Caroline Cavanagh compares anxiety to dog behavior to help you manage it as a useful ally. Anxiety barks like a dog sensing risk, preparing your body for real threats. Train it like you'd train a dog: keep it alert when needed, but let it rest when you're safe.
Chapters
I have 2 passions in life. Firstly, helping people who have anxiety, and secondly, dogs. And the wonderful thing is I can actually cross them over because there are a lot of similarities between anxiety and dogs. And you may be thinking, really? Let me share a couple of them. Firstly, if my dogs are aware of any risk, like someone knocking at the door, they will start barking. But if I say to them, stop, they quieten down. I control them, they don't control me. However, when they are barking, they're in a state of hypervigilance, ready to actually fly or run away from the risk. Exactly what you want to do if the risk is real, and sometimes it is. Our bodies do the same. Anxiety is there to help us perform better in the face of real risk. And thirdly, if you don't control anxiety, it will control you. If you don't control your dogs, they will control you. I have walked past so many dog owners where it's the dog that decides when they're going home, not the owner. My anxiety is like a well-trained police dog. By my side because most of the time I just don't need it, but at the times when I do need it, I know I have got an incredible asset that is there to help me. And lastly, my dogs sleep downstairs because I know I don't need them in my bedroom because they're pretty flipping disruptive. My anxiety doesn't need to come to sleep with me either because when I'm safe and sleeping tucked up in bed, there is nothing to worry about. So perhaps you can now see that there really is quite a high correlation between managing your anxiety and training dogs, and it's a really fun way of starting to recognise how you can have a really good loyal friend in your anxiety, just as you do in the four-legged ones too.
