E467: 크리스티나 영, 켈리 다니엘, 제인 아던, 이리스 블룸(Christina Young, Kelly Daniel, Jane Ardern, and Irith Bloom)과 함께하는 각성도 조절

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uh so um for me i think about arousal as not being good or bad for all of the reasons that have just been mentioned and also because you need some arousal for behavior and learning to happen so if an animal is incredibly bored as some of us may have experienced in school at some point or another you don't learn as well because you're too bored but if you're too anxious as we've experienced also potentially in school as humans then you might also not learn as well if you're afraid that the teacher is going to call on you you might be thinking so hard about the teacher calling on you that you don't actually listen to what's being said or when you take an exam your arousal level might be too high and one of the things i'll be talking about briefly in my presentation is something called the yorkies dodson curve and the concept that there's an optimal level of arousal for each task that optimal level is going to be different for different things if i want to run really really fast from a predator that is chasing me i want a higher level of arousal than when i'm taking a you know an examination in mathematics but the idea that arousal is good or bad sort of loses that sight of you know here's the task and here's the right level of arousal for it and so we shouldn't just say arousal is something we want to get rid of because in fact what it is is it's something we want to titrate to the right level christina like everyone's saying arousal isn't good or bad we need arousal to do cool things we need arousal to run fast we need arousal to do fun tricks we need arousal to do this great obedience pattern and whether it's a physical or a mental challenge we need arousal to excel at those things and the issues we need the right amount of arousal so we need to know how much to have for each thing that we want to work on and how to control how much arousal we have in a given situation so how do we know when that arousal is beneficial so when it's helping with our learning and our performance and you know maybe what signs or how do we know when it's starting to tip over when we're getting too much um when it's starting to interfere and maybe you know things are going to head south and possibly dramatic fashion in a short order jane so for me i think when um i'm working with dogs uh one of the things that i will i like to focus on is obviously if the dog's not in a state of high arousal then their kind of performance can be it's kind of not as flashy it's not as sharp and it doesn't it's it's not as eye-catching

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and sometimes we can get dogs where they can kind of go through the motions and do the things that are required but if the arousal's not there then there's kind of no edge um and it's often that edge that that wins competitions it's the dog that looks sharp and stylish so i think for me it's about looking for a dog who's you know if if they tip over too much what happens is that so that performance can look a little bit flat or what can happen is the performance can kind of start to go a bit erratic and you start to get errors so the main thing for me is that if the dog is making errors if the if there is less engagement um from the from the dog towards the handler then this is often the signal that the dog's kind of trying to communicate that they they are potentially struggling so for me i think like from a performance point of view is is if the arousal isn't right you're going to see and errors in the performance and that generally on one side of the scale is that the dog can kind of look a little bit flat or slow and then on the other side of the scale what you'll find is that the dog will be and potentially making errors and look a little bit more frantic and erratic you read i love that answer that's a really it's it's it's really like specific to the context and what can we look for in that context so i just want to start by saying that thank you jane um so for me i approach everything i while i support people who are doing sports with the work i do i approach everything sort of from the behavior side and usually people come to me because you know they're having issues at the start line or the dog can't think during a trial and all those kinds of things and very often those things do have to do with arousal so for me what i'm looking for when i'm trying to determine um if you know arousal is helping or hurting the first thing i'm going to ask is is the animal responding to cues with their normal latency if it's gotten very slow and it's like they've never heard the word down before even though you've been working on it for years and years and years then something's going on with them if on the other hand you know they're they're snoozing and i can't get their attention there's also something going on and some animals do shut down when they're stressed rather than sort of stressing up they stress down so i look for those signs that normally if i say this word or present this signal my dog is going to quickly respond in an appropriate way but the times when the response starts to change it slows down or it gets

