Mindfulness for Dogs

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of Psychological Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne 3800, Australia; moc. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license ( https://creativecommons. Furthermore, they were told that, as the practices encourage tapping into one’s senses to become more aware of one’s dog, that they could do it anytime, even when their dog is not with them. As such, this lack of an increase may reflect ‘ceiling effects’ whereby the level of emotional closeness was already at such a high level that it was unable to be further increased with the intervention.

This week’s recording invited participants to engage with their sense of sight, with the object of focus being the dog’s breathing. Using our own experiences of being “locked down” as a reference point, this study offers two novel ways in which owners can attempt to enrich the lives of their dogs at home. For the sake of presenting a summary, only those themes that were endorsed at a rate of 10% or greater for three or more weeks have been included in each Table.

If you feel like spending more time together with your dog and getting to know each other better, practicing mindfulness and inner peace can be a great option for you alongside all the other activities that you share together. 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. In conclusion, this study provides a demonstration of two easy to implement interventions: DAM and DI, that owners can complete with their dogs from the comfort of their homes.

Dogs are experts at being completely present and mindful – they do not focus on things past or worry about the future, they just live in the moment. We have a much calmer dog now, and some great tools to help manage potentially stressful situations. This, of course, is like peeling an onion and an on-going process, but engaging in mindfulness practice will allow our nervous systems to reset, resulting in correspondingly more positive emotional states and benefits for ourselves, our pets and other family members and from here – the universe!This highlights important differences between the individual tasks, and their relative effects on both owner and dog, in each group. 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. Participant group allocation was decided according to a predetermined, pseudo randomised and counterbalanced chart. Participants could endorse more than one theme with separate segments of their response, but could not endorse the same theme twice in the same week. Participants who did not provide a response or who provided a response that did not adequately address the question were not included.

Think back to how your dog wakes you up for walks, or how your cat stares you down in anticipation of dinner at five p. Owner–dog emotional closeness was not found to change over time in a quantitative way, despite qualitative reports of owner–dog connectedness during the activities ( Table 7 and Table 8).Teaching dogs to teach themselves how to be relaxed is only going to be effective if the dog is set up to succeed by the owner providing for their needs within a predictable routine. They were instructed to close their eyes and tap into this inner sense using their memory/imagination while mentally tracing an outline of their dog in their mind’s eye, using/imagining their hand, and connecting to any feelings of warmth if they were present. The good thing about meditation for dogs is that these moments don’t necessarily have to be planned and can happen spontaneously as well.