Chaos To Calm - How To Help Your Dog To Settle

Separation anxiety, reactivity and resource guarding often all come under the same umbrella or behaviour. Often a dog that struggles with separation anxiety will also be reactive, or also struggle with resource guarding and vice versa. The reason for this is simply your dog is worried.

Life for these dogs can be hard. Owing a dog with these struggles can be hard.

You might find that your dog is on the go 24/7. They dont seem to rest much, and have no 'off' switch. This is quite common with dogs with this particular struggle because they're watching your every move. You can't even get up to go to the bathroom without your dog coming too. Sound familiar?

What can we do to help?

We need to teach our dogs to settle, which in turn will grow more calmness.

Growing calmness in dogs with these struggles is the MAIN focus, because when a dog is calm, they shouldn't feel fear, frustation or excitement. They arent compatible. When a dog is calm, they have more appropriate and calmer responses to events that would normally trigger bigger reactions.

Settle games are a great way to grow more calmness in your dog which will in turn help with these different behaviour struggles. This is teaching your dog to settle in a designated area until they are released.

Calmness is an arousal state rather than an emotion and there are many different things that impact or add to your dog's arousal state. Simply standing up from the sofa can cause a spike in arousal for these dogs which will contribute to filling up their stress buckets (in terms of behaviour we would call this trigger stacking).

What we need to do now is become unpredictable with our movements. Stand up a little more in the evenings, move your car keys to a differnt place (but don't lose them), make more cups of tea or get more glasses of water inthe evening, even just shifting positions or fidgeting more can really help.

We also have a strategy called 'reward nothing' which is simply capturing thise moments when your dog is still. Maybe they're laying on a bed, maybe they've just sat quietly at your feet - we want to capture this behaviour and let them know that they've done something amazing. Be careful not to get the excited though because your reward method could cause an excited response. Instead, maybe a gentle word of praise such as a 'nice job' or a piece of food slooooowly being delivered. We want to maintain calmness here.

Finally, if your dog is crate trained, use it more during the day. Quite often dogs need to be told to simply 'have a nap' and to be put somewhere where there are no distractions so they they just relax.

These things, while they sound very small can have a HUGE impact on a dog that really struggles to rest, which will in turn really help these behaviour struggles.

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