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really frantic that speeds up to the point where the behavior is not happening with a lot of accuracy those are sort of two different ways that i might see arousal level being off and in the end when arousal is too high it's harder for an animal when arousal is too high for the context it's harder for the animal to make the appropriate the appropriate decisions excuse me for that situation so anytime i see an animal who's usually pretty good at decision making have their decisions start to look a little shaky then again i'm going to start asking what's going on with my arousal levels so those are some of the things that i look for christina when you have the right amount of arousal especially in a sport context it feels like magic like it feels like this great dance you're doing with your partner whether it's agility or obedience or nose work or a disc freestyle event you know it just feels like this great partnership and if we see the arousal dip down and it's too low then you might feel like a cheerleader if you're like oh come play with me go on and try to jazz up your dog you know that's a sign that the arousal is too low and then if you feel like your dog isn't responding correctly or if you hear yourself say thinking you know maybe oh but they know this why can't they do this anymore they know their context they know the start line if you feel think that yourself thinking those things often that means that we have too much arousal and our animal can't respond to our cues anymore so i kind of look from like how how am i feeling about the connection in it as well as like iri was saying and the about the animal's performance but how am i feeling about our connection am i feeling like it's a partnership or am i having to like calm them down or excite them in those moments as well i love that christina i'm sorry i'm just jumping in to say i love that and i think that what you're describing of like when the arousal is just right like our arousal is just right and their arousal is just right then we're in that flow state as a partnership which is so exciting so it's really not a better feeling i mean truly yeah kelly so i'm i'm gonna take a sort of a little bit of a different track to this answer because these guys have covered everything brilliantly um so i guess for me another concern i agility primarily is is my sport as well as nose work some other bits and pieces but i think we we see it often but there is dogs that like i said can't think and that can translate to dogs that become dangerous with their body and their sports because

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they are unable to think and when you combine the fact that the arousal changes their physiological response and now large muscle groups behaving differently um they're not moving in the same ways and that can become dangerous for big powerful fast dogs in sports so that's a consideration for me we need to keep it safe for the dogs and when you extend that to arousal over a long period of time in agility i do have clients where dogs are getting like quite bad diarrhea on a weekend of competing like a normal weekend of competing because of the high duration arousal that's occurring and that's not healthy so i think adding to like considerations of how arousal might be impacting your dog's body to keep them safe and healthy is really important that's an important thing to think about i think a lot of the times we focus so much on the training and ability to do the things that we're interested in doing we don't necessarily think about some of those secondary you know equally important aspects that it can have um everybody's listening good sorry i'm just gonna ask kelly i would also think that the likelihood of injury might increase yeah yeah absolutely i mean especially when you've also got people that are training skills to a high level of complexity but like running dog walks for example the dogs are getting insane high speed if you add to that arousal which changes the activation of muscle groups so we have less stability muscles activated and more powerful muscles activated they go faster and they have less control and balance and that it does result in injury absolutely i would say that yeah such a great point so everybody here is kind of coming at this from you know a slightly different perspective you know we've got behavior and uh physiology and sport performance and some you know mind study stuff and you know how do we kind of fit all of these pieces together so if we're thinking about you know all these different aspects you know where do you guys kind of see the overlap where do you see the things kind of pulling apart um you read so to me i i kind of feel like i was recently at a talk where someone was talking about mental health and physical health and saying there's actually no separation it's all it's one thing we're just artificially dividing it as if it's somehow different and i kind of feel like this question there's a little bit of that like it's all behavior physiology performance our mindset all of those things are part of the same thing anytime any one of those tips out of balance the entire

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the i don't know how to put this sort of the holistic animal human partnership is also out of balance and so to me i feel like i can't do the sport well if i don't have the stress and arousal sort of uh sorted out in a way that works for that animal i can't communicate my cues well if the stress is too high i can't do my sport well if my cues are not coming through or if something outside is happening in that sport context it's all sort of part of one big ball of things that fits together so it's it's kind of hard to say like it my main mindset is the stress end of it what can i do to get the the distress levels down to to as low a level as possible and then the stress as an excitement to a level that works well for what our purposes are and it's still all part of the same thing yeah christina well i um started in behavior work like 30 years ago and then when i started my business i just planned on doing dog sports and that shifted as those sport dogs started to come to me for behavior and then i shifted back again and all of pretty much all of my training is now behavior work but in the past all that behavior work concentrated on just lowering arousal like arousal was bad let's get rid of the arousal let's lower lower lower and let's try to train the arousal out of dogs like it was a bad thing and sports has taught us that arousal isn't bad like we get these super cool dogs to do these super cool things and we need arousal and through sports i think that gave us the lens to start understanding like the the purpose the the motivation to start really truly understanding arousal and how we can then take those skills that we're teaching our dogs back into the pet world or the behavior world to use those same skills that we wanted to get that super fast accurate agility run now to say actually i'd like to walk my dog down the street without them losing their marbles because of a garbage truck or another dog or a kid running and i think that um we learned a lot just having the motivation from sports in order to go back and look at um just the behavior stuff um it's just pieces of a puzzle and i think you have to consider all of the pieces to get the the end puzzle made um and so that so that means we need to look at all the different aspects that are relating to arousal and that includes at home that includes the behavior that you know it includes everything and i don't think we can have a decent view of of the whole picture unless we consider all the different pieces that fit together yeah so i think like whenever any dog comes to me from and if somebody's got like they come to me

