Your Team's AI Anxiety Isn't a Mindset Problem

Researchers at the University of Florida recently proposed a name for something HR teams have been struggling to describe: AI Replacement Dysfunction, or AIRD.¹ It describes distress such as anxiety, insomnia, depression, and identity confusion that could show up when someone faces the threat or reality of losing their job to AI. It is a proposed idea in a short paper, not a study with data, and it is not in any diagnostic manual. Separately, Mercer's Global Talent Trends 2026 report, based on a survey of nearly 12,000 executives, HR leaders, investors, and employees, says employee concern about job loss due to AI rose from 28 percent in 2024 to 40 percent in 2026.²

What We See Before Anyone Names the Cause

We bring this up in corporate sessions because we keep seeing the physical version of it before anyone names the cause. Shoulders that will not release. Breath that stays shallow and high in the chest all day. Clients who describe feeling “on alert” without being able to say what they are alert for. We think of that as more than a mindset problem: a nervous system reading an ongoing, low-grade threat and staying switched on because the threat never resolves. That is our own observation from sessions, not a finding from the paper.

Why a Wellness Perk Doesn't Reach This

This is where we think a lot of corporate wellness programs miss the mark. A resilience workshop or a mindfulness app can give someone language for what they are feeling. In our experience it rarely changes what their body is doing while they sit at their desk. Uncertainty that never resolves can keep the nervous system in a holding pattern, and a holding pattern does not get talked out of existence. It helps to work on it physically, through the body.

We are not therapists and AIRD is a clinical question for clinicians to define and treat. What we can speak to is the physical layer underneath it. Fear and uncertainty change how people breathe, and how people breathe can change how their whole system holds tension and recovers from stress. A team living with constant “will I still have this role” background noise is a team whose baseline stress may have shifted, whether or not anyone has said the word AI out loud in a meeting.

What Actually Helps

The corporate work we do in this space is not about pretending the uncertainty away. It is about giving people back some control over the one system that is always theirs to work with, their own body. Breath practices chosen to help the body settle, not just ones that sound calming. Movement that gives someone a felt sense of capability in a period where a lot else feels uncertain. Regular enough contact that a body has a chance to come out of alert mode instead of staying there for months. This is the same ground we work from in corporate wellbeing programs, building a physical baseline a team can actually hold onto while everything else shifts around them.

None of this replaces honest communication from leadership about what is actually changing and why. If anything, this is a case for more of that, not less, since silence is exactly the kind of ambiguity that keeps a threat response switched on. What we would say to any HR or people leader reading this is simple. If your team's AI-related unease is showing up as fatigue, shorter tempers, or people who seem checked out, that is a physiological pattern worth addressing directly, not just a morale dip to wait out.