Helping Your Pup Recover When Over-Aroused

A reminder to practice indoors and in the yard, our goal is to help your puppy report rather than react when over-aroused. We are teach them how to observe triggers neutrally and check in with you—shifting the emotional response from fear or excitement to calm awareness and reporting in to you that they have seen something.

Our focus is to lower or limit arousal as a habitual response—both before exposures and eventually during encounters with triggers.

Training Steps

1. Start Below Threshold

   • Begin with your dog on their mat, using stationary objects or people walking past as low-intensity triggers.

   • Mark + reward—when he looks at the trigger, use a clicker or marker word (“Yes!”/“Good!”) and deliver the treat when he orients to you.

2. Short, Gradual Sessions

Keep sessions brief (3-5 treats per round).

Slowly decrease distance only if remaining relaxed.

3. Controlled Environments First - training in calm settings helps dogs build their ability to self regulate. Doing multiple boring successful sessions of looking at Dad walking by and then looking back at handler without going over threshold. Is much more important at this stage than heading out to new places with triggers.

Understanding Thresholds

A dog’s threshold is the point at which arousal overrides their ability to think/focus. Signs that they are over threshold include:

Staring, barking, lunging, or ignoring treats.

Key Factors:

• Distance (from the trigger)
• Duration (exposure time)
• Intensity (size/noise/movement of the trigger)

Prioritize at-home patterns (scatters, u-turns, mat work, snuffle mats, pattern games, name game) to build relaxed feelings into repeatable patterns.

Adjust distance as needed. Work much further away from triggers than you think you need to—your puppy is often taking in more than you imagine.

Patterns he enjoys and needs to think about will become second nature. Once you’re having check- in success in every room indoors and in your yard. Take the same training tools and patterns to a quiet parking lot on the weekend before practicing in more distracting environments. This builds relaxed feelings as a pattern.