Dear Stoics,

There is a particular kind of happiness that you feel when a dog puts its head on your knee. Nothing has been solved, but for a moment, everything is all right. Anyone who has lived with or befriended a dog knows this feeling. Today’s letter is a small tribute to our four-legged friends, and to the ways their presence can heal us.

Humans are not very good at being comforted. Offer us reassurance, and we argue with it. Tell us it will be fine, and we come up with a dozen reasons it won’t. Our anxiety is made of language, but a dog brings us something much better than words: a warm and steady presence. There is no sentence in the world that can do what a trusting dog does to a nervous system.

Most of this is chemistry: when a dog and a person look at each other, both of them release oxytocin, the same hormone that bonds mothers to their infants. Over thousands of years, dogs have learned to use the one key that opens the human heart from the outside. And when we stroke them, our stress hormones fall: ten minutes of petting has been shown to lower cortisol in people who were anxious just moments earlier. This is the secret behind the therapy dogs working in hospitals. They are there not only to cheer patients up, but also to remind their bodies that they are safe.

Dogs also make us do the things we know we should do but never would without them. They drag us outside at seven in the morning and insist on a walk even when it’s pouring. Several times a day, they bring us back to the present, using a tennis ball as a meditation guide. A great deal of what we call the healing power of dogs is simply a dog refusing to let us disappear into our own heads.

Of course, not everyone reading this can share a sofa with a dog. Some of us are allergic, some rent flats from dog-unfriendly landlords, and some can’t afford a vet or give a dog the time it deserves. If that’s you, don’t worry, you’re not left out. The comfort of animals travels really well through a screen. When researchers sat anxious students in front of half an hour of cute animal clips, their heart rates and blood pressure fell to healthy levels, and a recent study of office workers found puppy videos doing the same in the middle of a working day. In the spring of 2020, when the world was frightened and isolated, our screens filled up with cats knocking things off shelves and dogs failing to catch treats. This way, we were medicating ourselves, and it worked.

In the end, what dogs give us is their gentle company. So this week, let them do their wonders on you: in person if you can, on a screen if you can’t. And one more thing: since dogs spend their lives looking after our nervous systems, it seemed only fair to build something that helps us look after them in return. That’s why we want you to meet…

Hau is the Stoic team’s new app for dog owners: a digital health record and care advisor that keeps everything about your dog in one place. In a few moments, it builds a personalised care plan: vaccines, medications, parasite protection, walks, meals, training, and shows you at a glance what’s on track and what needs your attention. With Hau you can:

Get Hau for your dog

A dog treats every walk as if it were the first one ever taken. The same street is still astonishing, even after a hundred times. This week’s theme, On Extraordinary Circumstances, invites you to look at your life through a dog’s eyes and find the wonders hiding in plain sight.

Each day, notice one marvel you’ve stopped seeing. What would a visitor from another century find most remarkable about your afternoon? What wonderful thing have you started taking for granted? What did today offer that you, ten years ago, would have found extraordinary? Open your journal and start your journey now.