Pet Stress Vs Anxiety Vs Sensitivity - How to Tell Which One Affects Your Pet

In this episode, Shannon walks you through the key differences between pet stress, pet anxiety and pet high sensitivity. Which one is affecting your pet? What do stressed pets, anxious pets, sensitive pets need, and how can you help your pet cope?

As you listen, you will learn….

• The signs you are dealing with pet stress vs anxiety vs sensitivity?
• Which of these three responses is normal and which is not and why
• Why our pet’s life as our companion predisposes them to stress and anxiety
• How and why pet anxiety can look surprisingly similar to grief
• The hallmark sign that lets you know your pet is absolutely struggling with anxiety
• The one thing your pet must have in order to know they are highly sensitive
• Why high sensitivity can actually be genetically advantageous to your pet
• Why sensitive pets feel more stress than even most anxious pets and how you can help

Other episodes mentioned in this episode:

•  The Hero’s Journey, Pet Edition: https://letstalktoanimals.buzzsprout.com/2105365/episodes/19241267-the-hero-s-journey-pet-edition-ho...

• How animal communication can help the Highly Sensitive Pet: https://letstalktoanimals.buzzsprout.com/2105365/episodes/12661708-how-animal-communication-can-help...


•  Pet Anxiety what is it and how animal communication can help your anxious pet: https://letstalktoanimals.buzzsprout.com/2105365/episodes/15502556-pet-anxiety-what-is-it-and-how-an...

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Pet Anxiety Guide: https://www.animallovelanguages.com/petanxietyguide

• Pet High Sensitivity Guide: https://www.animallovelanguages.com/HSPetoptin

Transcript

Welcome And Episode Roadmap

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome back to Let's Talk to Animals, the podcast all species can enjoy together. My name is Shannon Cutz. I am an animal sensitive and intuitive, a Reiki master practitioner, and an animal communication teacher with Animal Love Languages.com. And for our purposes here today, I am also your friendly neighborhood hostess and guide through the wild, wise, and wonderful world of interspecies communication. Call me crazy, but I truly believe that animal communication has the power to save, heal, and restore our planet for all species to enjoy and share. When we learn to communicate with one another, we begin to realize we are so much more alike than different. We care about each other. We become friends. On this podcast, we talk about what the animals have to say and share and why our pets truly are our partners, empathic friends, and teachers. I am so glad you have joined us here for this fresh new episode of Let's Talk to Animals. So let's dive in. Hi, Shannon here. Welcome back to Let's Talk to Animals, the podcast all species can enjoy together. And today, the episode on the table focuses on three core areas that crop up every single week in the communication sessions that I do with your pets: pet stress, pet anxiety, and pet high sensitivity. And specifically in this episode, we are going to take a look at the similarities and the important differences between the two with the working intention to equip you to begin to understand the difference so that when you are supporting your pet through whatever it is that you're seeing that they need support with or from, you begin to bring to that experience a deeper knowledge and insight about what does pet stress look like? How do you know? Just from the outside looking in, of course, with animal communication, we can approach it from the inside looking out and hear exactly what your pet wants to share about how they're feeling and what they need to feel better. But from a more objective outside looking in perspective, there are also certain signs and symptoms that you can watch for that might send us down the pathway of pet stress versus pet anxiety versus pet high sensitivity. So I want to start by simply defining each one of these separate unique states of being. These are all states of the nervous system. They're different, but they can appear very much the same when we as a pet parent are looking at our pet who's responding to life, responding to something that has cropped up in their world, and we can label it as anxiety, or we can label it as sensitivity, or we can label it as a stress response without really understanding the nuances of how our nervous system or how our pet's nervous system moves through those experiences. And that makes all the difference when you're working with your pet to help them through something, and you're trying to decide what tools are the right tools to add to your pet's whole pet wellness and care toolkit. Of course, animal communication is always a good tool. Pet Reiki and energy wellness is always a good tool. There's a separate episode for that that you can find on the Let's Talk to Animals podcast. But today we're specifically working towards equipping you with additional insight and knowledge so that when your pet is responding in a way that doesn't strike you as optimal, then you can start to begin to say that matches this or this matches that. Clear as mud, right?

