Self Care for living with a reactive dog

Some thoughts on looking after your own wellbeing when you live with a lump of plastic explosive crudely fashioned into a dog shape.

A reactive dog is a “dog who has the tendency to overreact” to certain things. Reactivity is a behaviour that can be rooted in a slew of causal factors, but mostly we see dogs who overreact to things they are scared of or things that they are really into, but can’t access. Reactive dogs are hard work for their human guardians. It doesn’t matter if you are a seasoned pro who’s changed their life plan to work with helping reactive dogs live a less stressful life or if you are brand new to living with an embodied exclamation point with fur: these dogs with big feelings take up a lot of emotional space and effort for us.

When a dog is reactive or begins to display reactive behaviours, it can shrink your life - sometimes overnight. It is isolating. In this blog, I am not here to talk about how we help those dogs feel better, if you need help with that you can get in touch here.
Right now, I’m here to talk about what you and I can do with and for ourselves to help somewhat spread the emotional load of life with a dog with big feelings.

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Self Care Isn't just Bath Bombs
“Self-care” is a term that’s thrown about a lot these days. If you are anything like me, you’ll immediately shut down any suggestion of practising it, telling people “I don’t have a bath, actually, so I can’t self-care”. But self-care is not just lush bath bombs and huffing a lavender bag as you cry into your pillow after an incident with a Man With a Dog™. It’s a deliberate effort to make general lifestyle changes that help your holistic well-being. Improving your physical, mental and emotional health, recognising and responding to YOUR OWN needs and making choices that feed into improving your overall health. It’s also about setting boundaries to make sure you have the energy to deal with general life challenges as well as the challenges your coke bottle with a mentos dropped into it of a dog slings at you from day to day.

If you are burnt out, you will start to resent your dog. You can’t be there for them if you can’t be there for yourself. If you are reactive, your dog will take even subtle cues from you and be more reactive themselves - very helpful, thanks, teamwork makes the dream work.
We spend a metric bark ton of time making sure our dog’s “needs are met” but often forget that their main need is for a stable, trusted primary attachment figure. If you’re so tightly wound you have nearly thrown a man into a reservoir because he’s failed to recall his dog repeatedly and frightened your Best Girl (based on a true story) what hope have you of helping your favourite financial burden feel safe and under threshold in the face of their triggers?

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Reactive Dog Realities
If you’re reading this, you likely already know a lot about how reactive dogs work, why they’re doing what they’re doing, their triggers, the distances they feel safe at and all that. However, if you are new to sharing your life with one of those fireworks that you think has finished going off but then continues to go off for another five minutes and is a bugger to tidy up in the morning of a dog, it’s helpful to know the following so you are able to give yourself a break.

First, understand that reactivity and "true" aggression are different things, but they can look very similar to the untrained eye. A fearful reactive dog and a frustrated reactive dog may display exaggerated and intense responses to certain stimuli or situations, and this can look from the outside like your dog is looking for any excuse to have a fight: usually, though, they just want to get out of a situation.

Secondly, a reactive response to triggers, especially an extreme one, is fuelled entirely by your dog’s nervous system. They are not in a “thinking” state and are not behaving this way to embarrass, get at or otherwise make you look like a “bad” guardian in front of Mike from down the road with the German shepherd that, suspiciously, never puts a toe out of line. When you reframe your dog’s responses and understand that they are simply behaving, it can take a huge weight off the worry.

Consult a Professional
Working with a force-free canine behaviour consultant, behaviourist, clinical behaviourist, vet behaviourist - or all of those is your first stage of self-care. Speak to an expert, someone who can help you understand why your dog is doing what they are doing, who can help formulate a management and behaviour modification plan will help you feel less isolated and give you a sense of control over the situation.
Every dog has individual needs and roots to their reactivity, working with someone who understands dogs and can help you with your dog’s specific flavour of extremely unstable nitrogen bonds useful for the controlled demolition of buildings means that you are not floundering around on Dogstagram or Facebook groups trying to navigate the many outdated and often dangerous “tips”.

Consider getting a reactive-dog-savvy dog walker on board, someone who’s into the extreme sport of reactive dogs and knows their way around evasive handling, direction changes and has a borderline questionable knowledge of where all of the local out-of-the-way quiet spots are.
A reactive dog walker should arrange a meet and greet session before they agree to take on your dog, where they can get the lowdown on who your dog is, what their issues are and learn any of the training cues you use when out with your dog. They should focus their walks with your dog on decompression and enrichment, giving you the opportunity to decompress yourself.

