37. Self-Care AI Tools for Therapists to Reduce Stress and Work Smarter

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Self-Care AI Tools for Therapists to Reduce Stress and Work Smarter

Therapists spend so much time supporting clients that their own self-care often gets pushed aside. Between back-to-back sessions, endless admin work, and the emotional weight of the job, it’s easy to feel exhausted. But what if I told you there are many AI tools that you can use for better self-care, helping you reclaim some time, set better boundaries, and reduce stress?

In this episode of Run Your Private Practice with AI, I’m sharing the best self-care AI tools for therapists that can simplify your workflow and help you avoid burnout. From AI-powered scheduling assistants to automation tools that help you stay organized, these strategies will help you work smarter, not harder—so you can prioritize your well-being just as much as your clients’.

AI Tips You Don’t Want to Miss:

  • How AI-powered scheduling tools like ClickUp, Trello, and Motion can keep your workload organized.
  • Using ChatGPT for automation to help manage email responses and set professional boundaries.
  • The best AI-driven self-care apps, including Finch, to improve emotional well-being.
  • How AI transcription tools like Fathom AI can save time by summarizing your meetings and sessions.
  • Why structuring your ideal daily and weekly schedule with AI can help you balance work and personal time.

Connect with me:

Sponsored by Alma: www.helloalma.com/kym
Sponsored by Berries: www.berries.icu/therapists

Transcript:

I thought I’d talk about AI for self-care, helping therapists help themselves. So, you know, we’re always juggling like our busy schedules and see clients and I’m sure everybody’s seen the meme where it’s like, how do you even like run to the bathroom and pee before you have to see your next client? It’s so busy sometimes, I know. How do you eat in between clients? All that stuff. So, I was thinking like, what are some good ways to use AI to help us manage our lives a little bit better, to do better with our self-care? I know we tell our clients to do it, but how many of us do it? Not that many, honestly.

I have a few clients that are definitely using some apps to help them with the different things, like if they’re in a bad mood, that sort of thing, help them get out of it. Using ChatGPT for that, I definitely have. There’s been a couple situations where, you know, I had a family thing going on during the holidays.

It was really annoying, but I was like, oh, I don’t know what to do. Should I do this? Should I do that? I literally like at two in the morning when I couldn’t sleep, put it into ChatGPT and I was like, help me decide. And it actually did a great job.

I put the situation into ChatGPT and I was like, here’s the details, here’s this, here’s that, what should I do? And it was like, gave me some really good, solid feedback. Like one, you’re tired. Why don’t you just give it a day, sleep on it, see how you feel, that kind of thing.

So I was thinking of some other ways, like how could we use it? How do I use it already for my own self-care? And one is task organization. So using scheduling tools to help you out with things. I use something called ClickUp with my team.

So I have some BAs and you guys might have admins, that sort of thing. I don’t know if you’re using a management tool like that, but a lot of them have AI inside of them right now. So ClickUp just recently allowed me to enable like this AI version of it.

And it’s really cool because we already have all these tasks and calendars and all this stuff set up inside of there. But now I can go to the AI. I can have it like, you know, rewrite a task for me to reword it to make it make more sense.

I can record right into a task and the AI can take it and turn it into like an SOP for me. I could tell it to manage the calendar better. I could tell it to summarize the calendar.

For example, we put a lot of like social media posts. If you guys are on my email list, you might’ve gotten emailed about David Holt. He is a healthcare attorney.

He’s going to host a free webinar from my audience and he’s going to talk about all the like legalities around insurance, like weird questions that come up when you’re dealing with insurance. Even if you’re at a network, it’s going to be super helpful. He’s very knowledgeable about this stuff.

So anyway, look up where you’re scheduling all this stuff. So we’ve got these webinars, emails, and then I’ve got my portable practice method course, my new travel therapist course that’s coming out. It’s called the portable practice method.

We’ve got emails in there for that. So we’ve got all these different emails on this calendar view, but with the AI now, you can talk to your calendar basically and say, give me suggestions on how to organize this better. Or, you know, should I schedule this differently? Or you can open up one of the emails and say, rewrite this.

I don’t like the way this is written. You can do all of that inside of ClickUp. Other ones are like Motion, Trello, with some other ones people use.

I know Trello’s got AI because I also have a Trello board for something. So all of these are ways to like organize your life and in that use it for better self-care. So the more organized you are, of course, the less stressed you’re going to feel.

So if you’re like a mess, sometimes like me, enabling AI and some of these scheduled platforms can really help. Even Calendly, if you guys use Calendly for scheduling at all, it’s got some new tools that are really cool. Maybe you’re trying to do like your private practice, like manage that calendar.

I’ve been talking about this a lot lately. Google Workspace has become HIPAA compliant with the BAA. So there’s a lot of stuff you can do with your Google Calendar, your Google Forbes, your Google Surveys, all of that inside of a HIPAA compliant environment, including in the Clinical AI Club this month, I dropped a module on scheduling and handling no-shows cancellations and waitlist management using the Google Workspace with some worksheets and downloading reports from your EHR and that sort of thing.

So it’s really interesting what you can do with that. And all of that to say, inside of Google Workspace, managing your practice on the back end, using some AI tools to help. Gemini is Google’s AI.

