Place Command and the Anxious Dogs

Some of the ways that I help a dog learn to cope with his anxieties in life is by teaching him about boundaries, impulse control, structure, rules and giving him accountability once he’s learned all of these great life skills. Crate training and Place command training are just two of the first pieces that they learning.

When most anxious dogs have the freedom and the opportunity to choose for himself, he always makes very poor (noisy! 😬🙉) anxious, impulsive and reactive choices. So, what we need to do is stop this cycle of unhealthy mindset and inappropriate behaviour and then replace it with something better… a calm state of mind and appropriate behaviour and then always hold him accountable for the new mindset and behaviour by not allowing them to indulge in old anxious habits.

Focusing on his mindset and teaching him how to go into and hold a much calmer state of mind using our place command and passive training. This means that an anxious dog spends the majority of his time right now learning how to hold commands keeping his mind and his body calm and relaxed… both very foreign concepts for the anxious dog. Movement is very easy for anxious dogs and enables them that get stuck in and perpetuate anxious and reactive patterns when they pace, act on impulse, whine and howl, etc. But stillness and calmness is extremely hard for them which is why we have to practice the calm stuff 100 times more then the active stuff. So during our passive mindset training sessions, aka doggie meditation, we sprinkle in just a few reps of active training for obedience purposes… because we need to have those bells and whistles too!

Anxiety is one of the most challenging unwanted behaviours to rehab in any dog. Once we’ve got the anxiety into remission and taught the dog a new calmer skill set, the dog’s longterm behavioural success now depends on his handler continuing to provide that leadership by consistently applying the rules, boundaries, structure, self discipline and accountability longterm. Training makes this possible, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.