I’m constantly seeing posts on social media declaring something along the lines of “my dog is the only thing standing between me and a mental breakdown,” or, “my entire emotional sanity depends on my dog.” While it is so incredible and wonderful that you love your dog and that they bring you comfort, there’s a right way to get an emotional support dog and a wrong way. The wrong way (something you will NOT hear me say often) is the one where you put the immense responsibility of your well-being on your dog, thus making them feel like nobody is flying the plane (scary!). If the only way you know how to calm down is by squeezing your dog until their eyes pop out, your dog will sense your instability and absolutely not feel good about the situation. The right way to get an emotional support dog is not a quick fix. It’s a slow process, but one that could ultimately change your life forever. I will dogsplain it to you in a moment, but first, the backstory that qualifies me to do so:

Looking back on my thirty four years of life, I see my anxiety rolling in at the seasoned age of five. In preschool, I had been on top of the world–pretty, popular, singing show tunes in sequined shoes atop picnic tables–but Kindergarten was a whole different world, and a dark one at that, with its one hundred bungalow classrooms, ever-humming translucent light fixtures, teachers who didn’t understand me and classmates who seemed to outright hate me for some reason I couldn’t begin to understand. From the first bell of the day to the last, my mind was a playground for the catastrophic. In my mind, the worst things imaginable were happening just outside the tinted windows of Room 28 and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I had no way to cope–rendered virtually taciturn by my fear–except to clutch my favorite stuffed animal (a bear cleverly named Beary) to my chest as I looked out onto the parking lot, counting the minutes until my parents’ canary yellow 1970s Mercedes Benz pulled in to come rescue me.

Soon, however, a new rule was implemented, and stuffed animals were no longer to be brought in from home. On top of all my fears I now had to add Beary being confiscated from me to the list (is it cute or grim that my five-year-old self imagined him being hauled off to some stuffed animal prison camp? #intergenerationaltrauma). But I also couldn’t imagine getting through a day without him, so I smuggled him into class in my backpack hidden beneath books I was too young to know how to read like some kind of illicit contraband. I would have done anything for him, he was my emotional support bear. He comforted me. He continued to comfort me as I became a teenager and was no longer supposed to sleep with stuffed animals, and he came with me when I went away to college (where my anxiety was so debilitating it made kindergarten seem like…kindergarten, the way it’s supposed to be).

I tell you all of this for one reason: so that you know how seriously I take anxiety and those suffering from it. I understand deep, DEEP in my bones the urge to corral a dog into your life with the hope that he will soothe your anxiety, take the edge off like an end-of-day martini. And YES, it’s true, being around animals can work wonders on your nervous system. However, here is what is VERY LIKELY to happen if you get a dog for the purpose of ending your anxiety: you will have a dog that is also anxious. Your dog will not be able to help you regulate your nervous system because they will be too anxious, and you will not be able to help them regulate their nervous system because you will be too anxious, so instead you’ll live in a feedback loop of constantly frantic energy and you will find yourself crying way more often than you’d like.

I learned this the hard way. Twice. But five years after getting my first dog (Shiloh) and two years after getting my second (Bogart), I have discovered how a dog actually CAN help your anxiety. For real. When I was twelve, I started therapy. At fifteen, I learned Transcendental Meditation. Eighteen was all about breathing techniques designed to downregulate your nervous system into a state of calm. From eighteen to thirty-three I tried so many different techniques and tools for outwitting anxiety that if I tried to type them all it would break my computer. I’m serious, I’ve tried everything. And a lot of it has really helped, don’t get me wrong! A lot of these tools and resources are really helpful, and I’ll get to the how and why of that in a second. For all these years, I’ve had these anxiety-mitigating approaches right in the palm of my hand, but none of it was successfully soothing me until I learned that if I want my dogs to be calm, I HAVE to be calm. And I guess, as it turns out, I care more about my dogs’ calmness than my own, so it was only then that I began seeing calmness as my main priority. When something is your #1 priority, you’ll achieve it. Think about it, or even try it out for a day: if the number one most important thing in a day is to stay calm, you will avoid situations you know to be stressful, you will focus on your breathing or use another regulating technique (I will list my favorites below) as soon as a stressful situation does occur (and it’s bound to), you will gently tell yourself ‘that’s okay,’ when you get off track or the day starts veering outside the militant lines of your to-do list. You will start praying for what you want instead of worrying about what you don’t want. You’ll gravitate towards activities that make you feel good, and stop berating yourself for taking moments away from traditional productivity. You may even end up rearranging your life to get rid of the stressors scratching at your soul, feeling lighter than ever. And as you do this, you will be shocked to find your dog chilling out along-side you.

I’m not saying my anxiety is gone, she’s just not the potent mean girl she used to be…she’s still Regina George, but now she’s the version at the end of the movie, channeling her anger and aggression into field hockey. And I’m not saying Shiloh and Bogart are anxiety-free either, I’m just saying that as I type this, my heart rate is 80BPM and the dogs sprawled out on the floor, so deeply asleep they didn’t even notice the mailman as he rang our bell.

*Being calm is crucial for your dog’s calmness, but there are many more pieces to the puzzle! Come back for more ways to help them find the calmest versions of themselves*

My favorite tools for taking the edge off anxiety:

Yoga Nidra: https://www.doyogawithme.com/content/yoga-nidra-sleep

Box Breathing: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/321805

Binaural Beats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_p2bTbdcCPA

Classical Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrmKaSvBssQ

Mantra Meditation: https://www.healthline.com/health/mantra-meditation#mantras

Mindful listening:https://mindworks.org/blog/mindful-listening/#:~:text=Listening%20meditation&text=We%20simply%20settle%20the%20mind,judging%2C%20or%20getting%20carried%20away.

Laughing!:https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/stress-management/in-depth/stress-relief/art-20044456

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Getting a Dog for your Anxiety

XO, Zara

XO, Zara Dog Training