It’s enabled inside of the Google Workspace. So, you know, this is new and I haven’t played with it a lot, but it’s pretty interesting to think how we could use it for our own self-care or even like managing our practices better to, you know, not be so stressed out all the time. And AI is really great for that in the back end.

Some other things I was thinking, like you can create better boundaries using AI. So I don’t know how many of you guys have this. I have an email responder.

When somebody sends me an email, I have an email that shoots back out to them, but it tells them what to expect as far as response times and my hours of communication and when I’ll be getting back to them. But it also lists, you know, hey, if you are okay with not talking to me and you just want to sign up for one of my products or memberships, here’s a bunch of ways you can do that. So you can use Chat2BT to help you construct like a out of office email responder or just an email responder in general that answers a lot of frequently asked questions like, how do I schedule with you? You know, we’re talking about your private practice, or you could put in there like I did, if you’ve got like a little workbook that maybe you sell to people that are on your waitlist or something like that, give this auto responder and you could use the prompt with Chat2BT or whatever AI you like.

You could say write a polite email template to clients explaining my office hours and my response times to promote work-life balance for me. So that can be super helpful. Another thing you can do like with your schedule and using Chat2BT for prompts is create a weekly schedule for me.

I see 25 clients per week and I want to ensure that I have time for admin tasks and at least two hours daily of personal time included in the schedule. So you can use it for that sort of thing too to help you like create the perfect schedule. In the portable practice method, I put a ton of AI tools in there.

I made a bunch of GPTs and one of them was like, it’s a time zone scheduler, but it’s also a personal time scheduler for traveling therapists or really anybody that’s, you know, in private practice could use this because it helps you design your lifestyle first and then make a good schedule and times around how to manage that using AI, using these GPTs that I built out. So those are other, you know, really great ways to do self-care using AI. There are some apps called Finch.

It looks like it’s for kindergartners, but really if you click through finchcare.com, it’s really cute. It’s a good self-care app. You can recommend it to your clients too, but it uses a lot of AI.

So you go in there and you just like type into the AI, like what you’re struggling with that day, if you’re exhausted or you’re stressed out, or, you know, you’ve got like something heavy weighing on your mind, that sort of thing. You type it in to finchcare.com and it gives you like a lot of self-care recommendations and tools and walks you through how to use the tools and all of that. And it’s all AI driven.

I think it’s pretty cool if you want to use it just for your own personal self-care or recommend it to your clients, if you want to, you know, you can say, Hey, what’d you do on the Finch app? Finchcare app this week and see what they say. It’s pretty neat. Another thing that I use all the time for like my own self-care is fathom.ai. It always runs in the background of my meeting and what that does when you’re done, it does a meeting summary.

It gives you the transcript. It’s got AI in it. So you can go in and give it prompts and you could say, Hey, what was it I said that I was going to do to David in this meeting or whatever.

And it’ll just like find a place in the transcript where you talked about that part with David. So it’s got a lot of AI components in it too, but it summarizes the entire meeting for you. And you can pick different summary styles of the meeting.

So you could just have like a summary, you could have a to-do list. You can have the full on transcript. You can share it with the meeting participants.

I always share it with like our bill, like a boss meeting, my insurance membership for therapists. We always have that running in the background. And then at the end, my virtual assistant goes into the fathom recording, grabs that transcript and puts it in like essentially the show notes from the recording in case somebody wants to go back and watch it later.

Those are some ideas for self-care, just using AI. I’ve used it obviously for cooking, you know, for recipes. Now with ChatGPT, you can talk to it.

You can enable the camera on your phone and then have the camera turned around and it can watch what you’re trying to do. And it can talk to you in real time based on the video that it’s watching and give you instructions on how to do something. For example, I’m at my mom’s right now.

She’s got a toilet in her house that’s like running. You know how the toilet runs. It’s so annoying.

So she ordered like a new flapper from Walmart. It’s going to get delivered and I’m going to use ChatGPT to help me fix it. I’m going to set the camera up or have her hold it while we look inside of the toilet.

I’m going to show it the flapper and I’m going to see if it’ll help me basically change the flapper inside of the toilet to stop this toilet from running so we don’t have to call a plumber. So, you know, it’s self-care. I mean, to me, that’s self-care.

Instead of struggling or trying to Google a bunch of stuff to have the AI right there just telling me how to do it is going to be amazing. But you can do it with like any task like that in your house. My friend, Brittany Long, I think she said that she had like a closet door that kept coming off the tracks and she couldn’t figure out how to fix it.

And she used that same thing and was able to fix it. So these cases are just amazing. Like if you like to cook, right? What better knife skills with your cooking or something? Turn that on and say, hey, this is how I’ve been chopping this tomato.

Do you have a better way to do it? And it’s going to be in real time. It’s going to tell you how to do it. So in my mind, these are all self-care.

Another use case is turning it around and showing the inside of your closet or something you need to organize and having it like say, hey, maybe you should organize by colors. That’s how Marie Kondi does in whatever her method is. You know, Marie Kondi style my closet, show it and get some suggestions that way.

Or, hey, I want to redecorate my living room. This is what it looks like right now. And show it around and then get suggestions that way.

So tons of ways that AI can help with like that self-care, just making like the things we do every day easier for us and in our private practice. So anyway, I hope you guys found that helpful. I will talk to you guys later.