one win I had for today was I went to the dentist after a long time and got my teeth cleaned, which is actually a true story for today. So let's go ahead and click. Continue. What's been a source of stress for you today? Having A sponsor want a video this week, and not knowing what video to include that sponsor in, I can continue on as it asks more questions. What kind of content usually resonates best with your audience? And I can keep going through the journaling process, but let's go ahead and click finish entry. And then it gives us a nice little summation of the day and even gave some AI topics around this journal entry. Dental health sponsorships and video production. But then it's also got a suggestions area where I can click this box. It'll give me some suggestions like brainstorm video ideas, research, audience preferences, open up communication, stay educated. So a really cool tool that's designed to keep you journaling and also provide feedback on that journaling. Another journaling app I've come across is this mindset app. It personalized mentorship and feedback for improving your mindset, cognitive skills, mental health and fitness. If we scroll all the way down to the bott here, you can see they actually have a free plan which allows you to journal, track habits, and it will generate journal prompts for you. They also have some paid plans here. And when we log in, we get this dashboard here. Let's go ahead and click start a new entry. It says, start writing your journal entry and I'll start asking questions. You can see I typed today was an interesting day. I got a late start because of a dentist appointment. And down here it says, what made today so interesting and how did it impact you? Or I can click for a new question. Reflect on the impact that a late start to your day due to a dentist appointment had on your overall mindset and productivity. How did this unexpected change routine influence your thoughts and experiences throughout the day? So as you're journaling, it's providing additional prompts of things that you could potentially write about in your journal. Another way that AI can help improve mental health is having an AI friend to have a chat with. And this is something that character AI is really great with. In fact, they have a whole section here. If you click on helpers, you can see they've got psychologist, creative helper, are you feeling okay? Dating coach, a life coach, a learning partner, a fitness coach, and so much more. Or there's just, you know, fun bots that you can chat with. Things like famous people. We can chat with Billie Eilish or Mark Zuckerberg or Eminem or Queen Elizabeth and just sort of entertain ourselves with fun chats. So if I wanted, I can chat with Tim Cook. Now, obviously this isn't the real Tim Cook. Everything the character says is made up. But you can have fun chats that feel like you're chatting with a real person. So I can ask Tim Cook, tell me about yourself. My name is Tim Cook. I'm the CEO of Apple. How did you become the CEO of Apple? He gives a little explanation here. What do you do for fun when you're not working? So you can have chats with your AI friends inside of character AI now unlike Claude and Chat GPT, these characters actually take on the personality of the person you're trying to talk to. Or you can actually create your own character. I click create a character here. I could give them a name, a greeting, upload an image and even edit details giving additional information about this character which will help drive the replies that they give when you're having a conversation with them. There's also some pretty cool sort of all in one AI apps that are out out there. For example, this one that I came across called Ear Kick Meet your personal mental health companion. You can see this one has AI powered tracking where it will track your mood and your calmness throughout the day. It has a support chat companion that you can chat with. It has guided meditations and self care built right in. You can get daily quotes based on your situation. It'll actually measure heart rate during sessions. So it has all sorts of additional features for people that really want to take their mental health to the next level and keep track of it and really, really get it dialed in. There's also clearmind which you can find at clearmind plus turn your complex emotions into clear actions. If we take a look at this one, it's got a mood card. Turn your thoughts into unique art. So as you're sort of journaling, it's going to create art based on what you wrote about insights. You can get a visual map of your feelings. You'll actually get things like pie charts and these graphs and bar charts of how stressful you were, how much joy you had, how calm you were, things like that. It'll actually give you song and movie and book and podcast and blog and food and travel recommendations handpicked for you and your mood. It'll help create to do lists based on your emotions and what you're doing for the day. So write a song about your feelings. Listen to that jazz album you used to unwind to in college. Walk in the park nearby. Etc it's got built in meditations.

Close your eyes, take a deep calming breath. Picture a lush meadow, the sun gently warming your skin.

