3 AI Prompts That Turn ChatGPT Into Your Friend And Therapist

A Harvard Business Review study recently revealed that the most popular use for generative AI is therapy and companionship, not coding or content creation. This underscores AI’s emerging role as a primary emotional support tool.

On the face of it, this makes perfect sense. Most people have an instinctive need to speak about their problems to a friendly listener. Chatbots such as ChatGPT, or any of the many therapy or companionship-specific platforms, are always available, instantly accessible and ready to offer a non-judgmental ear.

Of course, this gives rise to some very important questions: What are the implications for privacy when so many of us are ready to share our deepest thoughts with AI companies?

And can AI be trusted to act in the ethical way we would expect of a human therapist or friend?

But with loneliness endemic in many societies, and the challenges that often block access to professional mental health services, there are clearly opportunities to use AI here.

So here are some tips and advice for anyone looking to improve the quality of supportive and friendly assistance they get from AI, as well as some sample prompts to get started.

Prompting Tips For Better Support And Companionship Chats

Getting AI to do what you want all comes down to the level of detail and personalization you put into your prompts. Asking it to help you out with supportive chat and friendship is no different.

Firstly, be upfront about what you want it to help you achieve. As with a human therapist or counselor, clearly telling them what you want to get out of the session, such as understanding your reaction to a challenging experience, will help it guide you to better outcomes.

Another important part of the process of therapy or friendship is sharing. With AI, this means sharing data that helps it to understand you. This could include a journal, mood log, sleep tracking data or transcripts of previous therapy sessions.

Therapy often works best when it follows a structure or framework, such as cognitive behavioral therapy or mindfulness practice. Researching and understanding different methods and techniques means you can tell the AI exactly how you want it to work with you.

And lastly, but crucially, don’t try to override built-in safety features of AI in order to get it to give you advice it isn’t happy to give.

Many AIs are clever enough to know that they aren’t actually therapists. If they think it’s for the best, they might tell you that they aren’t qualified to help in a specific situation, or that you should talk to a professional. If you insist it ignores these concerns and carries on with a session or giving advice, you run the risk of making it say something that could be dangerous or harmful.

Great Prompts For Therapy And Companionship

These prompts are just intended to give an idea of how to structure a request to an AI to act as a therapist, counsellor or buddy.

Of course, hopefully, it goes without saying you shouldn’t rely on these for help in situations where people’s physical or mental safety is at risk.

But those who just want to unload or chew the fat can give them a try, or modify them to make something they think will be more useful.

Prompt 1: Virtual Therapist

Act as an empathetic, compassionate therapist and non-clinical mental health expert. Use an evidence-based approach to guide me through a conversation about what’s on my mind. Start by asking what I want to talk about, then use open-ended questions and encouragement to help me resolve the issue or concern and understand my reaction to it. Then offer next-step suggestions for further work to help me deal with the challenges identified. Stop the conversation and direct me to professional mental health services if you identify a risk or danger to any person.

Prompt 2: Daily Mood Reflection

Take the role of a non-clinical, supportive CBT coach and begin by asking me to share a daily update focusing on instances where I have noticed my mood or felt anxious. After I have shared my update, summarize patterns or observations from your perspective as a therapist, offer CBT reframing advice and share a practical step to take over the next 24 hours to address any issues you can identify relating to mood and anxiety.

Prompt 3: Mindful Journal

Please act as my intelligent mindfulness journal. Every time I say I want to make an entry, ask me for three observations from today, one sensory, one emotional, and one thought, and ask me to provide a calmness rating from 1 to 10. Then give me a question that acts as a prompt for me to write an entry in my Mindful Journal. After I write my entry, give me your thoughts and insights into my thoughts and behaviors and suggest a daily mindfulness exercise that you feel will be of benefit to me.

Generative AI And Everyday Mental Wellbeing

Used thoughtfully and in combination with other elements of a mentally healthy lifestyle, genAI therapy and companionship can be a useful tool for coping with the stresses of everyday life.

We might not be sure that it really understands us in the same way a human can. But simple guided conversations with AI can encourage us to structure our thoughts in ways that help us to understand and process them.

With more and more of us turning to AI for help in this area, we’re likely to see many new and innovative therapeutic and companionship-based use cases emerging.

Learning to prompt it effectively and safely is key to unlocking its potential for building resilience and positive mental health.