What Pet Stress Really Is

SPEAKER_00 4:21

So let's start by defining stress. In this case, it doesn't even matter what species we are. Your stress, your pet's stress, whether you're caring for a dog or a cat or a horse or a bird or a turtle or another kind of reptile or a different animal species, stress is stress at the neurological level. Stress occurs to us as something that feels out of balance, as something that feels suboptimal, as something that feels unsafe. This is a biological response. So nervous system 101, we all, regardless of species and no matter how so-called primitive or evolved, we all have the same basic neurological building blocks. So, for instance, we all have an autonomic nervous system. This is our automatic nervous system. This is what controls breathing and heart rate and digestion. It's kind of like a set it and forget it, and we can't really do too much about it, nor should we want to, right? It's great that the breathing thing just takes care of itself. We have a somatic nervous system. This is the voluntary nervous system. I'm sitting down and I want to get up. I'm breathing shallowly. I want to take deeper breaths. That's what we can control. We have a sympathetic nervous system. That is the fight, flight, freeze, tender, befriend. That is our response in situations that would be considered suboptimal or even dangerous. We have the parasympathetic nervous system. That is the nervous system that's the rest, digest, reconnect when all is well, we're in the clear safety, opportunity, evolving as an individual, evolving in community. So we're all working with those same basic parts. We also have a central nervous system, the brain in the spinal cord or whatever version that species has, and we have our peripheral nervous system, and we have a whole chain of electromagnetic and biochemical responses that take place that let our physical organism, as well as our mind, our emotions, and our soul know what state we're in and what's the next right step to take to move from a state that is suboptimal, a state maybe of anxiety, of stress, of sensitivity, to a state that feels better. So if you haven't listened to the episode yet called The Pet Heroes Journey, that's the episode where we take a look at setting the intention of specifically where am I now and where do we want to go? I think my pet might be stressed. I think my pet might be anxious, I think my pet might be sensitive. Well, where do we want to go with that? Well, I want a calm, happy, healthy pet. That's a very simple example, but that also restores a sense of trust that that is possible. We've all gone through hard times and we have come out of them. We've come out the other side. So that restores the energy of possibility that allows us to stop gripping so tightly to the problem and open up into taking a look at possible solutions or pathways forward. So you'll want to go back and listen to that episode, and I've linked that up in the show notes for you so you can find it easily. And come back to this episode and we're gonna talk through stress, anxiety, and pet sensitivity. So, stress, stress is universal. Stress is where we start. We just covered the bare bones of the shared universal nervous system, the different basic bells and whistles and how it works. So, stress is actually not a bad thing. Situational stress that occurs to us in the form of energy and motion or emotions, feelings, that is designed to keep us alive. So if you're walking down a forest path and you see a shadow behind a tree up ahead on the path, if you start to get little butterflies in your stomach, even if you don't know what that shadow is yet, you don't know if that shadow is your best friend waiting to go foraging with you or is a hungry saber-toothed tiger or mama with kits waiting to eat you for lunch. That's those situational butterflies in your stomach. That is stress. That is your system reacting to something. When I teach the intuitive development for pet parents webinar trainings that I teach, we talk about interacting with those butterflies, interacting with that heads up from your nervous system that it is detecting movement in the environment energetically around you and producing emotion, energy and motion within you. Why do we have emotion? Because it's motivating. I want more of this and less of that by the time we're thinking about it. As I tell my animal communication students, you've missed it. You are what's for lunch. So we really want to start noticing when you're experiencing stress, stress is okay. Stress is situational, stress is timely. And because of that, stress is transient. So let's say we're back in the forest scenario and you're getting those butterflies. You don't know if it's anticipation or dread yet. But either way, those little butterflies that you're feeling that heightened awareness is designed to get your attention. It's designed biologically over millennia. Why? Because it works. It works if we're noticing it. So stress is always going to be situational, it's always going to be timely, it's always