How To Train Service Dog For Anxiety

When you railroad train a dog to notice anxiety, it can make a huge departure in your life. Your anxiety may not manifest as a full on panic attack, but information technology can still be extremely hard to deal with.

Well, and there's that part where the feet can turn into a panic attack if you don't go a handle on information technology. Beyond that though, anxiety can keep you from living your life to the fullest, specially when it feels unpredictable.

You can make your feet more predictable though! Ane of the things you tin can practice to help is to train a dog to detect anxiety.

This is something that I train service dogs to practice equally a job for people with feet. (See my article Practise You Authorize for a Service Dog?) It counts every bit a job if, when the canis familiaris lets you know that you're having anxiety, yous or the dog can do something to help make the anxiety feel meliorate.

Still, your dog doesn't have to exist a fully trained service dog to but practise this for you at home. Training your canis familiaris to discover anxiety tin help y'all continue a handle on things in twenty-four hour period to mean solar day life.

What's really nice is, you can train a dog to observe anxiety, even if your dog is a 10-year-one-time mutt from the shelter. About dogs tin can learn how to do this with patience and persistence. If you think it might assist yous at home, why not endeavor?

If you're having anxiety in public that keeps you from existence able to office normally, you lot might retrieve about training a service dog so that y'all can have them aid you with this when yous are out in public. If this seems similar a path that interests you, check out my articles on owner-training a service dog.

Why Train a Dog to Find Anxiety

When I begin to go anxious, I don't usually realize information technology until I'm actually feeling tense and ill to my tummy. It actually helps me to have my dog, Luna, to help me recall to relax and take some steps to feel less anxious.

Training your dog to detect anxiety can remind you to do things to help your anxiety, like:

Take fast-acting medication that helps you before the anxiety gets too bad.
Do some meditation.
Take deep breaths and slow your breathing.
To footing yourself.
Repeat a mantra.
Remove yourself from the situation causing the anxiety.

Or, you can as well train your dog to practice some things to assistance with your feet, similar:

Bring you your medication
Deep pressure therapy
Turn on the lights in a room (if, say, y'all are having anxiety in your room at dark)
Grounding you lot past licking your face or pressing their nose into your manus.
Lead you abroad from an anxiety-inducing situation

How to Train a Dog to Detect Anxiety

So, how practice you actually train a canis familiaris to detect anxiety? Here are the steps.

Write down the symptoms you lot accept when yous brainstorm to feel anxious. For case, when I am anxious, I feel tense in my shoulders and sick to my stomach.
Place which symptoms your domestic dog could learn to discover. A dog can unremarkably exist taught to sense symptoms that tin can be seen, heard or smelled, similar these:
1. Hyperventilating
2. Fast heartbeat
3. Tense muscles
4. Trembling/muscle twitching
5. Nervous tics (pulling out your hair, nervously running your fingers over something over and over, etc)
Teach your dog the action you lot want them to do to alert yous. Most people like quiet alerts, like the dog scratching at your leg or jabbing you with its nose. Instruction this blazon of alert tin be done by teaching targeting.
1. Nose targets: you lot rub a piece of smelly stuff on the palm of your hand and hold information technology out. When the dog touches your palm with its nose, you reward.
2. Pes targets: you put a evil-smelling treat under a plastic chapeau and when the dog scratches at it, yous advantage. When the dog learns to exercise it without a treat underneath, y'all can transfer the lid to your leg, then remove the hat from your leg and so they target simply your leg with their manus.
3. Requite the targeting a name (e.thou. "Alert!") and teach the dog to do information technology with other trunk parts and in different situations without the lid or the smelly care for involved.
Now, recreate your symptoms that you wrote down (so say, hyperventilate for the dog) so say the name of the targeting behavior. Reward the dog for doing the targeting.
When you can tell y'all are actually getting anxious, ask for "Alert!" and advantage the domestic dog for doing it.
Over time, brainstorm to remove the verbal give-and-take ("Alarm!") and start to ask the domestic dog to exercise the targeting simply when yous recreate your symptoms.
Your domestic dog will begin to notice when y'all are getting broken-hearted and do the warning. Over time, if they are perceptive, they will showtime to alert y'all to the very earliest signs of your feet.

Conclusion

You lot can definitely train a domestic dog to detect anxiety on your own.

You don't need a special dog to do information technology and you don't need to exist peculiarly proficient at training to practise it.

If you keep trying, your dog can alert you when you're starting to get anxious. Information technology can exist frustrating to train this at times, but keep working at it. You'll get information technology. The benefits are worth the work. Fifty-fifty if you lot aren't ready for a service dog, you tin can still go help from the domestic dog you do accept at home.

Think your dog might brand a expert service dog? Get a free temperament test then you lot can see!