08/14/2025
How Trigger Stacking Helps To Create Larger Explosive Reactions
An emotional outburst or behavioural meltdown does not just suddenly happen. There were subtle growing indicators demonstrating that the nervous system of your dog was disregulated and overwhelm was growing. And if this overwhelming situation is not modified, if the build up of tension and stress is not disrupted or stopped at the lesser stages of overwhelm, the outcome would be an uncontrolled explosion of reaction from your dog.
The building of tension, fear, or anxiety gets worse when individual triggers get stacked. While just one trigger elixits a lesser more managable reaction, multiple triggers stacked together help create a pressure cooker of tensions that result in a bigger more uncontrollable behaviour reaction. Once your dog has reached this explosive crescendo of trigger fueled overwhelm, his behaviour is not easily modified because his brain is no longer geared to hearing you.
In this advanced state of emotional overwhelm and tunnel vision, your dog's brain shifts into a gear where you cease to exist in that moment for him. His attention is firmly fixed only on that final trigger and his feelings of overwhelm.
In order for you to help your dog at this point, only by removing the trigger or with force, removing the dog from the proximity of the trigger, can you hope to unlock the brain and calm the nervous system. This is the part where the owner is left trying to physically wrestle their dog away from the trigger object and hoping they don't get bit by their own dog during the process.
Rather than trying to deal with this explosive outcome, next time intercede BEFORE the triggers become stacked. Remove the dog while the symptoms of agitation, fear, or anxiety level is low because only at these lowered levels of arousal is your dog's brain still able to hear your cues and be able to respond to them.