AI lets you do ten things at once. Your body is keeping score.

The multitasking arms race

Multitasking used to have a built-in limit: you. There were only so many tabs, calls and half-written emails one person could hold at once. AI removed the limit. Now you can have one assistant drafting a report while you answer messages, a second summarizing the meeting you skipped, a third chewing through a spreadsheet in the background — and a quiet voice telling you that a truly efficient person would be running a fourth.

The numbers on modern work are honestly a little dark. Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend Index found the average employee is interrupted every two minutes — roughly 275 times a day — fields 117 emails and 153 chat messages daily, and that meetings after 8 p.m. are up 16% year over year. One in three workers said the pace of the last five years has become impossible to keep up with. And the tools that promised relief have, so far, mostly added to the pile: in a 2024 Upwork Research Institute study of 2,500 workers across Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and Australia, 77% of employees using AI said it had increased their workload, and 71% reported burnout — while 96% of executives expected AI to boost productivity. That gap between what leadership expects and what bodies are reporting is worth sitting with.

What all that switching does to your brain

Here's the inconvenient piece of neuroscience under all of this: your brain doesn't actually multitask. It switches — fast, and at a price. The American Psychological Association summarizes decades of task-switching research bluntly: the brief mental blocks created by shifting between tasks can eat up as much as 40% of someone's productive time. Attention researcher Gloria Mark at UC Irvine has tracked screen attention since 2004. Back then, people averaged about two and a half minutes on one screen before switching. Today it's about 47 seconds — and once you're pulled off a task, it takes roughly 25 minutes to fully find your way back.

So the honest math of extreme multitasking is: more open loops, shallower attention on each one, and a tax on every switch. AI doesn't change that math. It just hands you more loops.

What it does to your stress system

Now the body. In a 2023 randomized controlled trial published in Psychoneuroendocrinology, researchers put 186 adults through multitasking and constant-interruption work conditions. Perceived stress climbed, and markers of the sympathetic nervous system — your fight-or-flight response — measurably activated. Interestingly, cortisol itself didn't spike in a single hour of lab multitasking. That nuance matters, because the real problem isn't one frantic hour. It's that the frantic hour never ends.

Your stress system was built for short bursts of demand followed by recovery. A workday that interrupts you every two minutes, follows you home, and puts you back in your inbox at 10 p.m. removes the recovery half of that equation. Sustained activation with no off-switch is exactly the pattern stress research associates with poor sleep, anxiety, and — over time — the disrupted stress-hormone rhythms researchers see in burnout. Heavy media multitasking specifically has been associated with higher symptoms of depression and social anxiety. None of those studies prove that switching causes the suffering all by itself. But if you live this way and feel wired, foggy and flat at the same time, your body isn't lying to you.

The part nobody puts in the productivity deck

The overflow doesn't stay at the office. It lands at home. You walk in the door with your attention already spent, and the people you love get the 47-second version of you — physically present, half-listening, one notification away from gone. In my chair, this shows up constantly: not as "we fight about technology," but as "I can't reach him," or "she's always somewhere else." Distraction is corrosive to closeness. Intimacy runs on attention — it's the one resource your partner can actually feel — and chronic overload quietly reroutes all of it to the machine in your pocket.

And if your baseline is already anxious, an always-on workday pours fuel on it. Your threat-detection system doesn't distinguish an unanswered email from an actual emergency; it just keeps firing.

Stepping off the treadmill without quitting your job

I'm not going to tell you to abandon the tools. I ran a legal practice for twenty-five years and I use AI daily; used well, it genuinely lifts weight. The difference between AI that lightens your load and AI that quietly doubles it comes down to a few disciplines:

• Monotask on purpose. Pick the one thing that matters most and give it a protected block — no pings, one screen. You'll finish faster than the juggling version of you would have, and you'll end the block calmer instead of frayed.
• Delegate whole tasks, not fragments. Hand the tool something complete and walk away, rather than spawning five parallel workstreams you now have to supervise. The goal is fewer things in your head, not more.
• Build a hard stop. Your stress system needs a signal that the day is over — a shutdown ritual, a walk, a door that actually closes. If your inbox is open at 10 p.m., the day never ended; it just changed rooms.
• Put recovery on the calendar. Not as a reward for finishing — you'll never finish. As maintenance, the way you'd service anything you rely on.
• Tell the truth about capacity. In Relational Life Therapy we call it full-respect living: respecting others and yourself. Saying "I can do this well, or I can do all of it badly" out loud — to a boss, a client, a partner — is not weakness. It's accuracy.

If the wired-and-exhausted pattern has already settled in — if you're snapping at people you love, sleeping badly, unable to sit still without reaching for a screen — that's worth taking seriously before it hardens into burnout or depression. And if the distance has crept into your relationship, that's repairable too — but it takes the one thing the treadmill never gives you: undivided attention.

Your attention is the most honest measure of what you value. The machines will take every second you don't claim. Claim some.