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I work from home, and for about a year my dog quietly dismantled my career one video call at a time. This is a long post. The bowl recommendation is at the end if you want to skip, but the story is the actual point. I have a Labrador. I got her knowing Labs were "high energy" the way you know, abstractly, that the ocean is large. You do not understand the ocean until you are in it. Her name is Juniper. The work-from-home thing is what made it unbearable, because I was right there. I would be on a call and hear the specific sound of a dog committing a crime in the next room, and I could not do anything about it. I once watched a colleague's face change as, off-camera, Juniper unstuffed an entire couch cushion eighteen inches behind my laptop. I am, for the record, a skeptic about dog products. I think most of the industry is repackaged nonsense sold to people who feel guilty. I had a drawer of evidence: puzzle toys, snuffle mats, lick mats, a treat-dispensing camera that cost more than I will admit. None of it moved the needle for more than a day. I walked her constantly. Morning run, lunch walk, evening hike. Training class on Saturdays. A young Lab absorbs all of that and asks for the real workload. Because here is the part that took me a humiliating amount of time to understand, despite working from home with nothing but time to think about it. Exercise tires the body. It does not tire the brain. Retrievers were bred to work full hunting days, fetching and swimming and waiting on command for hours, making small decisions the entire time. The body gets tired. The brain stays online. So a physically exhausted Lab is still a fully alert Lab, and an alert retriever's brain with no job to do will invent one. It usually involves your furniture. I found a thread on here about a 3-in-1 slow feeder. Lick mat, center post, treat ball. Normally I would scroll past. What stopped me was that the top comments were not "this changed my life," they were people explaining the mechanism, the parasympathetic nervous system, why focused licking actually downshifts a dog's brain in a way that movement does not. That is a real thing. I checked, because I am me. Repetitive licking genuinely engages the calming branch of the nervous system. Five minutes of it has roughly the calming effect of a five mile walk, and unlike the walk, it works on the part that was actually the problem. I ordered it with a fully prepared "told you so" ready for whoever had recommended it. I did not get to use the "told you so." Day one, Juniper worked the bowl for fifteen minutes and then settled under my desk and stayed there for the rest of the call. Day three she slept through an entire afternoon of meetings. By the end of week one I had a normal workday for the first time since I had gotten her, and I want to be precise: not a better workday, a normal one, the kind other people apparently just have. She is still a Lab. She still brings me things and judges me when I will not throw them. But the destruction stopped, and it stopped because of a thirty dollar bowl, which my skeptic brain has had to make a difficult peace with. Two things I learned after. One, I should have listened to the people explaining the mechanism a year ago. Two, every bowl helps RescuePaws provide ten meals to abandoned dogs through their local partners, which I did not know and did not buy it for, but it is a good thing to find out you accidentally did. If you have a Lab, or any working breed, and you have tried the drawer of products and the three walks a day, and you are starting to think the dog is broken or you are: neither of you is broken. The brain was built for a job. Give it one. This is the cheapest, least annoying way I have found to do that. https://therescuepaws.com/products/3-in-1-slow-feeder-bowl