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from an arousal issue point of view um you have to look at that big picture as well and i will always start from a physiological point of view um from the dog and making sure that for example there's no pain and interestingly enough the majority of the dogs that i do have come to me where they're being labeled as like hyper arousal over aroused and and these dogs are non-functional we often root down and find that actually there's there's that it it's pain related as well i find a lot with the working dogs um that some of these dogs will it's as though they put themselves into hyper arousal because they're kind of self-medicating because of releasing the adrenaline and the endorphins and so on um so one of the things i think you know any dog if we've got an arousal problem we have to look at you know confidence we have to look at health and we have to look at what does the dog understand we have to look at how how does the environment um impact the dog what is pressure what does what is pressure for that dog what what does that dog feel that is challenging and difficult and we have we just we have to look at um absolutely the whole picture and sometimes when dogs um regress as well so often when dogs regress sometimes we can be working through arousal and we get a dog really functional and then we get some regression it's also understanding that um often with that you know for me that's like a really big red flag and because if the dog's learned to regulate itself and then has a regression and arousal then again we're probably going to be looking down the pain route or something physiological around with that as well such a good point and it's not necessarily something we'd specifically talked about yet i think that you know so often you know our dogs can't tell us when they're in pain and so we kind of do have to look at some of these other signals and be thinking about these things anytime we see something that we're like hmm we'd really like that to change so um we've been talking a little bit not necessarily theoretical but you know haven't kind of um jumped into the really practical piece of this yet so i'd like to shift gears a little bit you know when you see a dog who's really struggling with their arousal where do you start what questions are you asking before you kind of decide what needs to change how are you kind of approaching that plan creation of you know what are we going to do about this christina i always ask for a full intake form like a complete um description of the dog's life what they eat what's their exercise

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where are they struggling otherwise in life as well what is their the big picture of this dog's life look like because often when someone comes to us for help where they're coming from what they're seeing is more of a symptom of a bigger problem or it just might be the piece that's not fitting into their lives right now whereas the dog's life might show us that there are either medical issues or needs met needs not being met issues or too much stress in the home or maybe they're just missing foundations skills and taking a big big picture look at the dog first is where i always start before we make a training plan for for treating the symptom or the problem that they're coming to me for um i see dogs for a variety of different reasons so it's really addressing like considering the purpose of why i'm working with a person in a dog if i'm working with a dog for rehabilitation obviously um we don't generally want that dog in high states of arousal if i'm working with a dog in fitness the same kind of goes but when i'm working with them for sports purposes so really considering the ideal amount of arousal um and then how we modulate what we have to be more functional for that purpose so yeah i guess then where i start is obviously for rehab and fitness we're looking in whole picture as well we're looking at their health and well-being we're looking at their body um but i'm going to start with strategies to help modulate arousal to a level that the person and the dog needs it to be at for that particular activity jen yeah so i think first thing i'm always going to do is look at and just make sure if i'm working with the dog that we've looked at physical health to make sure that there's nothing going on there um and then really for me it's looking about what the dog you know what the dog has been taught to make sure that the there is clarity in the training there and that the dog understands what the expectations are if there's any specific problems in those areas generally what i do most of the time is i'm going to look at actually breaking down criteria i will also look at behaviors like what can we do with this dog that can what strategies can we use with this dog that can bring arousal down to a functional point and also focusing on you know can we teach the dog to arousal up and arousal down and teach those skills as well so for me it's very much about helping the dog learn to regulate but i will i think when it comes to arousal dogs are very individual and i think like you may have one behavior or something that you can do with the dog

