Separation Anxiety: A Blueprint

Addressing separation anxiety in any dog follows a similar blueprint. Every dog is different, but all separation anxiety cases have similarities.

1. Assessment
2. Establish a well-managed routine
   • Frequency
   • Distraction & Stress Management
   • Medications & Supplements
3. Skill Building
4. Practice Separations
5. Maintenance

Assessment

Understanding the severity of your dog’s separation anxiety can give us some insight into their prognosis, how long a training program might take, and what your training plan might look like.

• What does your dog’s separation anxiety look like? What behaviors do you see when you’re leaving, when you’re gone, and when you return?
  • Does your dog eat, sleep, drink water, play with toys, or otherwise entertain themselves when you’re gone? Or do they seem too stressed, restless, or hyper-vigilant?
  • Does their behavior improve or worsen as time goes on?
• How often does separation anxiety appear? Is it with every departure, or only in some situations?
• How long does it take your dog to recover from the stress of a separation?
  • Signs your dog is still recovering from stress include excessive sleep (rebound from staying awake while you’re gone), hyper-vigilance, increased intensity of stress-related behaviors like resource guarding or reactivity, disinterest in food, disinterest in normal activities, etc.
• Does your dog show these behaviors when they are isolated (nobody is home) or only when a specific person is gone? If your dog has a “support person” how do they handle separations?
• How achievable is it for you to reduce how often you’re gone? Is this sustainable, or a short-term only solution?

For some dogs, what looks like separation anxiety is actually just boredom, lack of exercise, or age-typical adolescent mayhem. In these cases, we typically see dogs that get up to mischievous antics.

Behavior	Separation Distress & Anxiety	Mischief & Mayhem
Vocalizing	Often non-stop, or intermittent but persistent. Not directed at a specific target. Tends to be a panicked, insistent bark, howl, or whine.	Intermittent. Usually directed at specific targets – alert barking at stimuli, playful, demand, etc.
Inappropriate Destruction	Common self-soothing behavior. Often items that smell like the owner or preferred person, but can be any item.	Common mayhem behavior. Can be any item, more often self-rewarding on trash, shoes, TV remote, pillows, etc.
Inappropriate Elimination	Often in moderate to severe cases. Not impacted by house-training.	Only common in young dogs or dogs with incomplete house-training.
Sleeplessness	Often in moderate to severe cases.	No difference.
Independence	Often velcro-dogs.	May be velcro-dogs, but may often sneak away when opportune to do mischief.
Impact of Exercise	Little to no impact.	Reduces behavior significantly.
Impact of Crating / Confinement	Often exacerbates issues like barking, sleeplessness, and inappropriate elimination.	Reduces behavior significantly, often fully resolves.

Establish a Well-Managed Routine

If you want to make progress on your separation anxiety training, one of the most important steps is establishing a well-managed separation routine. Practice makes permanent, and any time our dog practices feelings or behaviors — they are reinforced and strengthened.

Here are some key strategies for reducing the challenges of separation anxiety:

1. Reduce frequency. Reducing frequency of separation or isolation is huge. This might include making adjustments to your work schedule, ordering groceries for delivery, or asking someone you trust to hang out with your dog while you’re gone. Some people decide to lump trips together so they reduce the number of times they leave the house.
2. Use distractions & stress management techniques. Distractions have a place in training! Some dogs with milder separation anxiety (or higher food drive) benefit from stuffed food toys or enrichment toys when you are away. These food puzzles can distract them and help pair good feelings with separations. Other stress management techniques include eliminating confinement, playing white noise, leaving the TV on, turning the lights off, using pheromone diffusers, or giving your dog a “safe space” to hang out in while you’re gone.
3. Ask your vet about medications and supplements. Separation anxiety can be challenging to work through, and for some cases medications and supplements might be appropriate. Your vet is the only person who can tell you if medications are appropriate for your dog. If you are considering reaching out to your vet to ask about medications or supplements, your trainer can send a behavior report to your vet on your behalf — so you don’t need to remember all the specifics!

Getting your day to day routine down is your first priority. This helps reduce your dog’s overall stress level, and makes it possible for them to make progress with separation desensitization training. Once your routine is optimized, we can start working towards desensitizing your dog to separations!

Skill Building

There are a number of skills useful for dogs working through separation anxiety. Each skill deserves its own article. Here are a number of skills that dogs with separation related stress can benefit from:

Station Training for Independence

Safety Signals for Separation Anxiety

Calm Crating for Separation Anxiety

Peaceful Barriers for Separation Anxiety (TBA!)

The Door is a Bore – Desensitizing Departure Cues (TBA!)

Practice Separations

Once your dog has a rich toolbox of skills that will be helpful for your practice separations, it’s time to put the pieces together! Practice separations introduce the concept of separations to our dogs in a safe framework. When we practice separations with our dogs, we are communicating to them that we are “Just kidding!” about being gone.

When we practice separations, we teach our dogs that we will always return before things get super scary. As our dogs get good at being alone and feeling safe, we extend out the time of our practice separations slowly, bit by bit. Once our dogs are really good at feeling safe when they’re alone for a period of time that is sustainable, they graduate from practicing separations!

Maintenance & Beyond

Separation anxiety is often something that stays with your dog for their lifetime. Dogs who have separation anxiety can develop a strong skillset of being comfortable alone, but sometimes those skills can weaken without quality maintenance and practice. Always be on the lookout for signs that your dog’s separation anxiety is flaring up, and be ready to re-implement the strategies you had success with.