The Human Advantage Series | Nervous System Regulation & the Foundation for AI Literacy

This is a recap of Episode 5 of The Human Advantage, Caeli's interview series on the future of work and building organizations that genuinely support people.

The more AI shows up in my life, the more I've been thinking about what it actually takes to build a conscious relationship with it.

In episode 5, I sat down with Tamra Moroski, a transformation specialist and Head of Partnerships at SmarterX, who's been working in AI education for six years, since before ChatGPT existed. About fifteen minutes in, I found out we had something else in common: she's a certified yoga teacher, and so am I. I did my 200-hour training a few years ago and I'm halfway through my 500-hour right now, and the second that came up, the whole conversation shifted. What started as an interview about AI adoption turned into two yoga teachers comparing notes on nervous systems, breathwork, and what it actually takes to cultivate conscious tech use.

We ended up covering three things I think about constantly: how to actually regulate yourself at work, how organizations should be relating to AI instead of just mandating it, and what the emerging research says AI is doing to our brains when we lean on it too hard.

How to actually regulate yourself at work

This is the part of the conversation where I stopped taking notes like a host and started taking notes like a student. Tamra's whole practice, the yoga, the breathwork, the cold plunging, isn't a side hobby from her AI work. It's the thing that let her notice, in real time, what constant AI use was doing to her own body.

I noticed my ability to think through things at a deeper level. I wasn't journaling as much... I felt more disconnected from myself than I am usually used to.

She was careful not to make that a personal failing, and this is where she got into the physiology, which is the part I still think about most. Employees, she said, take on the nervous system of their manager. A dysregulated manager's state travels through the whole team, and middle managers, who are often responsible for both people and AI rollout right now, are absorbing an unusual amount of that load.

That's not just anecdotal. Research on emotional contagion and neural synchronization within leader-follower pairs, including a study published in PMC, shows that direct reports often align their neural activity and physiological states, like heart rate, with their leader's, and that the mirroring flows unevenly from the top down.

Her suggestion: open meetings with a minute of breathing or meditation. She pointed to the HeartMath Institute's work training police officers and firefighters in heart-coherence exercises as proof that a brief regulation practice measurably changes how open and connected a group is right afterward. It reframed something I'd brought up earlier in our conversation myself, that the average corporate employee's attention holds on a single task for only a couple of minutes before switching, competing the whole time with Slack, email, and half the room's focus. A minute of quiet at the top of a meeting is a small window, but her argument is that it's often the only moment all day where a room's attention is actually in one place.

How organizations should be relating to AI

Tamra opened and closed our conversation with the same tool she uses to stay conscious of her own relationship to AI: a four-part filter.

• Agency. Does this preserve my ability to choose, or am I taking a back seat and letting the AI tell me what's correct? This is the first checkpoint, before you even open the app: are you still the one deciding, or has the tool taken the wheel without you noticing?
• Discernment. Is it sharpening my thinking, or am I not thinking at all? Her test here is whether a tool leaves you a better thinker afterward, not just a faster one.
• Presence. Is it deepening my presence, or replacing it? This is the one she comes back to most as a yoga teacher: whether a tool pulls you further into the moment you're actually in, or pulls you out of it.
• Truth. Does it actually align with my inner truth, or am I just defaulting to convenience, the path of least resistance? This is the gut check for whether you're making a real decision, or just taking the easiest one.

Right now we're not thinking like that. We're just told we need to learn it because people say we need to learn it, which, okay, great. But there still has to be that embodied state, that intentional use of it.

She translates that same filter to how companies should roll AI out. Her diagnosis of what usually goes wrong was blunt: pressure lands from the top, and the people piece gets skipped entirely.

I do see it's more pressure from the C-suite to just start using the technology, and there's not a lot of communication around starting with the people.

Her prescription: build an AI council, with HR leading or at the table, so the rollout gets designed by people thinking about the humans affected, not just the tooling. Pick an education platform (she pointed to her own company's AI Academy, alongside the training Anthropic and OpenAI publish directly), then carve out real time in the workday to test the tools out of curiosity instead of obligation.

When people are coming at something from a place of pure curiosity and play and joy, and how this is going to improve my life...

She was candid about how big she thinks the upside actually is. When ChatGPT launched, her instinct was that it could help solve burnout and eventually support a four-day work week, because so much of the current structure of work runs on systems that don't need to exist anymore. Not everyone agreed with her at the time. She's still betting that AI, used with intention, can let us rethink what a thriving working life looks like, with the human as the actual goal instead of an afterthought.

It's a useful lens for evaluating any workplace AI tool, including ours. The agency question is the one we built Caeli around: it surfaces what's eligible and what a purchase will cost across HSA, FSA, and LSA funds, but it doesn't make the call for the employee. It hands back the information and lets the person decide, the difference between a tool that supports a choice and one that makes the choice without you noticing.

What the research says about AI and our brains

The research Tamra kept returning to lines up with MIT Media Lab's widely cited "Your Brain on ChatGPT" study, which found that people who leaned on AI for a task struggled afterward to recall or explain their own reasoning on it. She'd noticed the exact same pattern in herself right after ChatGPT launched. She journals every single day, no exceptions, and she watched that habit slip and her own thinking get shallower at the same time.

She's careful not to frame this as anyone's fault. It's what happens when a brain already overloaded from years of isolation and burnout culture gets handed one more stream of information to process, on top of a pretty existential question AI keeps surfacing: who am I, if my job title isn't me? Under that kind of chronic stress, she explained, the prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for logical thinking and decision-making, effectively shuts down.

It's part of why she's been studying the flow-science work of researcher Steven Kotler, who leads the Flow Research Collective. Her interest isn't deep focus for its own sake. It's understanding how to stay in control of what has access to your attention, AI tools included, instead of the other way around. I mentioned Johan Hari's work on attention, how the sheer volume of information we're all processing pushes the brain toward skimming, because skimming is the lowest-effort path and the brain always defaults to the lowest-effort path unless you actively train it otherwise.

Her actual advice for retraining it was almost defiantly analog: get outside, take a walk, be deliberate about where your time goes. And run everything back through the same filter, agency, discernment, presence, and truth, as a running check, not a one-time audit.

Unless you actually train it, the same way you'd go to the gym, the same way you'd practice breath work or do breath holds...

Caeli Pro-Tip: Tamra's own regulation toolkit, yoga, breathwork, cold plunging, is exactly the kind of spending an LSA (Lifestyle Spending Account) is built to cover, and most employees have no idea how much of it their employer already funds. Caeli reads your specific plan and surfaces what's actually eligible before you buy, so a class pass or a wellness membership doesn't have to come out of pocket if your employer already set the money aside. Install Caeli to see what your plan covers.

The takeaway

Every answer Tamra gave traced back to the same idea: the technology isn't the problem, defaulting to it without checking in with yourself is. An AI council instead of a mandate. A minute of breathing before a meeting instead of skipping straight to the agenda. A daily journal instead of letting AI hold your thinking for you. None of it is anti-AI. It's a case for staying the one making the choice, agency, discernment, presence, and truth, every time you open a new tool.

That's the human advantage.

Thank you to Tamra Moroski for such a generous and grounding conversation, and for the reminder that staying conscious of your own choices isn't separate from doing good work, it's the foundation of it. You can connect with her on LinkedIn to keep learning about intentional AI adoption.