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that might actually bring arousal down really well with one dog but you might actually find that might be overstimulating for another so i don't always think there's you know there isn't always kind of like a one size fix all because some dogs and how the dog experiences those things is different as well so first of all i want to echo what everyone else has said you know the first thing i'm going to look at is health and well-being are we seeing signs of you know digestive issues itchy skin pain any of those things which are fundamentally going to raise arousal because you're always a little uncomfortable and a little irritated basically um i want to look at what kind of enrichment is the animal getting and is that enrichment all increasing arousal or are we also doing things that are calming because sometimes in our effort to provide enrichment for dogs in our homes we they're kind of at disneyland all day every day and that can become problematic um i want to look at what skills they've learned in life so far what things are they capable of doing where their arousal levels are well modulated what things are they doing where their arousal levels are not well modulated and one of the things that i see particularly with fdsa students and their the fdsa community i guess i should really say and their dogs is because so many people are so engaged with their dogs and are doing amazing exciting things with their dogs their dogs really don't have a very good i'm just chilling out now skill set they're either crated or they're working is kind of the the two states and i'm not saying that's true for every dog but i've met enough of them where that's kind of the piece we need to fill in is well i don't have you in my in your crate i'm not going to be paying full attention to you right now and i need you to be able to tolerate that situation and these dogs are so used to but we're always working that their arousal level is up here and it's really hard for them to come down to what is sort of a normal level for the average pet dog who's not used to being entertained all day so that's one of the things that i think about a lot is does this dog have a history dog or other animal for that matter have a history of just kind of i'm always working i'm always doing and i don't actually know how to just stop and chill and be actually one of my case studies that i'll be talking about in the webinar in the present in the conference is about a dog who can chill at home just fine but couldn't just chill out outside of the home and how we helped him be able to do that so yeah that's

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a really common common issue yeah you guys all work in similar enough um you know kind of circles that i'm sure you guys have a lot of overlap in terms of what you actually see when you're dealing with dogs and people so um for those who are listening to this and going okay this is definitely a thing my dog definitely struggles with arousal um you know what's what's one thing that you think you know maybe they should consider stop to no longer do to stop doing and then maybe what's one thing they should start doing instead christina there's um an older philosophy that you always need to end on a good note and so sometimes we just keep repeating the same thing over and over again if our dog is having a hard time or if we're having a hard time stop trying to push through it stop repeating it stop just trying to end on a good note repeating the same failure over and over again is it going to help our dogs and it can really make things worse for them longer term instead stop break things down what can your dog do in that moment uh and then take a break what can think about where the arousal first became a challenge at what point if that game or that exercise or that skill did it start that did this the ability to modulate arousal start to diminish and let's start there instead we might take a big break from whatever it is that we were struggling with and go back to some foundation pieces starting earlier and make sure at any point along the path we can modulate arousal and then our dogs will be able to learn that hard thing even faster i like that kelly um i think it's just i i would hope that handlers would consider everything that they're doing with their dogs and make sure that it's not just everything is high arousal high intensity activities that they have a balance in what they do with their dogs um i think that's really important because otherwise the dogs are just going to associate them all the time with high intensity high arousal activities and they like literally interaction with a handler is going to create high arousal high intensity um and so i think looking at what you do and making sure that you do some activities that are a little bit more on that other side of the spectrum because it's healthy for everyone and then you're going to teach hey you're going to have the capability to recognize but also teach your dog how to engage that whole different nervous system that is going to reduce arousal and create more calm behavior and more um and better movement patterns as well because they're engaging different

