08/05/2025
🐾 Mental health 🐾
For some people dog ownership is hard work! When faced with challenges it can make life fairly limiting. Most of us get a dog to be able to go out on good walks, have company and they expand our lives but not for all. Having a dog with anxiety can limit where you walk, when you walk and who you talk to. Dealing with reactivity can be socially isolating and frustrating. Having a dog with separation anxiety can make it hard to leave the house to socialise yourself and see friends and family. It is super important for those of you facing challenges to look after your own mental health too! In many cases our own mental health can affect your dogs, they are so attuned to us that an off day for us can very easily mean an off day for them too.
Originally before getting into dog training I did a lot of work with people’s mental health, with my degree being human psychology. It’s easy for me to see a connection between the dogs that are struggling mentally but also the humans that are struggling too. Sometimes it’s a case of ‘which came first the chicken or the egg’- is the dog affecting the owner, or owner affecting the dog. The two go hand in hand!
