Managing Your Dog's Anxiety

Working with your pup on their anxiety can be extremely difficult, time consuming, and emotionally draining.  But seeing your pup anxious is heartbreaking and their anxiety can have a drastic impact on how you’re able to live your own life.  

Barak, our Alaskan Klee Kai, has always been very anxious. We’ve spent years trying to reduce his anxiety.  Barak specifically struggles with separation anxiety, leash aggression, and barking/jumping on visitors in our apartment.  We’ve read books, talked with many other dog owners, and worked with various trainers to help Barak. He’s still an anxious pup, but we’ve found some anxiety management methods have been very helpful for him - we’ve noted some of the most successful methods below!

Tips for Helping Your Pup Find Inner Peace -

• Keep calm and your dog will too

• Build routines

• Get active

• Help your dog nerd out

• Find your pups’ place

Keep Calm and Your Dog Will Too

Your dog pays close attention to your mood and will take their cues about how they should be acting from you.  Given that, the very first step you can take in order to keep your dog calm is to stay calm. 

This can be a challenge (it definitely is for us).  Even during a simple nighttime walk, if I’m worried about a problem at work and Barak starts barking and pulling because he spotted another dog, it’s very easy to become frustrated and lose my cool.  But when I do, everything about my body language changes - my tone of voice, the way I hold the leash, my gait… and all of these things send Barak a signal that says “something is wrong”, only compounding the trigger to make him more anxious.  If I can keep my cool, I can provide Barak with a reassuring, consistent, and comforting presence, which helps him calm down faster after he’s been triggered.

Build Routines

One of the reasons dogs are anxious is because they’re insecure. Creating routines helps create predictability and structure, which helps your pup build confidence and remain calm in anxiety-inducing situations.

Barak’s separation anxiety was quite bad when he was a pup. He was triggered not only by our absence from the apartment, but also by our preparing to leave - getting our backpacks out, putting our shoes on, etc. 

We used routines to help minimize Barak’s separation anxiety. After some trial and error, we realized that Barak is least anxious when we leave individually rather than when we leave together, so we started staggering our exits from the apartment by a few minutes. The last person to leave the apartment has Barak sit in his open crate with a stuffed kong and releases him just as they close the door to the apartment on their way out. This way, Barak focuses on the kong while we’re leaving and for a few minutes after we’ve left, minimizing his anxiety. The repeated routine is one he now expects and understands, which makes him feel more comfortable with our departure and absence. 

Get Active

A dog with pent up energy will be more likely to get up to no good while you’re gone than a pup who’s tired. Exercise is a great way to help your pup release excess energy, which can help reduce anxious behaviors. 

We’ve found that regular exercise helps reduce Barak’s anxiety (we wrote another blog post about running with your pup that you can find here). We try to give him extra exercise before more challenging situations that we know may trigger him, like packing a suitcase or having guests over.  Just be mindful of your pup’s physical limitations and don’t over-exert them in an effort to tire them out.

Help Your Dog Nerd Out!

Similar to staying calm and creating routines, exercising your pup’s brain through mental engagement and training will help minimize your pup’s anxious energy. We give the dogs puzzle toys (so they have to figure out how to get the goods), feed them using snuffle mats (so they have to use their snoot to find their food!), and work with them on tricks (so they use their brain to listen and learn) to get their brains active. These activities help in a few of different ways: 

• It tires pups out! Think about your first day at a new job - absorbing new information, learning new processes, reading a lot of materials… it’s EXHAUSTING. Training your pup new tricks and giving them puzzle toys does the same thing - it makes them use their brain and tires them out

• You can work on skills that you can deploy during stressful situations, like stay and focus

• The positive connection you build with your pup as you train will solidify that you are a safe, trusted presence in stressful situations

Find Your Pups’ Place

Barak hates when people come into our apartment.  His “greeting” includes a lot of barking and jumping… and the “greeting” continues the entire time they’re in the apartment. As you might imagine, this makes it hard for us to have guests as being on ‘Barak duty’ is a full-time job if & when we do invite people over.  

In order to minimize this behavior, a trainer recommended that we teach Barak ‘place’ and utilize that as a way to give him a safe, out of the way space to be when visitors come over.  You can find step-by-step instructions for teaching your pup ‘place’ here.  It has been a great way for us to help Barak get used to other people being in the apartment and also made it a lot more fun for us to have friends over.  

The ‘place’ command can help in other behavior management scenarios, too.  Does your pup jump all over you when you’re getting their dinner ready? You can train them to wait in ‘place’ while you put their food out. Does your pup rush the door everytime the bell rings?  You could train them to go to ‘place’ and make accepting that Postmates order easier!  

FINAL REMINDER

Your dog’s anxiety isn’t something that can be solved like a math problem.  You and your pup will need to continuously work together, communicate, and keep each other calm and happy.  We hope that the various exercises and frameworks we’ve recommended are helpful.  

We’d love to hear what sorts of tools and activities help others minimize their pups’ anxiety - please let us know in the comments!