going to be transient, and it's always going to be important. And your pet is going to experience stress. You are going to experience stress. Absolutely cannot avoid it. And because our pets, unlike us, our pets live primarily sensory-based lives. They live much more from the right brain hemisphere, which is the subconscious intuition pathway. It's the here and now pathway of immediate sensory and emotional energetic experiences. They are probably going to feel stress in a heightened way compared with our stress. So you being stressed, you might be extremely stressed before you even notice that you're stressed, versus your pet is going to notice systemic stress the moment it hits their system. So you may see more signs of stress in your pet than you see in yourself or your other human family members because they are so sensitive to the here and now. They are also going to be more inclined to hide their stress from you. That is a biological wiring that we can't seem to really breed out. We want our pets to come to us with anything, but even dogs and horses that are the two companion animal species that are the most socialized to keeping company with humans and trusting humans and seeking humans out for support. Even with those species, there's still a strong biological instinct to hide systemic stress from everyone and anyone, including us, because it's potentially dangerous. It's a sign of weakness. So just understanding stress is normal and natural. Stress is advantageous and stress is transient. Why? Because if you're at point A on the forest path and point B is the tree up ahead, that stress is going to resolve itself pretty quickly. You're either going to be what's for lunch, or you're going to head out with your bestie and you're going to go get lunch. It has a time stamp on it. This is also why experiences like grief turn quickly from stress into anxiety or depression because our nervous system never gets the message that the threat or the opportunity has concluded itself. The cycle has run itself out. We're kind of in emotional, energetic limbo. So stress, true stress, it exists for two and only two purposes to keep us out of danger, to avoid being lunch, and to take advantage of safety and opportunity to survive, thrive, evolve, pass along our genes somewhere along the way, back in yours and my genealogical history. Our ancestors did a good job of this. If they hadn't, we wouldn't be here. Your pets, it's the same. So kind of setting the bar lower, maybe, than we pet parents might prefer it to be, and acknowledging that pet stress, it happens. It happens every day. It happens when you drop a chip on the floor, like I did earlier with my cockatiel pedal, and she lunges for it. And I have to take it away from her because it's not good for her. That's stressful for her. When your dog wants to go for a walk and you're on a Zoom call, they're going to experience situational stress. I have a need, it's not being met right now. Your cat wanting to claw the curtains and not being able to, or seeing the neighbor's cat sitting outside on the fence. That's probably going to create situational stress, normal stress. Stress is how we neurologically interact with our environment to sense for what is dangerous, what is unsafe, and what is safe and opportunistic. So expecting our pets to have zero stress in their lives is unrealistic and quite frankly, not ideal. We want them to have an active ability to sense what is safe for me, what is potentially not safe for me, and to be able to tell the difference. This is something that is very normal. It feels less normal because we, as pet parents, we are bombarded with too much information, too many options. Our pets are living with us in our human-centric first-world lives where almost everything in their environment is alien to them. Centuries, millennia of evolution has not prepared any of our companion animal species for life with us in these insulated, artificial indoor worlds that we live in. So we can also expect our pets to experience a higher level of daily, normalized, systemic stress than what they would if they were out in the wild state. Not because it's less stressful to live in the wild, far from it. They're far more likely to end up plated and served out in a wild setting. But the ways in which their neurochemistry has evolved to deal with their stress, for instance, by barking, by biting, by fighting, by running away, by behaving in normal and natural mating and young rearing routines. Pretty much all of that is off the table for our pets, our partners, empathic friends, and teachers, those companion animals that choose a life, a whole life where they're accompanied with us. None of those behaviors, in most cases, are accepted or welcomed. Maybe in certain breeder circles, we see at least they get to mate and rear young and experience that normal biological urge and very natural process. But in most cases, our animals don't get to do any of that to deal with their normal situational stress. And that is the jumping off point for anxiety. Now,

