What Might Your Dog Be Helping You Notice
On highly sensitive dogs, hypervigilance, and what we don't always see in ourselves.
There are mornings I wake up anxious before I even know why.
Nothing on the calendar. Nothing wrong in the house. Just a hum already running underneath me before my feet hit the floor. And then I open the news, or scroll for thirty seconds, and there it is. The thing I was already feeling before I had a reason to feel it.
I don’t think that’s a coincidence anymore.
A lot of what I’m seeing in dogs and cats right now feels like a reflection of what’s happening in us. Not in every case, but enough that I can’t ignore it. People are stressed in a way that feels different than it used to. Pushed past their limits more often than not. Anxiety and depression showing up at levels I don’t think we’ve seen in a long time. And our animals live inside that with us.
They sleep in our beds. They sit in our offices while we work. They lie at our feet while we scroll. One minute we’re watching something funny or peaceful, and the next we’re absorbing outrage, tragedy, conflict, or fear. Our nervous systems are constantly being asked to take in more than they were designed for, and our animals are right there with us while it’s happening.
I realize now that what I’m feeling isn’t entirely personal. It’s not just my household. It’s not just my life. It's the collective density of what we're all carrying right now, our animals included. We are all connected.
Enough stressed, grieving, overwhelmed nervous systems create an atmosphere of their own. The energy is dense right now, and the most highly sensitive among us, human and animal alike, often seem to feel it first.
When I talk about highly sensitive dogs, I’m not simply talking about dogs who struggle with fireworks or thunderstorms.
Highly sensitive dogs tend to take in more information from their environment. They notice subtle changes, react more strongly to stimulation, and become overwhelmed more quickly when too much is happening at once.
The world is louder for them.
If you read last week’s piece, you already know Piper. The hypervigilant one. What I didn’t tell you is that she came into my life at the exact moment I needed someone to show me what hypervigilance actually looked like from the outside.
I didn't realize at the time that I was hypervigilant too. I just thought I was a person who startled easily. If you walked up behind me a little too quietly, I’d jump clean out of my chair, hand on my chest, the whole production. I genuinely thought that was just how I was wired. I never considered how years of stress and living in fight or flight had rewired my nervous system.
The funny thing is, I wasn’t ignoring my healing. I was in therapy. I was studying energy work. I was doing all of the things I thought were supposed to help.
But I’d spent years moving from one stressful event to the next. First came COVID. Then a significant personal loss that I was still carrying. Then Hurricane Ian.
A week after the storm, Piper and Wishbone came into my life.
By then, being constantly alert didn’t feel unusual anymore.
It just felt normal.
Then I watched Piper do the exact same thing, over and over, at things that weren’t actually threats. The ice maker dropping a tray of ice. Dishes clanking as I unloaded the dishwasher. A door closing unexpectedly. Someone walking through the house a little too quickly.
Ordinary moments that most dogs would barely notice seemed to register immediately in her nervous system.
And somewhere in there I started to see it.
Not that Piper wasn’t hypervigilant. She was.
It’s that I was too.
For the first time, I could see my own nervous system reflected back to me.
That’s the part nobody tells you about working with highly sensitive animals. They don’t come to be fixed. They come to show you something you couldn’t see in yourself yet.
When I talk about animals mirroring us, I don’t mean everything they’re experiencing belongs to us. Sometimes they’re responding to their own experiences. Sometimes they’re reacting to the environment around them. And sometimes they’re reflecting something happening in the household, the community, or even the broader human collective that we haven’t fully recognized yet.
That’s part of why guilt has never felt useful to me in this conversation.
Curiosity is.
I can’t heal the whole world. You can’t either. But I can start with myself, and so can you. That’s not a cop out. It’s the only part of this that’s actually in our hands.
Piper still paces by the back door sometimes. It looks like she needs to go outside. She doesn’t. She paces when my own stress is unraveling faster than I’ve noticed it. She’s my early warning system. She is communicating with me. Piper is trying to take care of me, not the other way around.
I’ll catch myself mid-task, moving too fast, breathing too shallow, and there she is at the door. Some days I take the hint and go do my breathing. Some days I don’t catch it until later. But I catch it more than I used to. That’s the difference.
Last week I told you about the pen that rolled off my desk. How she bolted downstairs, then came back up a few seconds later, all wiggly, already shaking it off. What struck me later wasn’t that she reacted. It was how quickly she recovered.
The same dog who used to live entirely inside her nervous system now finds her way back to herself in under a minute. That’s not a small thing.
It’s easy to focus on what’s still difficult and miss how far we’ve come. Progress isn’t a straight line. There are good days and harder days. Moments when old patterns show up again.
But when I look at Piper today, what I notice isn’t the reaction.
It’s the recovery.
I believe what I'm witnessing in Piper, in the dogs and cats I work with, and in myself is a mirror of the collective state we're all in right now. They're showing us that, if we're willing to look.
I’m not saying any of this to give you a five step plan. I don’t actually think that’s what’s needed here. I think what’s needed is permission to notice that the heaviness you’re carrying isn’t only yours, and it isn’t only your dog’s or your cat’s either. It’s moving through all of us right now, denser than usual, and none of us are required to fix the whole field.
We’re only required to tend our own corner of it.
So if you wake up anxious before you know why, you’re not broken and neither are they. Start there. Breathe there. Let your animal show you what you haven’t noticed in yourself yet.
That’s usually where the real work begins anyway.