When George was younger, I received advice that ditching the routine helps dogs to become more resilient.
Although this was a new concept for me (I had always understood that dogs love routine), I understood the reasoning. If a dog is always fed at exactly the same time, they may become anxious if it doesn't happen at that time. If you always come home at the same time and one day you can't, they may panic.
The concept was quite helpful for me as we were struggling to get into a routine in the early days. Some days George would go to daycare, some days I'd be working from home, and then the weekends were totally different.
But I have since learned the importance of routine and predictability for fearful and anxious dogs.
As George is already anxious about everything in the world, ditching the routine and making life more unpredictable is not going to help him become more resilient and confident.
The more patterns he can predict, and the more predictable I can make the world, the calmer George is going to be.
This became really apparent to me when we were working on pattern and predictability games with our trainer. I couldn't quite understand how simple, repetitive games were going to help reduce his anxiety. But they really work. And he loves playing them.
When George was afraid to leave the house for a while, even to go in the garden, pattern games were our saviour (see 'Being scared to leave the house').
We are starting to use them on walks with few distractions and are trying to use them outside of daycare if we have to wait to go in…admittedly with variable results but it's a work in progress!
We now have fairly solid routines for daycare days and work from home days with the weekends being more flexible.
This seems to be working well. George seems to recognise the cues for each of the days and adapts accordingly.
The world is unpredictable but I'll be continuing to enable routine and predictability when I can.
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