Mindfulness for Dogs

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As such, the timing of the study during the COVID-19 lockdown in Victoria, and the easing of these restrictions in the latter half of the study, may provide some understanding towards why a significant decrease in loneliness was recorded across the two time points. We’re all so busy these days, from work in the traditional sense to cooking, cleaning, and everything else that comes with running a household.

We are committed to providing accessible, effective, and compassionate dog training services, along with valuable resources, to empower dog owners to build deeper connections and understanding with their canine companions. Our focus is on creating a world where every dog and owner can experience a life enriched by mindfulness and joyful companionship.Any exercise that you practice where your dog is happy and relaxed will engender a ‘positive emotional response’. Just don’t label yourself a failure if that method doesn’t work for you, and try not to cram yourself into a box. We’ve mentioned already that feeling frustrated is a normal human emotion – but it does nothing to improve our training and can even be quite detrimental. While we did not take any objective measures of the dog’s experience during the interventions, we can infer from the DI group reports that these activities were enjoyable for the dog.

We cycle through productivity hacks, from the Pomodoro method to body-doubling to time blocking our calendars, or just working with a good old-fashioned to-do list. This study evaluated the feasibility and effectiveness of two six-week interventions that owners can complete with their pet dogs from the safety and comfort of their homes, designed to enhance the wellbeing of both parties. We also asked participants from the DAM group and DI group how often they completed the assigned task throughout the week, and used Qualtrics to capture their freehand responses about their experiences, including how they felt during the task, or how they felt any time before or after it. It’s easy to hunch over our phones while adding to our growing meme collections and simultaneously guilting ourselves over doing nothing (to my oven: I’ll get to cleaning you one day). It’s always a shame when these feelings take over and influence our actions, because it often leads to conflict with our dogs.This is why it’s so important that we reframe what a mistake means in training, so we can manage our emotions and ensure they don’t undo our training or damage our relationships with our dogs. This often presents itself elsewhere down the line, such as the dog starting to become reactive towards other dogs because their presence is a precursor to feeling discomfort caused by the “anti-pull” harness, headcollar or neck collar. Pets help us to be more present and being present when interacting with your dog will help you connect with them and yourself more completely. My understanding is that if a person has a mindfulness practice, they can use their own ‘being present’ to connect better with their dog and in turn, having a dog can help people develop a mindfulness practice as dogs being more in the moment is contagious.

Make sure you have something soft underneath you, and that your dog has a bed, so they can settle comfortably too. The dependent variables were participants’ perceived emotional closeness to their dogs, mindfulness, and perceived loneliness. Attachment behavior in dogs ( Canis familiaris): A new application of Ainsworth’s (1969) Strange Situation Test. The Perceived Emotional Closeness subscale of the Monash Dog Owner Relationship Scale (MDORS; [ 20]) consists of 10-items used to measure how dog owners feel about their pet dogs (e.This likely reflects that most people who self-selected into the study were dog lovers who already had a high level of emotional closeness with their dogs. Individual participants were only able to endorse a theme once but could endorse more than one theme. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license ( https://creativecommons. While you’re on a walk with your dog, you could take in the sight and sound of the trees swaying in the wind while you inhale and exhale. Mindfulness can help you to notice the way you are feeling and help interrupt the stress response so that it is less likely to communicate down the lead and make things worse.

The aim of this study then was to determine whether engaging in a Dog Assisted Mindfulness (DAM) six-week intervention would be associated with better mental health outcomes (i. Talk Time: Participants were instructed to sit comfortably facing their dog and talk or read to them.You don’t need to get cross or worried because your dog is on a lead and under control, you can simply move away from the distraction or gather up the long line and work at a closer distance to your dog. Follow the Lead: Participants were instructed to follow their dog’s lead doing anything they believed it wanted to do.