Better still, if you have a local force-free trainer who’s used to handling dogs that might contravene the Explosive Substances Act 1883, actually, it can be helpful to enlist them to provide active training-focused walks. They should be able to help support you in changing your dog’s emotional response to triggers, or even do the initial groundwork for you before handing your dog back over with advice on protocols and routines they have taught your dog.
Yes, the above things cost money, but if you are going to invest any cash into helping yourself help your dog then outsourcing the burden (and it is a burden) can give you the mental time and space to reset whilst expediting your dog’s behavioural progress.

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Prioritise Your Training Goals
Whilst we are on the subject of training... If you are working on this alone with your dog, please know that it is absolutely fine, and actually good practice, to train your dog things that make YOUR life easier.

Usually, if you are living with a gender reveal that went wrong and caused a forest fire of a dog, their reactivity towards triggers on walks is not the only issue you will be dealing with. Often you will have a dog who is generally not very resilient around other stressors, a dog who barks at things at home - like the door, window or sounds of other people in your building. You might have a dog who doesn’t like to be left home alone, or even that won’t tolerate being left with anyone other than yourself. Perhaps they can’t cope with car travel, so getting them away from home is also a struggle.

Make a list of things that would be handy for your dog to be able to do to make your life easier, for example, if your dog was happy to be left at home for an hour or two you might be able to get some time away from them. If your dog was happy travelling in the car, you’d be able to drive out to less stressful walk venues. If your dog had a few trusted humans, you could use them to dog sit whilst you spend an afternoon doing HUMAN THINGS, like a human!
By prioritising working on these lower-level stressors with your dog, you will open up your own world a little bit more, giving you mental energy to tackle the Bigger Issues with more focus, empathy and consistency. It’ll give you the opportunity to continue doing non-canine things you enjoy doing - decompression and enrichment are not just for dogs.

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Decompress Yourself
Decompression and enrichment, why do we do them with our reactive dogs?
To help them down-regulate their central nervous system, to bring them from a sympathetic nervous system state (fight or flight) into a parasympathetic nervous system state (rest and digest).
We really are out there trying to convince ourselves that somehow as humans, because we not only invented the USB connector but can also correctly put it in the corresponding USB port a minimum of 6 times out of 10 that we don’t need to think about our own nervous system regulation? Sorry, ape-person, you might be able to choose what you want to watch on Netflix as soon as you open the app but you still have a fight or flight mode and living with a leaking petrol tank next to a person dropping their cigarette end onto the floor in slow motion of a dog can mean you spend a great deal more time there than is really healthy.

Prolonged sympathetic nervous system activation can lead to various physical and mental health issues. Chronic stress is no joke, it impacts your sleep quality, can cause gut issues and leave you in a heightened anxious state. Taking time out to regulate your nervous system and mindfully take practical self-care steps, whether you want to or not, is the only way to make sure you don’t fall victim to the shitty shit everything is shit cycle (clinical term).

Move Your Body, Even a Little
Now, here is the part of the blog where I tell you to take up a brand new heavy duty cold water bath centric physical exercise routine because “RegUlAr ExErCiSe Is GoOD FoR StrEsS ReLiEF.” It is, exercise boosts endorphins, but I’m not going to do that to you. If you aren’t already doing some form of physical activity, there are probably reasons for this that I am absolutely not qualified to coach you through.
If you do enjoy specific exercise like running, yoga, cycling, roller skating, strength training, then absolutely do that thing. You get free endorphins, whilst self-directed focus on movement and breathing can be incredibly grounding. Plus sometimes it’s pretty rad to work along a personal “fitness goals” journey.

Touch Grass
Whether or not you have a favoured sporting activity, you should at the very least try to get outside and touch some grass. Studies have shown that being out in nature increases parasympathetic activity, reduces prefrontal cortex activity and sympathetic nervous system activation. In short, it slows down the thinky angsty bit of your system.
You don’t need to go on a hike to do this, simply being present when you spend time among trees and green spaces is enough. Slow down, breathe deeply and listen to the sounds. Take notice of the ground you are walking on, if you spend time in the same place over the year look out for the subtle changes of the season. It’s actually quite hard to worry about tax returns when you are face to face with a really good tree trunk or cool bug.

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Give Yourself a Lil Treat
If you are a serial self-flagellator and “struggle to make time for yourself”, consider integrating “power-ups” into your day. Power-ups are an idea devised by Jane McGonigal in her book SuperBetter. They are things that are easy to do that make you feel good.
Imagine micro-dosing positive energy, in an absolutely legal way.

It can be good to start with really simple things to get into the habit with little effort

• taking 10 deep, mindful breaths, for example. Then as you get into the swing, add more little “treats” to the rotation. There isn’t a right or wrong with this, just choose what makes you feel positive and don’t feel guilty in taking the time out to do it.

