I have noticed that my interactions with AI tend to raise stress more than lower it. Even when it's doing useful things for me. Have wondered if this is fundamental to the interaction, or a sign of user error, or something else.

Perhaps from the overhead of the language interface coupled with the ease of the expansion of the amount of 'stuff' you potentially need to read and internalise?

Human language can be wonderfully descriptive or terribly verbose as a way of communicating ideas. Writing everything out and being forced to externalise it is its own cost, which pays off only when the space of work to then do collapses with as little feedback as possible (and, ideally, with correct outcomes).

On the other hand the ease with which you can simply get back more text to process means the upfront language heavy interface is now just returning back more information to pull back into your internal model.

Which, for me at least, feels tiring, and stressful when doing language-heavy exploratory tasks that don't collapse or resolve neatly and simply give you back more decisions.