Anxiety As A Stuck Stress Loop

SPEAKER_00 15:45

you and I, even if you're the most calm and well-balanced person that you've ever met, you know what it feels like to feel anxious. Maybe you've never really stopped to think about it. Like, am I stressed or am I anxious? We tend to use those terms pretty interchangeably, but they're very different. Anxiety is a stress response that's gotten stuck. It's gotten stuck to the point where our nervous system has started to see it as normal and has, in cases of a more chronic state of anxiety, has even coded it in as part of the operating system of how we deal with life. And anxiety sets in when we've either experienced a traumatic event where we haven't been able to literally shake off the effects of it. So if you can think of anything in your life right now that creates a feeling of anxiety where you look around and you're like, there's no threat, there's no opportunity. It's not just situational stress, it's anxiety. I feel anxious about this even in a total vacuum. I continue to feel anxious about this. That's what I'm talking about. And we don't typically see anxiety behaviors in wild settings with true wild animals, those animals who have come here to our school and have opted into lives where they have as little contact with our species as possible. Because if they don't shake off their situational, normal and natural stress in a timely manner, they get distracted and they can't be here now to notice what wants to eat them for lunch. So they don't tend to survive very long. With the worlds, the lives that we've built that are so artificial and insulated, we can quite literally afford to get stuck in anxiety in a way that we absolutely would not be able to do if we lived out in the wild too. This is something else that we look at in my intuitive development for pet parents webinars is how we have evolved alongside our companion animals to predispose ourselves for chronic anxiety and why that is the case and why it doesn't work based on how we're wired through evolutionary anthropology, through our biology and our neurochemistry in a wild setting. If your pet went to go and eat something and another animal came and wanted to eat it too, they would duke it out. And then when they decided who gets it, they'd be done and they'd have to move on to the next moment in their life because it's never totally safe. We can never just sit on the couch and relax when we're in the wild. So we don't tend to hold on to our anxiety. If you've ever watched a wild animal that's gotten predated where they've managed to escape the predator, you can see them stop. I've seen it with birds that have gotten caught by birds of prey and have managed to escape. They shake their wings, they shake their feathers. You can watch it, you can see it. If you watch nature documentaries or you like to watch YouTube nature videos, you can see it. They shake it off and then they get up and they go on with their day. Because if they don't, they're what's for dinner. So when our animals, when our companion animals, our partners, empathic friends and teachers, our pets, when they encounter a situation where life doesn't go their way, or where something happens to them and all of their normal ways of dealing with it, like we just talked about being aggressive, retreating, barking, snarling, biting, clawing, hissing, competing for food, competing for mates in overt ways, because there isn't a Whataburger around the corner where we can go if somebody else snatches my prey dinner. They don't get to do any of that in their lives with us. So what they're left with is a stress response that never resolves. Not unlike our experience and their experience of grief, our nervous system never gets the all clear that the thing that needs to be resolved has been resolved. And that can be as simple as an animal that has been relinquished and has no ability to adequately care for themselves. Maybe they've been dropped off somewhere and they are now stray and they have no coping skills for that. They have not studied at the feet of mom and dad to learn how to deal with this situation. They don't know what to do, or maybe they've been relinquished to a shelter and they have no agency over what's happening to them. None of their natural patterns are in place. They literally don't have the neurology, they don't have the neural wiring and the preparatory training to deal with what's happening to them. So they get stuck in anxiety. They get stuck in a stress response that doesn't resolve. It's open-ended. So anxiety crops up when we see a pet who now is in a place of safety, of abundance, of friendship, of love, of caring, and they can't seem to relax into it. And we are seeing wild behaviors come out. So we might see that timidity, we might see that shyness, we might see the aggression. We might see it persistently as in a case of kind of all day, every day, like you just adopted a cat, and they literally won't come out from under the bed, or they pee on everything in sight, and the litter box is the only place they don't want to go. We might see it situationally, where we're only seeing behaviors when we leave, such as in separation anxiety, or only in the case of certain experiences like tall men in ball caps or large barking dogs in their near vicinity, or individuals with trucks or uniforms. So we are gonna see the anxiety behavior come out because their nervous system still thinks there's an active threat. And this is the anxiety response. Something has happened and it didn't get resolved. And they didn't shake it off. And everything that they have in their current toolkit to deal with that is either off limits or it's not working. That is anxiety. And it feels like literally being stuck in Groundhog Day. If you've seen that old movie with Bill Murray, where you wake up and you live the same day over and over and over and over again. And I want to stop here before we dive into high sensitivity, which is a little bit different. It's got some overtones of the same where we might be thinking, I really don't know the difference, but there is a difference. We're going to talk about that in a minute.

