What Pet Training Can Teach Us About Building Good Habits

Recently, my partner and I got our first dog and, like the amateurs we are, we got a puppy. We had specifically said we wouldn’t get a puppy. However, tale as old as Instagram, we fell in love with the Instagram post a local shelter made about our dog and knew we had to have her. Plus, the shelter said she was crate trained (lies), good on a leash (lol), and potty trained (kind of true). She also turned out to have major separation anxiety. As a result, we suddenly found ourselves doing a lot of dog training. In the process, I’ve found myself reflecting on the ways we can apply pet training lessons to building good habits for ourselves.

Indeed, it turns out that pet training is a whole lot like people training. And many of the bad habits and anxieties our puppy has–clinginess, fear of the unknown, a need for attention, etc. are a whole lot like the anxieties that lead to our own bad habits. Consequently, in this post I reflect on what pet training can teach us about building better habits and overcoming the anxieties that hold us back. Throughout, I’ll draw on data-driven research and expert advice on both pet training and building good habits. By the end, I hope you learn strategies for building better habits in you and (if you have one) your pet.

Positive Self-Talk Works Better for Creating Good Habits

Bonding with our pets is so important for training. If your pet sees you as part of their pack and, better yet, their alpha, they’ll be much more inclined to listen and be loyal to you. In contrast, many trainers find that fear is counterproductive for training. If our pets fear us, they will tend to avoid us rather than listen. Moreover, when humans punish their pets with aggressive consequences like yelling or hitting, it can actually encourage their pets to be more aggressive themselves.

This is why positive reinforcement through treats and praise is so powerful. It helps create and solidify your bond with your pet. And it makes good behaviors feel desirable. Over time, those good habits become second nature to your pets. They don’t need the treats to want to keep doing them. The positive associations they have with those behaviors persist whether there are treats or not.

As a result, pet trainers find that positive reinforcement works considerably better for training than negative reinforcement like yelling. To put this into practice, focus less on what you don’t want your pet to do and more on what you want them to do. This means you avoid lots of yelling if they potty inside. Instead, praise them and give them a treat when they potty outside. Likewise, if your dog barks at other dogs, try distracting them with treats as you walk past. Yelling at your dog may jut encourage the behavior further.

How Positive Self-Talk Creates Good Habits in Humans

When it comes to our pets, we’re often very good at praising them and using positive talk. Few of us are as good at turning that positive talk on ourselves. It takes a pretty terrible person to constantly tell their pet how ugly and/or bad at things they are. However, how many of us have said things like that to ourselves at least occasionally?

Just like with pets, negative self-talk does not encourage good behaviors among humans. If anything, it makes us more likely to engage in undesirable behaviors. For example, low self-esteem is associated with over-eating, drug abuse, alcoholism, and binge-watching TV.

There are many ways to improve self-esteem. However, an important one is to engage in positive self-talk and reflection through things like mantras, journaling, and a gratitude practice. Once we improve our self-esteem, we can much more easily modify our habits because we have more confidence that we will be successful.

Likewise, if you are trying to modify a habit, avoid using negative self-talk when you trip up. For example, if you miss a workout, don’t chastise yourself. Like with your pet, that will make the behavior feel even less desirable. Instead, reward yourself when you do the positive behavior, whether it’s with a relaxing bubble bath, listening to your favorite podcast during your workout, or reflecting on your gratitude for yourself and your workout after you complete it. And, to the best of your abilities, try incorporating practices that can boost your self-esteem as well.

Bad Habits Are Not Your Identity

We often believe that bad habits are a part of our identities. For example, we might labels ourselves as people who are always late, who hate exercise, or who are bad with money. These labels are signs of a fixed mindset. They suggest that we don’t have much faith in our ability to change. As a result, a fixed mindset is a big barrier to improving our habits.

We can feel similarly about our pets. For example, some people believe that certain dog breeds will always be dangerous. Less dramatically, some people say that their pets are just bad with men or reactive or not crate pets. It’s true that the longer a bad behavior goes unchecked, the harder it is to modify it. And just like with people, the more trauma a pet has experienced, the harder it is to overcome that trauma.

