Hannah Zulueta Canine Anxiety
The Wrong Kind of Calm
Anxiety in a dog is a direction, not a volume.
Every calming product on the shelf is built like a volume knob. Turn the dog down. But in Traditional Chinese Medicine, we say your dog’s spirit went somewhere, and you cannot pick a remedy until you know which way it went.
The one thing to get right
There is no such thing as a calming herb. There are herbs that weigh a spirit down, herbs that feed it, herbs that gather it back in, and herbs that lift it. Give the wrong one to the right dog and you will get a result. It will not be the one you wanted.
The dog who went flat
A client came to me after starting her dog on a calming formula. The dog was anxious, she said. Stressed. Barking. She had found something respectable, a real Chinese formula, not a gummy from the checkout aisle.
The dog stopped barking. The dog also stopped everything else. Sedated looking. Not interested in moving. Present in the room but not really there.
She wanted to know if the dose was too high. It was not the dose. When I asked her to describe the dog before any of this started, the picture turned over completely. Soft. Light. Silly. A dog whose whole nature ran upward.
Don’t put a stone on top of a dog who was already lying down.
That formula was correct but for a different type of anxiety.
What changed in 53 years
I have owned dogs since 1973. For most of those years, an anxious dog got a long hike or three hours at the beach. You wore the dog out and the dog was fine. Nobody used the word regulated.
Somewhere along the way we stopped asking whether our dogs were happy and started asking whether they were enriched, content, unstressed. The shelf grew to meet the new question. Diffusers, compression shirts, licking mats, snuffle boxes, calming chews, CBD in six delivery formats, and yes, dogs on Prozac.
Whenever someone asks me about it, the question always arrives in two parts.
Can my dog just not be anxious? And what herbs can you recommend?
The second part is the one people want answered. The first part is the one that has an answer.
Start with a trainer
Herbs do not teach a dog what to do with a doorbell. A dog who has never been shown how to settle will not learn it from a capsule.
Before I talk about anything I can offer, I want to know whether this dog has had real training, whether the household is consistent, and whether anyone has looked at the ten minutes before the behavior starts. A good trainer changes more anxious dogs than a good formula does. I would rather send you to one and have you come back.
Sometimes it is both. That is when the herbs earn their place.
Emotion moves the body
People used to say psychosomatic, meaning the emotional state shows up in the soma, the body. The current term is psychophysiological. The idea underneath has not changed. Emotions are physical events.
Someone mentions at a family dinner that they have been getting headaches here and here, and two people at the table say the same word at the same time. Stress.
I am not licensed in talk therapy and I do not go there. As an acupuncturist I work on the body. Needles in certain places will settle a nervous system enough that the emotion stops landing so hard. The person does not have less life. They have more room to hold it.
I am not licensed to needle dogs. So people come to me for the other half of the medicine, which is what goes in the bowl, and what herbs they might ask their veterinarian about.
The loudest patient I ever met
Once you see this in a person, you will start seeing it in your dog.
My second year of acupuncture school, I was on a shift at our teaching clinic. A patient came in hot. Loud at the front desk, argumentative, and when the desk could not give him what he wanted he took it into the clinic manager’s office. You could hear him from the other side of the building.
We got him checked in. First step is vitals. I put the cuff on him and thought, no wonder. His blood pressure sat close enough to the line that we nearly sent him to urgent care instead of treating him.
The intake told the rest. He was elderly. Nobody at home was looking after him. He was eating almost nothing of any use. And he presented with what most people would have called psychosis and left at that.
His pulse was hot. Not fever hot. Hot the way a pulse gets when there is heat in a body with nowhere to put it.
In Chinese Medicine we accept that the state of the body reaches the spirit, which is why TCM Dietetics sits underneath everything else we do. We gave advice so that he was fed properly. He came back less agitated. Same man, same life, less heat in him.
I think about him every time I hear a dog barking without stopping. I wonder how hot that dog is.
Some patients still need pharmaceutical support, and some dogs do too. That is a conversation with your doctor or your veterinarian, and it is not one I would talk anyone out of.
A settled gut settles the dog
I have watched this often enough to say it plainly. A dog whose gut has been wrecked by a diet that never suited him will look anxious, and a properly balanced diet will bring a good portion of that dog back.
The behavior reads as nerves. Restlessness in the evening, pacing, grass eating, a dog who cannot get comfortable and keeps changing position, a dog who is snappy about being touched near the middle. None of that is a personality. That is discomfort with no other way to say itself.
Fix the diet and give it a few weeks, and some of these dogs simply stop. No herb, no chew, no diffuser. The dog was never anxious. The dog was uncomfortable and nobody asked.
This is why I run the food first in almost every case. It is the cheapest variable to change and the one most likely to be doing the damage.
The four directions
Which way did your dog go?
When you come to me and say your dog is anxious, I am going to ask how the spirit is disturbed. What direction did the qi go? Because once we know the direction, we know where we are standing.
Click the type that sounds most like your dog.
The spirit is floating up and needs weight.
You see Loud. Hard to interrupt. Startles at every sound and stays up long after. Worse in the evening. Seeks the cool tile. Pants without heat to explain it. Tired and still will not settle.
Underneath Heat with nowhere to go, and a spirit riding on top of it.
The tools The substances that anchor are mostly minerals and shells. They are heavy, and that is the entire point. Chai Hu Jia Long Gu Mu Li Tang is the example I reach for, built on Long Gu, fossilized bone, and Mu Li, oyster shell. Both descend and gather. When the formula fits, the stress is still in the room. It stops running the show.
I have seen this structure inside canine formulas, including Halscion from Dr. Steve Marsden’s line.