How To Tell Stress From Anxiety

SPEAKER_00 22:41

I want to stop here and talk for a moment more about stress versus anxiety and give you a handy hack for how to determine which one is taking place for your pet, especially if you have an animal that's new to your family, right? It's easy to forget for those of us who've been living with our animal family members for some months or years that every day somebody adds a new animal to their inner species family. And so you're getting to know somebody that you really don't know very well. And if you've rescued an animal in particular, but even if they've come to you as a very young animal, you probably don't have a lot of history. And even if you do have history, you have the narration from the other humans that know them. You don't have the inside track from that animal themselves. And of course, that's what animal communication can provide is the missing perspective on why your pet is the way that they are and does the things that they do. So you're kind of navigating through this getting to know you phase with your animal, where you're saying, I literally don't quite know. I don't have a sense of what's normal behavior for you, my pet, and what's abnormal. I literally don't know. Everything to me is a learning curve right now because we're just getting to know each other. Where you want to go with this, and this is what I tell my animal communication students and my pet clients is you want to do something I call stepping into your pet's paws or claws or wings or scales or shell or fins or tail. You want to literally switch places. You want to imagine that you are your animal reacting in the moment or interacting with their world in a moment. And notice if you were your pet and that thing happened, whether it was the male person delivering the mail or a truck driving by or the neighbor's cat sitting outside on the fence or another pet in your family coming a little too close to them. If you were that animal, how would that feel to you? How might you respond? If you were them, you didn't have your words, you didn't have your human agency, you had their paws or claws or wings, and something happened. How might you respond? And then you want to notice and see if that response is effective and if whatever the stressor is gets resolved. So sometimes we have to actually allow our pets to try to kind of work it out for themselves as long as nobody is in active danger and observe what happens and how they set boundaries with one another and how they communicate their needs and how they resolve disagreements about things with each other. Again, as long as it doesn't actively infringe on anyone's safety, including ours. And if you can see that given a little time and space, they work it out and then they go back to being themselves as you're learning how and who they are, that's stress. That's normal. We have stress with our human family members in similar ways, and we typically can work it out versus if the animal that you're caring for is systematically stuck in the same response over and over and over again. And then ask yourself if I was my pet and I was wild, what would I do out in a wild state to try to resolve that stress so that my nervous system gets the point? We're done with that. It's time to move on with our day. And ask yourself, is that normal stress response mechanism allowed? Am I allowed to pee on everything? Am I allowed to bite my brother? Am I allowed to lunge and bark because I'm defending my turf or my territory? And if the answer is no, that's not part of the family playbook. We don't get to do that around here, then ask yourself, well, then how is my pet going to resolve this? Clearly, this is a trigger for them. Then what tools do they have? And that's where I see pet parents starting to come to me for animal communication. Because we need to have a family meeting. We need to talk about what you can do instead of just all the things that you can't, because their wild behaviors are not allowed in our world. This is so important, which is why I keep coming back to it and landing on it again. If you've ever gone to another country when my father was alive, he would regularly travel for work to the country of Saudi Arabia, where the rules and regulations and the customs, in some cases, are quite different from ours here in the United States. And there were things that he needed to be very mindful, like which hand to use for certain things or whether it's okay to show the soles of your feet. I don't remember a lot of it, but he had a whole playbook that he had to review before traveling there to live for a period of time each year, because the way in which that culture was shaped and what was a trigger and what was safe, it's just a little different than what we have here. And so imagining that you're your pet and what you would do and how well understood those behaviors would be by others around you versus what we've set up in our first world artificial, insulated, human-centric lives, they don't understand it. So what options do they have? And that's where we start with animal communication often. We're doing emotional freedom technique, we're doing pet Reiki, we're doing somatic release work, we're working with intentions, we're working with color therapy, we're working with crystal therapy, we're working with sonic therapy to help our pets shake it off, reset their nervous systems, and move on with their lives. And then when they're out of that chronic anxiety state, to be able to respond more appropriately in a timely manner to situational stress and build in some new coping skills because we have to recognize, as I talk about in the episode on the pets heroes journey, our pets have chosen life with us. So it might seem pretty cosmically unfair. Sometimes it occurs to me that way, I'll be honest with you. Or I think I wouldn't be willing to give up 99% of my personal power, my personal agency to give up choices like what do I get to eat? How much do I get to eat? When do I get to eat? Where can I use the bathroom? What do I sleep on or in? When do I get to sleep? All of these different choices that we just take for granted. And our pets are giving up all of that to live with us, to be our partners, empathic friends, and teachers. That is kind of mind-blowing. And in exchange, we need to help them adapt to our world. And so often when we're looking at the soul agreement level with our pets, that's one of the lessons that they come here to learn. As I've talked with your animals over the years, they have told me again and again that nobody, nobody of any species, including our own, comes here into one of these 3D earth suits that we call bodies here to earth school without two goals, two intentions, or two objectives, if you will. One is we've got something that we want and need to learn. And two, we've got something that we want and need to teach. And that's where that relationship comes in because we learn and teach together. It works better in relationships. So often one of the lessons that our pets want to learn is how to adapt, is how to have an experience of life with a human. Often it's because they're working with other pets who are preparing for that experience and they want to know what it's like, or they're working on their own soul growth and evolution. And the big carrot at the end of that stick is they get to teach us. They get to teach us about energy, they get to teach us about soul agreements, they get to teach us about our own human potential, they get to teach us how to come back to our own hearts, how to come back to our right brain hemisphere, the hemisphere that humanity is quite literally trying to forget about every single day. It's very, very useful. Come back to our nervous systems, come back to our truth about who are we really? Why are we really here? What is this really all about? These core essential questions that so many of us are too afraid to ask or too overwhelmed to answer. And our pets coming into our lives with so much unconditional love, they're reminding us that these complicated sounding questions actually have really simple answers. It's about how you feel and whether you want less of or more of that feeling. And then how do we get there? That's the lesson. That's what they're here to teach us. So they're willing to give up so much control, but it's not easy. It doesn't mean it's easy. The carrot is that we get to teach our human a lesson. The stick is we've got to do a lot of growing and learning for how to navigate this human world we're living in in order to do it. So that's the difference between stress and anxiety.

