Building Coherence

Personal governance now only takes a file, a watch, and a few evenings.

January 18, 2026

The Shift

Four months ago, I couldn’t run. I couldn’t think clearly. I was surviving, not living.

Today I’m training for a 100km ultramarathon. I’ve moved countries. I wake up excited about my life’s mission. The transformation wasn’t a heroic effort—it was systems. A handful of rules, a few rituals, and an AI operating system.

It’s JARVIS for my biological suit.

This is the story of what changed.

I. Hitting the Wall

I’m the founder of a deep tech company.

Fifteen people’s livelihoods depended on my decisions. Responsibility compounded. The gap between where you are and where you want to be never stops staring at you.

Nights became compulsive. I was working late to reduce uncertainty, running scenarios, replaying the same conversation, rewriting the same slide. The pattern felt productive, but it was actually self-soothing—buying temporary relief with tomorrow’s capacity. When you’re the person holding everything together, stopping feels like betrayal. But your body doesn’t care. It keeps score.

August 2025. HRV in the 30s. Resting heart rate spiking into the 80s. Deep sleep gone.

I tried to recover the way I’d solved every other problem: more effort, more planning, more discipline. Nothing held. Because I was trying to solve a nervous system problem with the tool that was compromised: my brain.

II. The Governor

What I needed was less, not more.

So I built a rules engine for a human life. It reads objective inputs—sleep, HRV, calendar—chooses a mode, and enforces constraints when my judgment is degraded.

I call it LifeOS. It’s not fully autonomous. It’s pre-committed rules and rituals enforced by a system that remembers them when I’m tired.

The mode is chosen from capacity and obligations. Not ambition.

The system tracks seven pillars: Health, Training, Work, Learning, Relationships, Output, and Integrity. Each has its own status, thresholds, and rules. Health always wins conflicts with other pillars. If the body breaks, nothing else matters.

The point isn’t productivity. It’s alignment. It’s about living every day in accordance with my mission and values, even when my nervous system is fighting me.

III. The Rituals

Four commands. Five minutes a day.

Morning calibration. Evening shutdown. Check-ins. Weekly review.

Each session starts by reading a constitution—a file that encodes everything the system needs to know. When I start, the AI knows my constraints, my current state, my open loops, and what I committed to. The session starts where the last one ended.

Every rule has three parts: signal, constraint, and enforcement.

When the signal appears, the rule fires.

IV. In Practice

Friday evening. I’d just finished an 84-minute outdoor run—first proper session in months.

I felt good. I wanted to train hard again the next day. The system checked my state. Body Battery: 11 out of 100. Training Readiness: 42. I’d drained 72 points of capacity in a single day. The rule fired: recovery day tomorrow.

I wanted to push. But past-me knew this pattern. Feeling good after a hard effort doesn’t mean you’ve recovered. The debt is invisible until you try to spend what isn’t there. I took the rest day. Two days later, Training Readiness was back to 88.

It doesn’t work perfectly. Sometimes I override it. Sometimes I bargain with it. A few weeks ago, I pushed through a low Training Readiness day because I “felt fine.” It took four days to recover instead of one. The following week, I added a rule: Training Readiness below 40 means easy effort only. No exceptions.

I still relapse into old patterns. The difference is I catch it in hours, not weeks.

And when I fail, I add a rule.

V. Four Months Later

Four months of biometric data. The numbers aren’t the point. The pattern is.

(Garmin data, October 2025 to January 2026)

The system didn’t heal me. I trained, slept more, reduced stress, and changed my environment. But LifeOS made those behaviours inevitable. It prevented me from sabotaging the recovery.

Four months ago, I couldn’t run. I couldn’t think clearly. Now I’m training for a 100km ultramarathon. I’ve executed an international relocation.

The mission didn’t change. My ability to carry it did.

VI. The Access Shift

None of this was blocked by technology. It was blocked by the willingness to treat my own life like something worth designing.

LifeOS doesn’t cure depression. It doesn’t replace therapy, sleep, or relationships. It just prevents irreversible decisions while compromised. The rules don’t disappear if the system goes down—I internalise them through repetition. The AI is training wheels that become muscle memory.

A year ago, personal governance required a team. Now it’s a file, a watch, and a few evenings of setup.

The tools now exist for anyone to build personal governance: a few rules, a few triggers, a few rituals, enforced by something that doesn’t negotiate when you’re tired.

The Age of Wonders isn’t only energy and materials. It’s access to the infrastructure of a well-lived life. That infrastructure used to require money, teams, or exceptional self-control. Now it’s cheap enough to build in a weekend.

Motivation is weather. Systems are law.

Appendix A: The Session Flows

Morning Calibration

The system pulls fresh data from my Garmin, reads yesterday’s journal entries, checks my calendar. A typical output:

Then it asks: What’s the single most important thing to ship today?

From there, it builds a plan: deep work block, critical three tasks, training recommendation, hard stop time. The session takes four minutes. I know exactly what I’m doing, what I’m not doing, and when I’m stopping.

Mid-Day Check-in

Quick status. What was committed, what’s completed, what’s outstanding. Body Battery trend. One actionable nudge. Ninety seconds.

Evening Shutdown

The system pulls fresh Garmin data and today’s journal entries. It surfaces what was committed versus completed, extracts new contacts and open loops from journals, logs training, and sets tomorrow’s anchor.

Then the hard stop fires: No new work after this point. Undone items become backlog. Wind-down begins.

Weekly Review

Sunday morning. The system pulls the full week’s data and produces an integrity review: pillar status, promises made versus kept, drift detection.

Then it asks for one structural adjustment: What rule would have prevented the drift?

The rule goes into the constitution. Next week, the system catches me earlier.

Appendix B: The Debt Indicators

Five signals that fire DURABILITY mode. Any two triggers automatic intervention.

1. Sleep quality down for 2+ nights
2. HRV trending down or RHR trending up
3. Racing thoughts after 9pm
4. Compulsive checking or “one more thing”
5. Emotional volatility — irritation, despair, or overconfidence

When DURABILITY fires: no decisions after 9pm, 24-hour minimum recovery before intensity returns.

Appendix C: The Hard Stops

Non-negotiable constraints written into the system.

Shutdown Enforcement: No new work after shutdown. If something is undone, it becomes a backlog item for tomorrow—never a night rescue. “Just one more thing” is not permitted.

Friction Budget: If the friction score hits 3+ (sleep disruption + admin load + conflict + travel + injury), operate in Maintenance Mode. No expansion in any pillar.

Debt Repayment: If any two debt indicators fire then 24 hours minimum repayment before intensity returns. A coffee and a walk are not repayment.

9pm Curfew: After 9pm—no decisions, no strategy, no relationship processing. Write it down, close the laptop, sleep.

Everything else is negotiable.

Appendix D: The State File

The system runs on a single JSON file. Every session reads it. Every session updates it.

The file contains pillar status, today’s friction signals, the three critical tasks, and a handoff section with open loops and context for the next session.

When I start a new session, the AI reads this file first. It knows my resting heart rate trend, my training load, my open loops, and what I said I’d do yesterday. The session starts where the last one ended.

That’s the entire infrastructure. A text file and a watch.