Jot down a list of things you enjoy like - watching the birds, having a bit of a dance to your favourite music, eating a good apple, crochet, making and drinking an excellent coffee - any things you can think of that would be a power-up for you.
You can gamify this even more by writing your power-ups onto slips of paper and putting them into a jar, if you’re feeling a dip, or deserve a reward for diplomatically dealing with the way that Mike from down the road tried to tell you how to handle your dog, you can stick your hand in the jar and bring out a power-up prompt. WIN EVERY TIME.

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Objective Thoughts
Sometimes we can’t keep ahead of the lizard brain response to living with an “I can hear ticking, can you hear ticking? Can you smell gas?” of a dog and we may fall foul of catastrophising. This often begins with you being out with your dog in public, them being a little… much, and you becoming overly conscious and fearful of those around you judging you.
It’s a human response that when something happens, you will assign it meaning, and that then affects how you feel about the situation. For example, if a mate says they’ll ring you but doesn’t, you might think it’s for a bad reason: you don’t matter, they forgot you, they are mad at you. Thoughts like that will likely make you feel crappy or frustrated. If you knew they’d had an emergency, were feeling rough or had lost their phone on the beach, you would likely feel sympathetic or concerned.
A habit to get into to kick your mindset back into “they don’t really care, actually” is playing the Three Accounts Game.
You are already telling yourself a BS story about what someone thinks about you, let’s say someone looks at you when your dog is kicking off. You immediately go into “they are judging me and think I can’t handle my dog” mode and get all embarrassed or even ashamed.

With this game you just make up three more possible stories for why they might be looking at you.

• Maybe they too have a reactive dog and are impressed at how you’re handling yours.
• Perhaps they had a dog that looked like yours as a kid and they are curious about them.
• Or maybe they are judging you, but they have no idea what challenges you are facing.

These alternative stories can help you feel better about a situation. You aren’t trying to find out the true reason behind the way the other person is acting, you’ll never know, just reminding yourself that you have control over how you interpret an encounter and you are able to choose an interpretation that makes you feel less crap.

Basically, nobody gives a toss what you are up to, as long as you are fully clothed you most likely register nil on their “things I have encountered today- ometer”. This is a particularly difficult thing to convince yourself of when your dog has just responded to a teacup yorkie as though they were encountering Norman Bates in a shower though.
So, use the three accounts game.

Community
Sometimes it is actually great to vent about Man With a Dog™ and how, despite you doing a whiplash turn away from him with your on-lead dog wearing a flashing fluorescent “GIVE ME SPACE” tabard, moving yourself off the path far enough away that you were practically in another postcode he still shouted over to you “is your dog friendly?” rather than just putting his dog on a lead. And to do that you will need: A COMMUNITY - Because sometimes friends and family really don’t care about your dog. (how dare?)

Look around on Facebook, Instagram and Reddit to find a group or gang of folx that fits with your particular life and training style. Join My Handful Dog Club on Facebook if you are struggling to find somewhere with the right vibe.

Force-free reactive dog support communities are some of the best places to hang out to realise that you are not alone and to gain support from others who are living similar struggles.
Having a community to celebrate the small victories as well as the big victories. To poop watch. To recommend dog gear manufacturers or training courses. To recommend trainers who have helped.

Having a community means you are more able to meet others who know the reactive dog life well enough that you might feel safe organising distanced group walks with other dogs that are somewhere between 1,500,000–2,500,000 on the Scoville scale.
And, of course, it’s just nice to have a place to have a good old moan about the person, the cat, the deer, the squirrel, the dog that made your day go from a walk in the park to piloting an aircraft after dozens of venomous snakes have been released into the cabin.

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Look After Yourself
Cohabiting with a reactive dog can be demanding and emotionally draining, you spend a lot more time than most dog guardians thinking about everything to do with your dog and their care, making it absolutely crucial to care for your own wellbeing. Recognising that your dog’s behaviour is not a reflection of your failings is a great first step, but remember it is not a cop-out to get someone in to help you out. Getting support where you can is an important way to spread the load.

Finding a supportive community of others who understand life with a reactive dog can help to ground you in reality, especially if your friends and family don’t really get what you are doing with That Dog.

You do have to prioritise your own self-care through activities you enjoy, spending time out in nature and incorporating positive moments into your day, however small, it’s essential in order to maintain your mental and emotional health.

You cannot pour from an empty cup, your own needs are as valid as your dog’s. You can’t be the stable, trusted guardian your dog needs if you aren’t looking after yourself.

So DO THAT THING.