High Sensitivity As A Genetic Trait

SPEAKER_00 31:43

So let's move into high sensitivity, what is now called sensory processing sensitivity. Excuse the pun, but this is a different animal altogether. There's a lot more data behind it. It's very interesting to take a look at what science has demonstrated about this genetic trait. It is a genetic trait. About 20% of an average species population is going to be born with the trait. The trait is called sensory processing sensitivity. The only two species where this trait has been pretty well studied to date are Homo sapiens, our own human beings, and canines. So dogs. So much so that in humans it's called sensory processing sensitivity, and in dogs, it's called canine sensory processing sensitivity. So we've got data, we've got hard data, we've got fMRI data to support that about 20% of our own species, about 20% of canine species, and we have data extending out to more than a hundred other animal species, including all of our companion animal species, that also can inherit this trait. There's an evolutionary advantage to having 20% of a species population responding neurologically to life and to situational stress differently than the majority, the other 80% of the population. Here's a really relevant wild example. We can take a look at the wildfires in California. And let's take an example of a ground squirrel. And let's say that 80% of the ground squirrels are not highly sensitive. They do not have the genetic trait of sensory processing sensitivity. And when they see the wildfire coming, they decide they're gonna jump right in and try to outrun the leading edge. 20% of ground squirrels have the sensory processing sensitivity genetic trait. They hang back a little bit. They watch the other 80% trying to outrun the leading edge. They realize that doesn't look like it's working very well. What if we burrow underground? What if we use the underground network of burrows to lay low as the fire rages overhead and emerge after it has passed? So you can see how even if the 80% sadly do not make it, they don't have success outrunning the leading edge of the fire. 20% of ground squirrels in that area are safely tucked away underneath the raging fire, and they can come out and repopulate. This is the evolutionary basis for this trait. What you need to know about this trait. And I have free tools for both pet anxiety and pet high sensitivity that I'll link up in the show notes for you here, including a quiz that I've developed that is based on the pioneering work of Dr. Elaine Aaron, who is the leading edge of understanding high sensitivity or sensory processing sensitivity in humans. And you can take the quiz and you can determine if what you're seeing in your pet is anxiety or is high sensitivity. But let's take a look at high sensitivity. As a genetic trait, these animals are likely to have an increased awareness of stimuli, environmental stimuli. So in our ground squirrel example, the fire is gonna sound louder, feel hotter, smell more acrid, and cause them more emotional upset. So those are just some examples. In our companion animals, sensory processing sensitivity means that car backfiring is gonna sound louder than it will to your pet who doesn't have sensory processing sensitivity. So lights will look brighter, sounds will sound louder, smells and tastes will occur to them with more intensity, emotions will be felt more deeply, tactile sensations will be more invasive or more intrusive. So we've got any kind of sensation, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, sensing, and feeling are all going to be the volume is turned up. There's nothing that these pets can do about it, by the way. This genetic trait, it is a setting. It is why I wear earplugs when I go to the movies or a concert, and I don't do it very often. I carry earplugs with me everywhere I go. It is why I always have layers on, because if I'm hot, I'm gonna be hotter. If I'm cold, I'm gonna be colder. It's a reason why I like my food blend. Because if it's mildly spicy to somebody that doesn't have sensory processing sensitivity, it's gonna come across like blazing hot to me. So you can ask yourself, and this is a really interesting question. This is that self-discovery part of our soul agreements with our pets. Can you place yourself in this model as well? When I first discovered Dr. Elaine Aaron's work and I read the book and I took the quiz, it was like so many years of asking myself, what is wrong with you? And all of those messages about, well, you're just too sensitive. Well, why are you like this? became very clear because I score almost a perfect 10 across the board for high sensitivity, which is what it was called when her work first came out. So as you're exploring this with your pet, explore it with yourself as well. I have guided many pet parents who are caring for highly sensitive animals into a deeper awareness of their own high sensitivity, to the point where I've even had emails from pet parents saying, I think this applies to me too, which is great. This is an activation of our soul agreements where your pet is teaching you about yourself through the lens of something that you're helping them through. So that's that pet's hero's journey again. And it also means that if your pet is anxious or if your pet is highly sensitive, it doesn't mean that you're doing anything wrong. It means you have a shared opportunity to learn and grow together.

