AJ Zagglin is a psychotherapist, performance coach, and trusted friend of the Mornings in the Lab community who has appeared multiple times on the show over the years — always returning to a warm roast and a genuine conversation. He works in private practice with men, women, and athletes, and has built a reputation as the kind of therapist you might not expect: Iron Maiden shirt, backwards hat, tattoos, and a directness that makes his clients feel both challenged and genuinely seen.
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AJ Zagglin is a psychotherapist, performance coach, and trusted friend of the Mornings in the Lab community who has appeared multiple times on the show over the years — always returning to a warm roast and a genuine conversation. He works in private practice with men, women, and athletes, and has built a reputation as the kind of therapist you might not expect: Iron Maiden shirt, backwards hat, tattoos, and a directness that makes his clients feel both challenged and genuinely seen.
His professional focus is on the patterns that run people's lives underneath the surface — the relational dynamics, the self-limiting beliefs, the performance blocks, and the emotional architecture that shapes every decision a person makes before they consciously decide anything. He works at the intersection of mental health and performance, drawing on therapeutic tools to help people not just feel better but operate better — as athletes, business owners, partners, and parents.
AJ's practice is busy. On his Mornings in the Lab appearance, he noted that business was "extremely busy" — a good problem that came with its own challenge of balancing his two professional worlds (clinical therapy and performance coaching) alongside his personal life. He described the scheduling work of creating that balance with the equanimity of someone who genuinely enjoys being stretched, not just stressed.
When asked about the consistent themes he sees across clients, AJ gave an answer that reflects both clinical depth and hard-won wisdom: 80% of human challenges are the same, regardless of profession, geography, or circumstance. And almost always, somewhere in the story, there is a relationship that is playing a central role. Not necessarily a romantic relationship — it might be with a coach, a co-worker, a family member, a business partner — but a relationship. His conviction: the ability to build and repair relationships is 90% of life, and it is the skill most people never explicitly develop.
His approach in the therapy room is shaped by a critical belief about the client: they are the expert on their own life. His role is not to prescribe answers but to offer different perspectives, ask the questions the client's own mind cannot generate, and create enough safety that genuine self-examination becomes possible. He is keenly aware that his presentation — the tattoos, the backwards hat, the casual aesthetic — creates first impressions that can cut both ways. Some clients are immediately drawn to him; others need time to get past the image to the substance. He is comfortable with both, because his conviction is that over time, people form their opinions based on actions, not appearances.
He is also a man with his own textures. He attended the Guns N' Roses reunion tour opening in Las Vegas in 2017 with the lab's host Keith Bilous — a friendship that predates and extends beyond the show. He is an Iron Maiden devotee. He is, by his own account, deeply invested in his children. He navigates two professional identities simultaneously and is doing the work to make them coexist with enough grace that neither one suffers.
AJ Zagglin represents a type of therapist that is still underrepresented in the cultural imagination: someone who shows up in a room that feels safe because it doesn't feel clinical, whose directness is a form of respect, and who believes — as a professional conviction backed by years of practice — that the answer to most of what ails people is already inside them. His job is to help them find the question that proves it.
