dogs

I Asked My Own App for Help. Here’s What It Said.

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A dispatch from the edge of new puppy ownership.

It is 8 a.m. I have already been awake for hours.

Meet Ellie. She is a puppy. She is adorable.

She is destroying me.

I want to be clear about something. I am a human performance coach. I have spent years building a ten-pillar framework for maximizing health and happiness. I teach people how to manage stress, optimize sleep, build resilience, regulate their nervous systems. I have a registered trademark, for crissakes.

And I am currently being defeated by a creature who weighs less than my lightest kettlebell.

So I did what I’ve been encouraging all of you to do. I opened the Coach Keir AI app and typed in my problem.

“I’m struggling with the stress of parenting a new puppy as a full time job, on top of my full time job.”

I want to share exactly what it said. Verbatim. Because it’s better than anything I would have written at that hour…

What Coach Keir Said: Round One

The first response named what was actually happening:

KJ, welcome to the puppy tax — the hidden cost nobody warns you about. Sleepless nights, constant vigilance, zero personal space, and a tiny furry creature who has absolutely no idea what you’re going through. It’s basically a newborn who will eventually chew your furniture.

Here’s what’s actually happening physiologically: you’re running a chronic stress response. Interrupted sleep alone tanks your cortisol regulation, impairs decision-making, and reduces emotional resilience. Add constant unpredictability (will she destroy something while I’m on this Zoom call?) and your nervous system is on high alert all day. That’s exhausting.

Immediate tools from the Slowfit toolkit:

First, your breathing. When the puppy stress spikes, do a quick downregulation reset: mouth closed, 4-count nasal inhale, 8-count nasal exhale. Repeat for 3-5 minutes. That extended exhale is a direct dial into your parasympathetic nervous system — it physiologically cannot stay in fight-or-flight mode with a long exhale. Do this during any quiet moment, even while the puppy naps.

Second, protect your sleep ruthlessly. Also grab a Manta Sleep mask with this link — blackout sleep is non-negotiable when you’re already sleep-deprived.

Your move today: Do that breathing protocol right now, then schedule one 20-minute walk — just you, no puppy. Your nervous system needs a reset.

What’s hitting hardest — the sleep deprivation or the constant unpredictability?

I answered: the sleep deprivation. And the follow-up was even better.

Round Two: The Neuroscience of Running on Empty

KJ, what you’re describing is textbook — and it’s not a character flaw, it’s neuroscience. Sleep deprivation doesn’t just make you tired, it literally impairs your prefrontal cortex (the rational decision-making part of your brain) while simultaneously amplifying your amygdala (the emotional alarm system). You’re essentially driving with no brakes and a heavy accelerator.

Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work is essential here — her book How Emotions Are Made explains exactly what’s happening to you. Her “body budget” model is brilliant: sleep, nutrition, exercise, and social connection are the bedrock of emotional stability. When sleep is depleted, your brain’s predictive emotional processing goes haywire — it starts catastrophizing and overreacting because it literally doesn’t have the resources to regulate properly. You’re not overreacting because you’re weak. You’re overreacting because your brain is running on empty.

Practical interventions right now:

Protect whatever sleep you’re getting ferociously. Same wake time every single day — even weekends, even after bad nights. This anchors your circadian rhythm when everything else feels chaotic. Grab a Manta Sleep mask and get Momentous Magnesium Threonate (with code foghorn) — it crosses the blood-brain barrier and meaningfully improves sleep quality.

Track your recovery with Whoop — join Team Foghorn Fitness free. When you can see your actual recovery data, you stop guessing and start making smarter decisions about when to push and when to protect.

Your move today: Set one non-negotiable sleep boundary tonight. What time does the puppy allow you to be in bed?

The resource tiles that surfaced below the response: Dr. Alia Crum’s Science of Mindset podcast, the Wim Hof Method book, Full Catastrophe Living, How Emotions Are Made, Hope for Cynics. Every one of them relevant. Every one of them something I personally put in the Vault.

Why I’m Showing You This

I’ve published three posts about this app. One about the features. One about why I designed it to not be addictive. One about the ethics of building AI for human performance.

This is the post I should have written first.

The app is not impressive just because of its feature set. It’s useful because at 8 a.m., when I’m running on fragmented sleep and have a full day of coaching ahead, it gives me fast, direct, specific access to the synthesized thinking of someone who has spent years studying this stuff.

That someone is me. Which means I’m getting my own best thinking back when I’m too depleted to access it myself.

That’s a strange and genuinely useful thing.

A few things I want to flag about that exchange, because they matter:

• It called me KJ. Not Coach Keir, not Keir, not “I understand you’re struggling.” It knew who it was talking to—because of a few questions in the onboarding process— and it was direct.

• It named the physiology immediately. No sympathy spiral. No “that sounds really hard.” Here’s what’s actually happening in your nervous system. Here’s why.

• The affiliate links surfaced organically. Manta Sleep mask, Momentous Magnesium, Whoop — these are products I actually use and recommend. They appeared because they were relevant, not because an algorithm was optimizing for commission.