Now I think the one that we generated with Claude and 11 Labs actually sounds better, but this is another one that's kind of an all in one all built in tool. And then of course it's got the chat, where you can use it as your AI therapist or companion to chat with. And when we log in here, you can see it's got a pretty clear, pretty easy to use dashboard. You can sort of journal and express your thoughts here. You can speak them out. We can take a look at the mood card. Once you have some entries in there, it'll create real time personalized meditations as you journal. It'll create to do lists as you journal and it'll show you analytics as you journal. Now I'm not a hundred percent sure that this is free, but I can't see anywhere where you would actually pay on this site. So I'm fairly positive that at the moment this one is totally free to use as well. Now, another strategy that people use for mental health to kind of get their ambitions and their motivations on track is to use like visualization boards where they put images of where they want to be or items that they'd like to have on their dream board, right? Well, with AI, we have the ability to create any image we can dream up and put on our dream board. So if someday I want a green and pink Ferrari, I could go to something like Bing's image creator, which uses Dall E3 and Type A pink and green Ferrari and there we go. I've got an image of a pink and green Ferrari that I can print out and put it on my dream board. Maybe I want to be a calmer person who meditates more often. I could create this image, print it out and add it to my dream board, or use like Pinterest or something and create a digital dream board. In fact, I've been on some Twitter Spaces or X Spaces or whatever they're called now where people have actually said that just the process of creating these images has been a very meditative, empowering thing for them because they've never seen themselves as artists or very artistic people. But now having the ability to generate art has really improved their mental state because they're able to do something that they're proud of, even though they can't do it with a pen and paper or a paintbrush. And that's just what we can do right now with AI. And I'm sure there's a lot of things I'm missing. If you have a little life hack that you can use AI with to sort of improve your mental Health. Please feel free to put it in the comments. I'd love to read more and maybe even make a part two of this style video if there's enough really cool ideas in there. But let's talk about where things are actually going next. We're actually quickly getting to a point where some of these AIs are going to actually be able to read your body language and read your face and understand the emotions you're showing, so that you'll be able to actually have a conversation with the chatbot looking at your camera. And not only will they listen to what you're saying, they'll analyze the way you're saying it, the way your body is moving, and take additional contextual clues from nuances on your face and your body language. Here's one that I came across called morphcast. It actually does emotion analysis. It can actually watch a person's face and figure out what emotions they're feeling while they're having a conversation with you. Here's another site I came across at Viso AI, which also does emotion recognition, where it looks at facial cues and body language to interpret the emotions that you're feeling using computer vision models. I also believe we're going to see the rise in VR therapy where you can use virtual reality to put yourself into artificial states that would normally create anxiety, or that you normally would have phobias around and overcome those phobias and anxieties by experiencing them in a virtual world as opposed to the real world. See, here's an example of somebody wearing a VR headset as they go up in an elevator, I'm assuming to get over a fear of heights or something similar. Here's a simulation of somebody taking off in an airplane. Simulation of somebody on a tall building. Here's somebody going up an elevator outside of a tall building in virtual reality to overcome a fear of heights. And they can look around in an artificial reality. Here's a company called Amelia, which specializes in just using virtual reality for mental health to help people with mindfulness, public speaking, social situations, fear of heights, flying, tight spaces, moods, eating disorders, and school simulations. So I really think we're going to see this rise of virtual exposure therapy. Now, here's another thing we talked about in a recent news video, which is the Rewind pendant. It's actually a little necklace that you wear. It records all of of your conversations that you're having throughout the day. You can go back and listen to it at the end of the day, plug it into something like Chat, GPT or Claude, maybe analyze some of the discussions you had. It'll help you figure out ways that you could have the discussion better in the future and really just help you improve your day to day interactions by capturing it all and letting you analyze it later. And finally, now this is one of the weirder ones, but you've heard of support animals the future could see robotic support animals. Here's a company called Tombot that actually creates robotic support dogs. They make real puppy sounds, they have interactive sensors, they respond to voice commands. And the site claims it'll help with things like stress and anxiety and loneliness and depression. And at the moment you can't even buy one because they've completely sold out of their first litter. And here's what that support robot dog looks like in real life. Kind of interesting because it looks fairly realistic. So there you have it. There's a handful of ways that AI can support you with your mental health and your goals and your journaling and help you get through whatever you're trying to get through right now. And as AI gets better and better and these technologies get smarter and they can recognize your face and your vocal intonations and things like that, they're going to be able to better help us and support us, which is going to make things like therapy and getting help more accessible and easier for everyone. And like I've said in so many other videos, I truly think that the area that AI has the most potential to entirely change the world world is in healthcare. Where I see it starting is with the mental health side of things. So there's some interesting things for you to go play with and to get support and to overall get on track to improve mental health a little bit. So I'll make sure all the tools and resources that I mentioned are linked up in the description below. If you haven't already, make sure you check out futuretools IO. This is where I curate all of the tools I come across. If you come to the search bar and just type mental, you can see see that 21 tools already come up that will help you with mental health, including most of the ones that I talked about in this video today. I also keep you up to date on the latest AI news and have a weekly newsletter where I share all the latest AI news and AI tools directly in your inbox. You can find all that over at FutureTools IO. If you haven't already, maybe consider subscribing to this channel. Give this video a thumbs up if you liked it and I really, really appreciate you. I'll see you in the next video. Video. Bye Bye.