The protocol coach in the Relapsd app is not a chatbot with addiction information. It is a stage-aware, protocol-grounded coaching system, integrated with your protocol data.
Here is what this means in practice.
What the Coach Knows
When you open a coaching session, the coach has access to:
- Your substance (NIC, GREEN, or DRY)
- Your current week in protocol
- Your recent craving log (frequency, intensity, primary triggers)
- Your streak (days clean)
- Your relapse history within the app
This is different from asking a general AI about addiction. The coach is not giving you information about nicotine withdrawal in general-it is responding to your specific situation at your specific week in your specific protocol.
What the Coach Doesn't Know
- Anything you haven't told it in the current or previous sessions
- Your medical history, medications, or pre-existing conditions
- The nuances of your personal relationships and social context
- How your week has felt beyond what you've logged
This means the coach is maximally useful when you provide context, not when you expect it to intuit context it doesn't have.
The Most Effective Use Cases
During a craving: "I'm having a craving right now. I'm at work, it's 3pm, my trigger is usually stress after meetings. What do I do?"
The coach can deliver the specific intervention for your substance at your protocol week, tailored to your logged trigger pattern.
After a relapse: "I just used. I'm at day 47. I'm frustrated."
The coach provides a non-judgmental, protocol-appropriate response: acknowledges the relapse, preserves the streak as personal best, and helps set a new quit date.
For protocol questions: "I'm in week 3 of the NIC protocol. My cravings are mostly gone but I feel flat and unmotivated. Is this normal?"
The coach explains the dopamine deficit phase in the context of week 3 NIC cessation, confirms that the anhedonia is expected, and provides protocol-specific guidance.
At 3am: The coach is available 24/7. This is its primary advantage over human support-the high-risk moments often occur outside business hours.
The Boundaries
The coach is not a therapist, a physician, or an emergency resource. It will explicitly recommend professional support when:
- Suicidal ideation or significant self-harm risk is mentioned
- Medical symptoms requiring physician evaluation are described
- Complexity exceeds what protocol guidance can address
For acute medical emergencies (seizure risk, possible Wernicke's), the coach will instruct you to call emergency services.
The Honest Limitation
Coaching works best when users engage honestly and consistently. Brief, surface-level prompts produce surface-level responses. Providing context-what you're feeling, what triggered this, where you are in your day-produces more calibrated and useful coaching.
The coach improves as you use it. The craving log provides data; the coaching sessions provide context. Together, they build a more complete picture of your cessation arc.