Helping Sensitive Pets At Home

SPEAKER_00 37:52

So understanding that a pet that has sensory processing sensitivity is going to need environmental modifications. So we're not necessarily looking at anxiety, we are looking at systemic stress because they've got their sensory volume naturally genetically turned up. They cannot do anything about it. And if they were us, if they were humans in our human world, they could go and get some earplugs, they could put on some dark shades, they could put on another jacket, they could take off their jacket, they could go find a quiet spot to just chill out and nobody would bother them and say, why aren't you hanging out with us when we're watching this blaringly loud movie or listening to our music or grilling something or using essential oils or products? That's another reason, just even beyond the physical potential for toxicity, there is the sensitivity aspect of the products that we use and how they're impacting our animals. So understanding that the pet with sensory processing sensitivity, they are going to need our help modulating sensory input in their nervous system. They are going to need our sensitivity to how our bright lights, how our loud sounds, how the scents that we interact with affect them, even the food that we feed them and whether or not they're able to tolerate it, whether or not the flavor that might be so enticing to a pet that doesn't have their gustatory pathway turned up all the way to 10, it might be overwhelming for a pet that's sensitive and has that trait. So they may need help with the area where they rest or sleep. I've guided pet parents to create more of secluded den-like areas for highly sensitive pets to take a look at the tactile sensation of their bedding, of their toys, of the food that they're eating, and really modulate the environment to help the highly sensitive pet cope. And this also includes reactivity to us. This is the part we really don't look at. It's right out there in plain sight, and we don't see it, where you might be having a strong reaction or a strong emotion. So this is what I call that empath channel or clear empathy. Highly sensitive animals, their clear empathy channel is also turned up to Mach 10. So if you're highly stressed or highly anxious, if you are depressed, if you are having a strong emotion like anger or joy or fill in the blanks, you can expect your animal with sensory processing sensitivity to react to that. Sometimes what we see is actually very emotionally hurtful to us where we're going through something tough and our pet tries to avoid our company. And this is misunderstood as my pet doesn't love me, or what am I doing wrong, or what has changed? You don't want to spend time with me. No, this is the highly sensitive pet trying to modulate how our emotions impact them because they literally cannot handle it. That doesn't mean we have to try to get over whatever it is we're going through more quickly, or ignore it or tamp it down. It just means we need to give them a little grace and recognize it's not me, it's you. You are feeling this too strongly. And I've talked with several pet parents recently who report that they're going through grief and their pet is avoiding them and it's hurtful. We take it personally. And the highly sensitive animal is asking us not to recognize I can't do anything about it. And if you are highly sensitive yourself, you know what it's like to have your empathy channel button pushed by somebody. If you've ever cried with somebody else when they burst into tears or gotten self-righteously angry on someone's behalf as they were working through their anger with you, you know what this feels like. It's not pleasant. And in our highly sensitive animals, it's a part of their autonomic nervous system. Not their automatic, not their somatic nervous system, their autonomic nervous system. It is coded in to their most primitive neurological hardware. So we laugh when we see things like pet sunglasses or pet earmuffs or pet clothing. And sure, a lot of it is kind of laughable. And we have to ask the question do our pets really want to wear those things? But for a pet with sensory processing sensitivity, that turns from a funny social media gimmick into a potential necessity, especially in families where we are not willing or able to modulate the in-home environment to accommodate a sensitive pet's needs. Now, those don't tend to be the people I typically attract on this podcast or in my animal communication practice or classes, but it is important, especially for somebody who talks with animals. And I do see some animals that they get dressed up in cute little outfits. And I always like to ask the question, is this something that you're okay with? Or even is this something that you need? Sometimes we as pet parents, we may do it subconsciously. We're using that right brain hemisphere. We're intuitively guided. I think my pet is cold, I think they need a jacket, versus, oh, isn't that jacket adorable? I think my pet will look cute in it. So asking yourself that question if I'm dressing my pet up, if I'm getting them booties, if I'm getting them earmuffs, if I'm getting them glasses, if I'm getting them outfits, where's that coming from? It's an interesting question to ask yourself. So that's where we see high sensitivity in its own class and its own category. There is a lot we can do to help a pet who's situational and normal and natural and protective and beneficial stress that has turned into anxiety. There's a track we can look at to help them through. What's going on? And there's a track that we can look at to help a pet with sensory processing sensitivity with that trait, that gene, to help them through and help them cope with pet anxiety. We can look at a potential resolution where when we stack the right tools and helps and aids and the mindset and intention that we also need that at that energetic level together, we can see a resolution in most cases of chronic anxiety back to normal situational stress. Now,

