Train Your Service Dog in a Reliable Behavior Interruption Task (e.g., Self-Injury, Compulsions, Overeating)

Content Advisory: This article references self-harm, disordered eating, and other mental health struggles.

Recently, I was asked whether a service dog can be trained to help with bulimia or other problem behaviors. Yes, it is possible to train your dog to interrupt negative habits or compulsions. This post covers not just how, but whether to train your dog in a behavior interruption task.

Are You & Your Dog Ready to Train an Alert?

Warnings and Disclaimers

I am not a medical or mental health professional. This article is for informational purposes only and should not take the place of mental health care by a licensed practitioner. All examples are theoretical and should not be viewed as medical advice or recommendations.

Note: “Self-injury” in this context means repeated or habitual self-directed behaviors like scratching, hair pulling, skin picking, etc. It does NOT refer to suicidal behavior or serious self-harm. If you’re feeling suicidal, please call 988 for a suicide or crisis hotline or contact your mental health provider. If you are injured and need medical care, please call 911 or go to the emergency department of your nearest hospital.

Before training this task, I ensure that my client is working with a therapist. I may sometimes check with their therapist or doctor that they’re confident that our client is ready to involve their dog in their repetitive behavior.

Depending on the nature of the task, I usually advise waiting until your dog is at least a year old. For more emotionally charged situations, I advise waiting until the dog has reached social maturity at two years old.

Your Dog is Your “Back Up”

A service dog should always be a “backup plan” for alerting to symptoms, not a first-line treatment. We would only train a diabetes alert dog for someone who was already using all available medical tools to keep their blood glucose controlled. Otherwise the dog might be alerting all day, every day. For psychological and behavior disorders, too, train your service dog to alert once all other remedies and supports are in place.

This is for your sake as well as your dog’s. Your dog relies on you for all their basic needs. While our dogs are smart, loving, and intuitive, they are still dogs. They do not have the abilities or insight of mental health professionals. If we involve our dogs before we’re ready for them to intervene, it can be very upsetting for our dogs, bad for our relationship with them, and therefore also trigger guilt and shame in ourselves — which will likely further entrench our negative behaviors.

It’s essential that you have the supports in place and have done the necessary healing work before involving your dog in your mental health recovery. You must understand why you perform this behavior, what you want to do instead, AND you must have done sufficient healing that an alert will be helpful, not harmful.

Here are some questions to ask yourself and discuss with your healthcare team before you decide to train your dog in a behavior interruption task.

Why Do I Perform this Behavior?

If it’s trauma related, have you done the necessary healing that will allow you to be present and calm when your dog interrupts you? If your dog interrupts you when you’re in this state, how will you feel? If you might feel upset, you’re not ready to train this task yet. If you train your dog to interrupt you, you want to feel grateful and relieved. If you burst into tears, yell, or lock yourself in the bathroom, you will send confusing and upsetting messages to your dog which will counteract their training.

If this is a “brain wiring” issue (such as OCD), have you already maxed out other effective strategies for controlling or reducing this behavior?

If this is a self-soothing behavior (such as overeating), are you truly ready to leave it behind? Do you have a replacement behavior that will enable you to feel safe and comforted instead? Will you feel happy and relieved to have your dog interrupt, or will you find ways to start avoiding your dog when you engage in the behavior?

Preparing to Train

When you and your healthcare team feel confident that training your dog to interrupt you will benefit you and be an enjoyable and healthy task for your dog, it’s time to start “thinking like a dog.”

What Does Your “Problem” Habit Look Like?

Humans use words that have a lot of meaning for us, but are not descriptive. For example, if you ask me to help you train your dog to help with bulimia, I would first ask which behaviors you want to interrupt. What does “bulimia” look like to your dog? Standing and eating over the trash can? Running on the treadmill for three hours? Kneeling in front of the toilet? 

What about skin picking or hair pulling: Which hand do you use? Where do you do it? Do you sit, stand, or lie down? You are going to have to pretend to engage in this habit to train the dog to it, so we need a clear picture of what the behavior looks like.

Select (& Train) Your “Good” Habit

What replacement behavior do you want to do instead of your current habit? Undesirable behaviors, while they may feel like a problem you want to change, also fill a psychological need. It is not helpful for the dog to interrupt your behavior if you don’t have a healthy alternative. While I occasionally have a client who does not need a replacement behavior — they are engaging in a behavior with no awareness (e.g., biting nails, scratching arms) and once interrupted, they already have alternate coping strategies in place — in most cases we need another outlet. Work with a therapist to determine the best alternative behavior.

In some cases, you may not need the dog to help you perform the alternative behavior. For example, if your alternative for hair pulling is knitting, you may only need your dog to nudge you. Then you go pick up your knitting on your own.

Most of our clients want to involve their dog in their alternative behavior. In this case, we would first train the dog to perform the alternative behavior. For example, if the alternative behavior is going for a walk, we might train the dog to bring you their leash. If you want to pet the dog instead of picking your skin, we might train the dog to push their head under your hand. If you want to call your OA sponsor instead of bingeing, the dog could hit a button that says, “Call your sponsor!”

Note: If you involve your dog in your alternative behavior, it should be something the dog really enjoys. If your dog doesn’t love cuddling with you in the warm bed, don’t select that as your alternative behavior. Your dog will stop alerting you.

If you only need an alert, select a behavior that will get your attention but that you won’t confuse with another of your dog’s tricks or habits. Typical alerts include pawing your leg, nudging your hand or leg, or jumping onto the bed or couch (if the behavior occurs when you’re lying down).