This is the formula I mentioned at the start of the article. It will not calm every dog. In a dog who is not the right fit for it, it may flatten them instead.
The spirit is not overcharged. It is underfed.
You see Worry rather than temper. Barking that is fear and not threat. Follows you room to room. Cannot be left. Often on the thin side, often a poor sleeper, startles and then hides instead of charging.
Underneath Not too much energy. Not enough.
The tools Sweet, nourishing substances rather than heavy ones. Suan Zao Ren, Bai Zi Ren, Ye Jiao Teng, Fu Shen. In a person this is the one who laughs too high and too long and cannot stop, and everyone reads it as too much when it is the opposite.
This is the dog who goes flat on an anchoring formula. If your dog got quiet in a way that worried you, start here.
The spirit has scattered and needs calling back in.
You see A dog who cannot land anywhere. Spins. Cannot hold a down for more than a few seconds. Leaks a little when excited. Paces a circuit through the house with no destination.
Underneath Nothing is holding the center.
The tools Sour and astringent. Think about what a sour taste does to your face. You pucker, and everything comes back to the middle. Wu Wei Zi and Suan Zao Ren do that to a spirit. They call it in from wherever it went.
The spirit has sunk, and weight makes it worse.
You see Heavy. Not playing. Irritable about being handled. Sighing. Sleeping badly. Snappy in a way that is out of character.
Underneath Something closer to depression sitting under the anxious behavior.
The tools The light things. Flowers, petals, thin aromatics. He Huan Hua and Mei Gui Hua. Lifting is what calms this dog. This is also the group where Bach remedies sometimes do the entire job on their own, and I say that as someone who prescribes real herbs for a living.
The herbs named above are examples. They are there to show you the kind of substance a formula in that direction would be built from, not to hand you a recipe.
Information here is not meant for you to give herbs to your dog. It is here so that you can read the ingredient list on a formula you are considering and get a sense of what it was built to do.
One more thing worth knowing. A Chinese formula is not the sum of its parts. The herbs change each other. The research calls this synergy, meaning the combination does more than the individual herbs added together would do, and often carries less toxicity than any one of them would alone. That is why pulling a single herb out of a formula and giving it by itself rarely does what the formula does.
Before you buy anything
What was your dog bred to do?
Before I got my first Boston Terrier, I bought a book about dog breeds. This was back when you still went to a bookstore for an answer. I read it at night, and the part I kept returning to was not the coat or the size. It was the line about what each dog had been bred to do.
That is the line most of us skip now. A retriever was built to work a field until dark. A terrier was built to go into the ground after something that did not want to be found. My own breed was bred down over generations into the work of sitting beside a person, which happens to be the only job most dogs today ever get.
Here is what I see in people. We do not move. And a human who does not move has a dog who does not move, because the dog only goes as far as the leash goes.
Most family dogs are not active. Most family dogs never once get to do the thing they were built for. I cannot prove what that does to a body, but Chinese Medicine has a name for the problem. Qi that is generated and never spent has to go somewhere. It backs up, and then it comes out at the window, at the mail carrier, at four in the afternoon for no reason anyone can find.
I have been around long enough to watch enrichment turn into a product category. A snuffle mat is not wrong. It is usually standing in for the walk that did not happen. The lick mat is easier than the hike, it fits a Tuesday, and it sells beautifully. Trainers are the opposite of that. They are worth their weight in gold and there is no shortcut around one.
So before you buy anything, including anything I might recommend, try the oldest intervention there is. Take the dog out for a long time. Not around the block. Out. Then look at what is left of the anxiety.
For a lot of these dogs, two weeks of real walking is the entire treatment.
I am a dog owner before I am anything else, and I have had my share of high energy dogs. I am also a doctoral student in school full time, interning in clinic, and running a household with three dogs in it. I still take the walk. I am not asking you for anything I am not doing myself.
The part people skip
All four directions are trying to do the same thing, which is to bring a spirit back to center. They travel opposite ways to get there.
So when someone asks what herb to give an anxious dog, the honest answer is that I cannot tell them yet. I have to know which way the dog went. Otherwise I am the person handing a stone to a dog who was already on the floor.
Go back to the barking. Before you decide it is anxiety, watch it for two weeks. Is your dog hot, loud, hard to interrupt, worse at night, hunting for the cold floor? Or is your dog worried, thin, glued to your leg, quiet until you pick up your keys?
Those are two different dogs. They do not get the same bowl and they do not get the same formula.
Work with me
Bring me the dog in front of you
If you want a second set of eyes on the diet before you go looking for a formula, that is the consult I do. We start with the bowl, because the bowl is the variable you control and the one most likely to be part of the problem.
Everything on this page is for educational purposes. I am a canine nutrition consultant with TCM Dietetics training and a senior intern in a four year human acupuncture program. I am not a veterinarian. All clinical decisions rest with your veterinary team. Nothing here replaces a behavioral or medical workup for a dog whose anxiety is new, sudden, or escalating.
Hannah Zulueta obtained her Certificate in Canine Nutrition from CASI Institute. She is also studying for her Doctorate in Acupuncture, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and Herbalism from the esteemed Pacific College of Health and Medicine. If you’re as keenly interested in health for yourself, visit her website for human health: Satori Acupuncture and Herbs.
She resides in San Diego with her three dogs, Maggie, Orbit, and Mr. Higgins.
She is available for one on one consultations. She develops evidence-based recipes that meet both NRC and AAFCO nutritional standards while integrating the therapeutic food principles of Traditional Chinese Veterinary Medicine into her formulations.
Additionally, you can find her sharing free content on Instagram.