Nevertheless, a growth mindset is important if you want to change your own behavior or the behavior of your pet. That means that you have to believe you (or your pet) can change. One easy way of shifting towards a growth mindset is to add “yet” to the end of sentences. For example, “I’m not good with money… yet” or “My dog isn’t a crate dog… yet.” Then envision where you want to be (or want your pet to be) and build SMART goals to get there. I have a guide and free worksheets for creating SMART goals that can help!

Start Small To Build Good Habits

An important part of SMART goal setting is setting specific and achievable goals. Often, that means that to accomplish a big goal, we need to start small. The same goes with habits in humans and pets.

We’re crate training our dog Cinder right now. Ideally, we’d be able to leave her in her crate for a couple hours while we are busy with work or doing errands. However, Cinder has intense separation anxiety. Whether she’s in her crate or not, she freaks out whenever we leave for even a short period of time. In fact, when we left her at home for a couple hours, she broke out of her crate. We captured this rather iconic picture of her on our pet cam.

Unfortunately, the reality of life means that we don’t have the luxury of spending weeks perfectly training her before we need to leave for a couple of hours. However, when we can, we’ve been trying to start small when it comes to crate training. That means having her eat all her meals in the crate, putting her in the crate to rest while we’re in the room, and leaving her in the crate for a few minutes at a time when we leave the room. As she becomes more comfortable with the crate, we’ll leave for longer periods of time.

Again, we haven’t been perfect. Sometimes we’ve had to leave her in her crate for a couple hours. But starting small is key for building good habits in our pets.

Small Changes and Good Habits in Humans

Likewise, starting small is key for developing good habits in humans. For example, if you want to exercise more, moving from no exercise to a goal of exercising daily for an hour is unrealistic. Just like Cinder isn’t acclimated to staying in her crate for a few hours, your body, mind, and even schedule aren’t acclimated to that level of shift in your exercise routine. You’re setting yourself up for disillusionment and, as a result, failure by raising the standards too high.

Instead, when we’re developing good habits, we should start with small, achievable goals (the A in “SMART” goals mentioned above). You might start with exercising 2 days a week or 10 minutes a day. Once you get used to that, work up from there.

Practicing Good Habits Makes Perfect

When developing good habits, consistency is important for pets and humans. It’s rarely enough to spend a couple of hours training your pet on a skill over the weekend and let everything slide the rest of the week. To build good habits, you want to make the practice frequent. When I was lamenting about crate training, a friend told me to keep at it. She noted that for her dog, it took many months of training and then one day it clicked.

The same goes for humans. I’ve had so many people tell me that they just can’t get into running or exercising. However, it took me about 4 or 5 months to finally enjoy running and become more comfortable with it. And it took years before I worked up to the level of fitness routine I have now.

This is where starting small is so helpful. Start with a habit change that is small enough you can practice it on a daily basis or multiple times a week. Once that becomes comfortable, work up from there. Just like I can’t expect my dog to love the crate after a few sessions, don’t expect yourself to see or feel a transformation after a week or even a month. Lasting change takes a long time, but it’s worth it!

Putting Anxieties in Perspective Can Help Counteract Roadblocks

I had an epiphany while I was dog sitting last winter. The dogs we watched barked at any sign of movement outside of the frosted glass front door. Given that I knew the dogs had nothing to fear, I thought the behavior was a little ridiculous. The dogs panicked about the neighbor in the driveway, the postal worker on the sidewalk, and the jogger across the street. We can look at those behaviors and think, “silly dogs!”

However, the dogs couldn’t see what was outside. As a result, they feared the unknown. In the face of that unknown, they assumed the unknown was a grave threat rather than their beloved next door neighbor.

Anxieties and Habits in Humans

Humans experience very similar anxieties. We may fear a health diagnosis, a relationship breakup, or just the future in general. When we experience these vague fears, we rarely assume that things will turn out great or even okay. Rather, we tend to get consumed with the worst-case scenario. The future is a murderer and not the next-door neighbor.

These fears of the unknown can prevent us from making positive changes in our lives. The fear of rejection can prevent us from pursuing a new job or romantic relationship. The fear of discomfort can prevent us from going on a cool trip. And the fear of embarrassment can prevent us from starting a new hobby.

So if your anxieties are preventing you from making progress in your good habits, try putting them in perspective. Think of them as the shadow passing over my friend’s front door. Yes, there’s a miniscule chance that shadow is actually threatening. But there’s a far greater chance that shadow represents something good (or at least neutral!)