Condition to Your Compulsive Behavior

Once the desirable behavior is trained, condition your dog to your undesirable habit. This involves pretending to engage in the unwanted behavior, then generously rewarding your dog. Repeat this in every permutation of your habit.

CAUTION: Be thoughtful about which behavioral cues you choose. Remember that your dog will generalize to alert to every possible form this behavior will take, everywhere, every time. If you ever engage in this behavior for real, from now on you must also throw your dog a treat party when you do.

Eventually, when your dog sees you perform this behavior (or pretend to), they will rush up to you, eagerly wagging their tails and anticipating a treat.

For example, Carol often scratched her arm unthinkingly while she watched TV or talked on the phone. By the time she realized she was doing it, her arm might be bleeding. She usually scratched her left forearm with her right hand, but she started out gently picking at her hand, before working her way up to her wrist, and eventually scratching hard on her arm. We started with training her dog, Finn, to notice when Carol was vigorously scratching her left arm with her right hand. When he was attuned to that, she trained him to notice when she scratched her right arm with her left hand. A video from these early training sessions is below.

Then, she reduced the obviousness of the cue, scratching lightly, then scratching her wrist, then just gently picking at her hand. When he was completely reliable with all of those cues, she did the same training standing, sitting, lying down, in every room of her house, and then eventually outdoors and in public.

Can I train to interrupt multiple behaviors?

It’s very common for a condition to result in multiple habits. For example, someone with OCD might want their dog to interrupt checking the door locks as well as checking the stove burners. Or someone who pulls the hair on the top of their head might also pick at their fingernails.

While you can train your dog to alert to multiple behaviors (cues), it generally works best to train your dog to interrupt one behavior first. Dogs that are trained to too many cues early in the process tend to think that almost anything can be the behavior they should interrupt. If you train multiple cues at once, your dog is likely to get confused.

Train your dog through the entire process for that behavior first before starting on a second behavior. Once your dog is fluent and reliable in interrupting one behavior, training them that another cue also applies will be faster and easier.

Train Your Alert or Alternative Behavior

In most cases, the alternative behavior itself can act as an alert. The dog brings you their leash while you’re engaging in your problem behavior, which signals you to take them for a walk. Your dog pushes their head under your hand, which reminds you to pet the dog instead.

Carol trained Finn to jump up, putting his front paws on her leg, as his alert when she scratched herself. She used the cue “Noodge” for this skill.

Prevent False Alerts with Stimulus Control

Usually, the hardest part of the training process is getting the alert under stimulus control. This means we train the dog to alert us every time they perceive the cue (you engaging in your bad habit). But we also need to make sure we train our dogs never to alert when we’re NOT doing the behavior, including when we’re engaging in a behavior that might look similar to them.

We get the behavior under stimulus control BEFORE we chain the alert to the handler’s compulsive behavior. Without this training, you end up with a dog who alerts when you’re not engaging in the undesirable habit. Achieving stimulus control is an important topic for another time!

Release Cue

Another key skill to train before you train your dog to alert you to one of your behaviors is the release cue. This is the cue that tells your dog to STOP alerting. This is very important so that your dog doesn’t keep alerting you to a behavior that you can’t or don’t need to stop. For example, if you’re having a meal with a friend, not engaging in compulsive eating, or if you scratch at a mosquito bite, not repetitive scratch yourself.

It’s also important because if you know you’re engaging in the behavior, but you can’t stop (for whatever reason), you don’t want your dog to continue alerting you. That will just increase anxiety for you and your dog.

Chain Them Together

Once you’ve trained the alternative or alert behavior and conditioned your dog to notice whenever you engage in your unhealthy habit, you’re ready to chain them together. Now, pretend to perform your unwanted behavior, cue your dog to perform their alert, then mark and reward. Repeat many times and in all locations and permutations.

Why Train the Alternative Behavior Before the Interruption?

It’s important NOT to condition your dog to your unwanted habit until you have fully trained your alternative habit. I learned this the hard way when I was working with a client who picked at her skin when she was anxious. She wanted her Chihuahua mix to jump into her lap so she could pet her instead of picking at her own skin. I thought that training the dog to jump into her lap would be quick and easy, and that conditioning her dog to notice skin picking would take a lot of time.

Instead, jumping into her lap turned out to be much harder than we expected. Additionally, this dog was a smart and observant dog. She soon ran over to her handler whenever she saw her picking in real life and stared at her unblinkingly. The client became very self-conscious, but didn’t want to hamper the dog’s training by not rewarding her. She ended up hiding in her closet so she could skin-pick in peace!

Training your dog to interrupt your unwanted habits is usually very doable. However, it requires careful planning and preparation, and a slow, thoughtful, progression.

Unintended Benefits

Sometimes, this type of training includes an extra bonus. After a few months of dedicated training, Carol successfully trained Finn to alert her to the slightest scratching. However, because Carol had spent so much time thinking about and being aware of her scratching, by the time Finn was trained to alert her, she had virtually stopped her unconscious scratching! She didn’t think she needed his help anymore. But we both agreed that having him as a backup was reassuring, in case she had a lapse.

Would you like help to train your dog to interrupt an unwanted behavior? We can help! To start with service dog foundations, register for our PEARL DISC class. If you’re ready to train tasks, including behavior interruption, we can help with online private lessons. Get in touch!

Thank you to Andrew Lapin, M.S., M.A., LMHC/LPC for checking this article from a mental health clinician’s perspective. Any errors or omissions belong to the author and do not reflect on Andrew!