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muscles and i know some people will say but i do like nose work and if anyone's seen a spaniel do nose work i can absolutely say that that is not going to be low arousal it's absolutely high arousal my spaniels foam at the mouth that is that is not a relaxing activity for them they are high intensity so for my guys i teach them um fitness obviously and i try really hard to keep the arousal low in fitness so that i'm engaging the muscles that help with stability but i also teach them to um to to relax in a bed when they're not working so it's kind of the things that everyone else has been saying so for me fitness is really important for multiple reasons with my dogs and this is one of the reasons i like that jane so i i always think it's important if we've got um an arousal problem with anything that we're doing and coming from kind of people who are working in competition or with working dogs and sports because often when we get our dogs we have um we have an agenda we have these goals of the things that we want to achieve and often when these dogs are struggling what i will often say to people is that um you need to meet the dog's needs before the dog can meet your needs and often from an arousal point of view um what we have to do is rather than focusing on the sport and the activity and the behaviors that we want to teach for the dog to accomplish that is what we have to do is step back and say we need to i need to help this dog learn to to regulate so sometimes we have to completely change what we're doing and focus on that because if you for me if you can meet your dog's needs then the dog will then be able to meet your needs which often in sports that's what we're doing go ahead erit uh these are such amazing points so um i agree with everything and i think the thing that i'll talk about is sort of a tool that people can start thinking about and this goes back to what uh kelly was saying about how every individual well actually it's been said several times you know what is arousing for one individual is not necessarily what's arousing for another individual and so look at the individual that's in front of you and think about when there's a high arousal scenario where you want that higher arousal like you're you know you're running an agility course you want the speed of course you want to titrate that to the point where they're taking the obstacles in the appropriate way safely and they're actually listening to your cues but you want a fairly high level of arousal because we're going really fast right because time matters too

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now i've got this dog who's amped up let's say our run was great and everything was perfect and now i'm taking them out of the ring and now somehow i have to get them from way up here to we're not going to have another run for a while or maybe we're not going to have another run at all depending on where we are in the trial and yet we're still not leaving so if you can come up with sort of a hierarchy hierarchy i can say this word a hierarchy of tasks or games that you can do with your individual dog the one who's in front of you where you know this one is super exciting and high arousal and this one is high arousal but a little lower and you slowly work your way down it's a really nice idea to gradually transition your dog don't just expect them to go from 60 miles per hour to crate do something to help them slow down before you put them back in that zero miles per hour situation and remember as everyone else has said that what that's going to look like is going to be very different from individual to individual so there will be some trial and error while you figure it out but your dog will thank you awesome all right so just a reminder you know because the conference is next week if listeners could walk away from the conference next week with just you know kind of one new thing of that they're kind of mulling about or thinking about arousal you know what would you kind of hope that was kelly um from my presentation it's going to be considering what's going on inside your dog's body and that perhaps the reason that they can't respond to that cue is because physiologically they're not able to so being able to consider the the internal workings of your dog and how that contributes to the behaviors presented in front of you i think is really important so that we don't get frustrated with our dogs but also so we can consider um the longer effects on your dog's body than just that moment of arousal jane for me and again covered in my webinar is really that you know understanding that arousal regulation is a skill that needs to be developed and it also needs to be practiced and it's not something you're going to solve overnight and also understanding that age plays an important maturity plays an important factor in that those as well um i would say adding to all these excellent comments that i think it can be helpful to look at arousal as information it tells us about what's happening for that animal in that moment and i think it's very easy for us especially when we are handlers in a sport and there are people watching us it's very easy for us to sort of take it personally

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for lack of a better way to put it and in the end it's behavior that is happening for a reason and the best thing we can do is be curious about it and look at it as information what is this arousal telling me and now that i know that what tools can i use to start addressing it christina i hope people come away understanding that arousal modulation is a life skill it's something that can be taught and incorporated into day-to-day life rather than just specific training sessions or in a sport context or a reactivity context we have a lot of these big feelings dogs and often when we build those skills into their lives that's going to help them thrive not only in the sport not only in the reactivity if they have that but just day-to-day it will help them be better physiologically mentally uh everything um rather than thinking of it just as a specific problem in a specific sport awesome all right well thank you all so much for coming on the podcast that feels like a really good note to wrap things up on thank you for having us this was wonderful thank you yeah it was great to talk to everybody and thanks to all of our listeners and our viewers for tuning in we'll be back next week this time with jennifer kunst to talk about mental management life transitions accepting the things we cannot change and how all of that intersects with our dog sports if you haven't already subscribe to our podcast either on itunes the podcast app of your choice or over on youtube to make sure you never miss an episode today's show is brought to you by the fenzy dog sports academy special thanks to denise fenzy for supporting this podcast music provided royalty free by bensound.com the track featured here is called buddy audio and video editing provided by chris lang thanks again for tuning in and happy training