To put my anxieties in perspective, I have a few questions I ask myself. First, what am I experiencing anxiety about? Sometimes naming it helps automatically put it into perspective. What is the most likely scenario I’ll experience? Often, the bad outcome we’re worried about has a very, very small chance of happening. And, what would I do if my worst fear happened? Action is often an antidote to anxiety. Knowing we have a plan or even that a worst case scenario might be easily addressed can help ease those concerns.

Expose Yourself Consistently To Your Anxieties

Additionally, for pets and humans, small, consistent exposures to things that cause us anxiety can help lessen those anxieties. Indeed, this is the idea behind exposure therapy. If your anxieties are holding you back from activities or habits you want to practice or if your pets’ anxieties are keeping them from good habits, try exposing yourself/them to that anxious thing in a low-risk environment for short periods.

For example, if you want to speak up more but fear public speaking, challenge yourself to go through the checkout line and make small talk with the cashier rather than doing self-checkout. Next, you might challenge yourself to give a compliment to someone you’re not friends with a couple of times a week.

Similarly, if your pet fears being alone, try spending a few minutes in another room with the door closed until they become more comfortable with that. Then try leaving the house for a few minutes. And you can build up from there.

Evolution Can Lead to Bad Habits

One of the reasons good habits are so hard to stick with is that we (and our pets) are not evolved for our current environments. For example, dogs evolved to live in packs and packs stick together. It was bad news if the pack got separated. So some level of separation anxiety makes sense for many dogs.

Likewise, many dog breeds were bred with a specific purpose in mind. However, nowadays few people own a particular type of dog to accomplish the task it was bred for. For example, our dog Cinder is part Australian Shepherd. However, we certainly don’t have any cattle for her to shepherd around. Dogs of her breed can misbehave if they don’t have tasks to keep them physically and mentally stimulated.

In a similar way, for millions of years, humans learned to eat food when it was available, rest when possible (we survived in part because of our abilities as endurance athletes), and waken with the sun. Now, for many of us, food is readily available, we have sedentary jobs, and our living environments are constantly lighted. As a result, we have too much of a good thing and our inclinations to take advantage of these resources can actually hurt us.

Practice Forgiveness

I say all that to emphasize that you are not weak or bad, nor is your pet weak or bad, if a good habit takes time to adopt. In some cases, like resisting sugary food and eating high-fiber fruits and veggies instead, you’re overcoming millions of years of your body telling you to eat more of that high calorie food while it’s available so you don’t starve. Or when you struggle to go to bed early, it’s maybe not you that’s the problem, so much as your phone and all the streetlights outside your bedroom.

Similarly, with pets it takes time to train habits that go against their natural instincts. But with both humans and pets it’s possible. And even if it feels hard and unpleasant, the payoff of a healthier body and mind is worth it. So practice forgiveness with yourself and your pets when things take longer than expected or when you experience setbacks.

To the extent possible, also think about ways to change your environment to make habits easier for you and your pets. On the pet side, it might mean getting a friend or interactive toy for your high-energy dog. On the human side, it could mean keeping tempting foods out of the house and laying out your gym clothes the night before.

Final Thoughts on Developing Good Habits in Pets and Humans

There is so much overlap in building good habits in pets and humans. Positive reinforcement and self-talk, starting small and consistent, maintaining a growth mindset, facing our anxieties, and practicing forgiveness are all key for training ourselves and our pets.

However, sometimes it’s easier to practice and observe these things in our pets rather than ourselves. This is why I think it’s so helpful to observe the similarities in habit-building in pets and humans. By appreciating the importance of the practices listed above for our pets, we can better see their relevance for us. We can also perhaps be kinder to ourselves when we notice that we forgive our pets’ anxieties and setbacks but do not give ourselves the same grace. Consequently, I hope you found this post but fun and helpful.

Are you working on building good habits in yourself or your pet? What habits are you working on? Are there any tips you’ve found helpful, things you’ve found frustrating, or overlap you’ve observed in training pets and humans? Let me know in the comments!

I hope you enjoyed this post! If you did, please consider liking, subscribing, or sharing with others. It’s always a huge help! Interested in related content? Check out our posts on goal setting for couples, developing a growth mindset, how to start running, and prioritizing and achieving multiple savings goals.