• It ended both responses with a single, specific action. Not a list of ten things. Not an attempt at endless dialogue to artificially increase engagement. One move. Today.

• It asked a follow-up question. It didn’t assume. It narrowed toward what I actually needed. Then it sent me on my way.

That’s what “trained on my methods” actually means in practice. Not a chatbot that has read some random fitness content. A coaching interface that reflects a specific philosophy about how to help people, built from years of my writing, research, and direct work with athletes.

You don’t have to have a puppy. You can have a deadline, a training plateau, a sleep score trending the wrong direction, a knee that won’t cooperate, or just a week when everything feels like too much.

That’s what this app I built is for.

OK. Ellie is ramping up for another loud barking session in her puppy zone at the moment, looking for attention. I’m going to do the breathing protocol right now.

Best,

Keir

P.S. The app is free to download. Coach Keir AI is available to all users. The full Vault — 270+ books, podcasts, tools, and on-demand workouts — unlocks with a paid subscription. Download here.

P.P.S. If you’re dealing with something the app can’t fully address — an injury, a major life transition, or you just want a real human in your corner — that’s what the 1:1 coaching is for. Book an intro session at foghornfitness.com.

P.P.P.S. All ten pillars of the Slowfit Method® live here on Substack. Paid subscribers get the deeper dives and the full resource library. Upgrade here.

P.P.P.P.S. Photo credit to my pal, Jana Ašenbrennerová.

Das Boot.

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“Boot” as in “boot,” not “boat.” My dog eats boots.  She has not, as of yet, devoured or even nibbled on a boat.  At least not to my knowledge. Perhaps if the boat were made of leather, she might give it a whirl.  Take a run at it.  Trip the light fantastic. 

Screenshot 2014-11-20 08.21.10This historic piece of boatbuilding?  A glorified chew toy for our Black Lab and whatever mix.  If I just turned my laptop’s screen to give her the briefest of glimpses at this bark and leather canoe, Wailea would begin blowing her saliva bubbles and dotting her head around with unnatural rapidity, birdlike.  She’d be on the verge of losing her mind.  Terrified, I’d loose my fingers’ grip on the MacBook Air, sprinting and gone from the living room before the laptop thudded on the carpet.  Running for my life. Aren’t I, more or less, made of leather?

Fortunately, I believe leather has long since fallen out of favor as a boat-making ingredient. That’s good for boat owners (and for dog owners showing their dogs pictures of leather boats).  Because my dog would eat every leather boat in the Marina.  It would look like the San Francisco Bay waterfront during the Gold Rush, littered with the remains of abandoned boats.  She would clean out a leather-made boat, removing every last edible or potentially-edible morsel, leaving nothing but the ribs behind.  This would be hard for me to explain to the good people who own boats near my neighborhood —

Screenshot 2014-11-20 08.17.50 On the other hand, for better or worse, as long as my wife leaves leather boots on the ground within Wailea’s reach, the boots are in jeopardy.  Real jeopardy.  Fantastic dog food blog fodder, if you will.

We are still working on training our not-quite-two-years-old pup to keep herself in check when we leave the house without her.  She has pretty much outgrown the chicken coop of a crate she’s had since she weighed 15 pounds.  Sixty pounds later, she practically oozes through the thin metal bars of the crate like that viral Facebook photo of the heavyset dude who gave himself six-pack abs with some kind of bbq grate contraption.  Or like these guys —

Screenshot 2014-11-20 08.11.13

When I head out for a few hours, I know the routine.  I think Lea does too.  Certain doors get closed, the contents behind the door off-limits.  Verboten.  Other items get lifted out of reach.  My baseball glove, for example.  Anything else is fair game. I have made a habit out of scanning a room with a quick spin of my eyes and weighing the odds that anything in paws’ reach will next see the light of day in a pile of poop tomorrow.  It’s not a perfect analysis, but perfect enough.  Usually.

Yesterday, I slipped out for a couple hours, and didn’t look closely enough at the floor of the garage. It’s a little dark in there, and the rainy/overcast conditions yesterday didn’t help my rods and cones.  So I didn’t see the fancy boots on the ground.

Wailea doesn’t suffer from 46 year-old rods and cones.  As soon as the garage door touched down, the girl must have gone straight to work.  Edward Scissorhands on the dinosaur bushes. A couple hours later, the rising garage door slowly revealed…what is that?  I literally couldn’t tell if the pile of shreads was the remains of her beloved penguin stuffy, or a live bird she had somehow managed to capture in the backyard, or maybe even fat rat remnants.  I stood leaning over the carcass.  Squinting my eyes in the still-dim light.  Pulling quick sniffs through my nostrils, trying to detect something organic.  Nudging it lightly with the toebox of my sneaker.  Then I saw a buckle.  Like one you’d see on a pilgrim’s hat.  Like the ones I’ve seen on a pair of my wife’s boots.  Relief that this was no dead rat.  Tightening larynx realizing that I had probably missed this potential food item on my way out the door two hours ago.  And that I would soon be in the dog house for my transgression. 

But at least I’d get some sixpack abs out of the deal.  Am I right?

Thanks for reading.