Your Animal’s Nervous System Is Responding to Yours
What chronic stress is actually doing to our dogs and cats, and why their behavior may be telling us more than we realize
We spend a lot of time trying to fix what we can see: behavior, health issues, training problems, environment.
What we don’t talk about enough is what’s happening underneath all of it, what chronic stress is actually doing to the body, not just yours, but theirs.
When a nervous system stays activated for too long, it doesn’t just create anxiety or reactivity. It starts to change the way the body functions. Chronic inflammation increases, the immune system weakens, and over time, the body has a much harder time maintaining balance.
Over time, that can start to show up in the body as the kinds of chronic issues so many animals are dealing with now like skin issues, digestive disorders, chronic inflammation, and unpredictable behaviors. We even see stress-linked conditions like Cushing’s disease, thyroid imbalance, IBD, and heart disease becoming more and more common.
These tend to be treated as separate problems, but they’re not. They’re often different expressions of the same underlying dysregulation.
But why are our animal companions carrying so much stress in the first place?
Why are we seeing so many animals struggling with anxiety, inflammation, chronic illness, and nervous system dysregulation?
Could part of it be us?
I didn’t need a study to believe this. I see it every day in my work, and I feel it in my own animals. But for people who need something more concrete, there is research that backs this up.1
There’s a study that looked at long-term stress levels in dogs and their guardians, measured through hair cortisol. Not a moment in time, but an ongoing pattern over months. What they found was that those stress levels were synchronized, not because the dogs were more active or trained more, but because they were living in the same emotional and physiological environment as their person.
In other words, your dog isn’t just responding to what’s happening around them. They’re responding to you.
What they’re measuring here is cortisol, a stress hormone. But what’s underneath that is the system that controls it. The nervous system.
When an animal companion is unsettled, anxious, reactive, or even dealing with something physical, it’s very easy to focus on what we can see. We try to fix the behavior. We try to calm the symptom.
But underneath all of that is a system that either feels safe or it doesn’t. And when that system is dysregulated, sensitivity increases, reactivity increases, and even the body itself starts struggling to settle.
The nervous system is constantly responding to the environment around it, which is why seemingly small things such as light, sound, tension in the home, and the emotional state of the people around them can make such a difference.
It’s also why I don’t separate emotional, energetic, and physical support the way most people do. They’re all working on the same system.
What makes this harder to see is that so much of this stress isn’t coming from their world alone. It’s coming from the nervous systems they’re living beside.
And that includes us.
Not in a way that blames you. In a way that reflects how deeply connected this relationship actually is.
Our animal companions look to us to understand whether their environment is safe. We provide the food, the routine, the shelter, the stability. They read our nervous systems constantly for cues about how secure the world around them is.
The problem is that so much of modern human stress has nothing to do with immediate survival. It’s deadlines, financial pressure, traffic, uncertainty, the constant pace and noise of the world we live in. But our bodies still respond as if we’re under threat.
They don’t know why your body is in fight or flight. They just know that it is. And they regulate to that.
I didn’t understand this the way I do now until I lived it with my own animals.
When I moved to the farm at the beginning of 2019, everything changed all at once. The house needed major renovations. There was constant noise, people coming in and out, things being torn up and rebuilt. At the same time, I was still working a corporate job and going into the office every day.
Maisy had always been a social, present cat in my previous home. But after the move, she disappeared into a room and stayed there. She withdrew from the other animals. She withdrew from me.
At the time, it made sense. The house was chaotic. The environment was unpredictable. We were in a new home, and big transitions can be hard for cats. They tend to adapt more slowly to change. I told myself she was just reacting to the noise and the change.
And eventually, the construction ended. The noise stopped. The house settled into itself.
But Maisy didn’t.
She stayed withdrawn.
At the time, I still didn’t fully understand what I was looking at.
Then everything shifted again with COVID and I started working from home, but the stress didn’t ease. If anything, it intensified. Long hours, constant pressure, feeling watched, feeling like I couldn’t step away even for a minute. I wasn’t sleeping. My body was in a constant state of stress, even if I didn’t fully recognize it at the time.
It wasn’t until much later, after a deeply traumatic event that shook my entire world, that something in me finally cracked open. I couldn’t numb my way through it anymore. I had to actually face what I was carrying.
That was when I started reaching for the tools I had once known, not as ideas, but as lifelines. I came back to Reiki. I sat with myself. I worked with practitioners who helped me process what I couldn’t hold on my own. I spent more time outside, reconnecting to the land and the trees. I started regulating my system in a way that was real, not performative.
And that’s when I noticed something I couldn’t ignore.
She started to come back.
Gradually, she became the cat I had known before. More present, more relaxed, more connected. Her personality came back online too, the sassy, silly, curious parts of her that had gone quiet. Nothing about the house had changed at that point. What changed was me.
And it wasn’t just Maisy.
At the end of 2019, I brought Noodle into my life, right into the middle of that chaos. I didn’t really get to know her at first. I assumed she was just a more reserved, hiding kind of cat because that’s all I saw.
But she had come into a home that didn’t feel settled. There wasn’t space for her to fully be herself yet.
As my own system started to settle, I got to actually meet her. She came to life. She blossomed. She’s now the calico of the castle. Social, engaged, always greeting everyone, checking on the other cats and dogs, making sure everyone is okay.
It wasn’t just one animal changing. It was the entire household. Some of the others shifted more subtly, but I could feel the difference across the whole space.
They weren’t just reacting to the environment. They were responding to me.
These cats taught me something profound about myself, about my home, and about the connection we share.
Looking back, they were the first signs that something in the household wasn’t settled. Not because anything was wrong with them, but because they were living inside the same field of stress that I was.
I had the knowledge. I had studied energy work. I had read the books. I had done therapy. I knew, in theory, how this worked.
But I hadn’t seen it this clearly until I lived it.
And I don’t blame myself for that. You shouldn’t either.
We learn. We grow. And with that comes awareness, and the ability to show up differently.
This is why I don’t look at behavior in isolation, or jump straight to fixing what’s visible.
Because what your animal companion is showing you is often a reflection of something deeper in the system you share.
Because once the nervous system settles, a lot of the things we’ve been trying to fix often start to soften on their own.
If you’re seeing changes in your animal that you can’t quite explain, like anxiety, reactivity, withdrawal, or sensitivity, it’s worth asking a different question.
Not just what’s wrong with them.
But what might be happening underneath, in the space you’re both living in.
And if you need help navigating that, that’s where I come in.
I love helping people and their animals find their way back to safety together.F
Roth, L. S. V. et al. Long-term stress levels are synchronized in dogs and their owners. Scientific Reports (2019).
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-43851-x