Nature, Nurture, And Breed Lines

SPEAKER_00 44:34

I will add a PS to that. Anxiety, it does evolve through twin tracks of nature and nurture. So biology and environment. And there's enough data to support that if the parents went through stress that turned into anxiety or their parents during the conception and the development and delivery that gets coded into epigenetics. So it changes our genes and how they express and which genes express and how strongly they express. And that can set a pet up for more struggle with anxiety or potentially even a lifetime of anxiety. There's also plenty of scientific evidence looking at different breed lines for dogs, in particular, also cats and some horses, where we can see that a more anxious temperament or traits that we might label as anxiety affecting were selected for because these animals were doing certain jobs with us where they needed heightened awareness. They needed an increased prey drive, they needed more reactivity, they needed more aggression or just behavior traits that lend themselves to certain jobs that they were working with us on. There is a case to be made for in some breed lines, we have quite literally, maybe intentionally and perhaps accidentally, we have bred the tendency towards anxiety as a set point into them. And in those cases, we can see anxiety almost mimicking a genetic trait like high sensitivity or sensory processing sensitivity. So we have to kind of balance that with an awareness and an understanding of genetic history, situational triggers and experiences. So nature, nurture, biology, and environment. But typically speaking, with anxiety, we can make progress. We can see a resolution, we can see a return to more of an appropriate danger, safety, and opportunity stress response. High sensitivity, completely different ball game, completely different end game. It's there, it's gonna stay there. The settings are presets. There's nothing we can do to go in and tinker with the code and lower the sensitivity. So it's about environmental modification. So that feels like a good stopping point for our conversation, our discussion today.

Resources, Community, And Closing

SPEAKER_00 47:04

Pet stress versus pet anxiety versus pet high sensitivity or sensory processing sensitivity. I would love to hear your insights, your comments, and most importantly, your questions and stories. We can continue this conversation, but it's an important one. Our pets need us to have it. And we as pet parents need and deserve tools to support our pets through the experiences and the bodies that they've chosen to inhabit so that they can be with us. So please take the time to share a comment, to ask a question, to let me know what you'd like to talk more about or what you need help with. It truly does help me shape these episodes to meet you and your pet where you are and be of service and offer you encouragement to continue walking alongside your pet from the perspective of this is a vital lesson that we get to learn together. And there absolutely is more to learn here that can and will help your pets to thrive. So, as always, thank you so much for listening to Let's Talk to Animals podcast. I deeply appreciate your love and your heart for animals. I love producing these episodes for you. If you are not a part of my weekly love letter community, you can join that. There's a link in the show notes. You get $25 off your first pet session with me so you can start that conversation. And I have all of the pet help guides, the free guides linked up in the show notes here. So if you want to learn more about pet anxiety, you want to learn more about pet high sensitivity, you can request those guides and continue your learning journey. And I will see you back here in two weeks for another fresh new episode of Let's Talk to Animals. So I send you and your inner species family all my love and bye for now. I have so enjoyed sharing this episode with you. If you're new to the Let's Talk to Animals community and you've enjoyed this episode, please do leave us a review on your favorite streaming service or drop a comment wherever you'd like to listen. I'd love to hear from you, and your feedback truly helps me shape future episodes based on your interests and needs. If you're not already in my weekly love letters community, head over to Animal Love Languages.com to opt in. Your welcome email will include $25 off your first pet session with me, and you'll be the first to know when a new podcast episode drops. If you're interested in learning more about the work I do communicating with animals, offering pet Reiki, and teaching animal communication, please visit me at Animal Love Languages.com. Click on Schedule for Pet Sessions and Programs for all the information about my new animal communication adventure to master your student program and the live animal communication practice circle I run for student practitioners. And I look forward to welcoming you back here very soon for a fresh new episode of Let's Talk to Animals. Okay, all my love. Bye for now.