I want to very briefly talk about the Law Of Diminishing Anxiety.
I should say to begin with that it is only a law because I say it is in my mind. However, I may be the only person on the blue planet in the solar system known as the Milky Way who considers this a law of horsemanship.
In any case, the law states that “the closer in proximity a horse’s thought and feet are, the less anxiety a horse experiences.”
Of course, the corollary of this law would be that "the further in proximity a horse’s thought and feet are, the great the anxiety."
This law is closely related in concept to the Cup Of Worry video that I posted on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYwJH1pfDrM&t=2s). If you have not viewed it I strongly suggest you do so to get a better understanding of what I am talking about.
The thing that the Law of Diminishing Anxiety adds to our understanding of working with a horse with worry is that to ensure the trouble does not overflow into an extreme behaviour that becomes unmanageable we have to ensure we don’t let the horse’s mind and its feet get too far apart.
This has a couple of practical implications for how we should consider approaching our training.
Sometimes when there is a clash of opinion between our horse and us we see it as a challenge to our position as the senior partner and make a firm stand that what we want is how it is going to go. We might soften our pressure or we might wait longer, but that is the limit of our compromise. That’s where the line is drawn as far as we are concerned. However, I believe that when our horse carries some trouble inside we should see getting to the other side of the trouble as a negotiation rather than a battle of wills. The idea of negotiating is to keep the horse’s needs and our needs close enough to avoid tipping the horse’s behaviour into the unmanageable end of the spectrum where any attempt by us to help is futile.
It is not unreasonable to compromise a little and allow the thought and the feet to come closer together that we can have a conversation with our horse that will enable us to quell some of the anxiety and make progress.
Let me offer an everyday example that many people face. Let’s say you are out on a trail ride with some friends and your friends decide to canter ahead. Your horse wants to go with the other horses, but you want him to stay back and stand for a while while you fiddle with something. The senior partner in you may decide that your horse needs to stand still and you work hard to force that on him by strong use of the reins and perhaps legs. But the Law Of Diminishing Anxiety determines that as the other horses get further away, so do your horse’s thoughts. This creates greater anxiety the further away they get. The Cup of Worry is at risk of overflowing causing extreme behaviour. However, if your horse is allowed to travel a little in the direction of the other horses (that is, in the direction it is thinking) the Law Of Diminishing Anxiety states the anxiety should be dampened to some degree than if your horse is not allowed to move. So you might allow him to walk or even trot, but direct his movement and his thought with some bending work so that he doesn’t just take off cantering. That way you can placate his anxiety enough to enable his thought to come back to you sufficiently that he can converse with you and reduce his need to canter down the trail.
One more example. Say you are riding along and your horse is frightened by something moving in a bush. Your horse’s thought is to escape and move away from the bush. But again the rider in you tells the horse to not be so stupid and you try to ride forward towards the bush. As your horse moves closer to the bush it is getting further away from its idea to flee from the bush. The Law Of Diminishing Anxiety suggests that increasing the gap between where a horse wants to be and where we are making it go will cause great anxiety and trouble. Therefore, instead of trying to force our horse to walk directly up to the bush, we might consider asking the horse to walk a wide arc around the bush to prevent a flight response that would get in the way of helping our horse. With each pass of the bush, the arc might get smaller and smaller until our horse can walk right by with very little worry.
The second component that assists in avoiding disaster when working through the Law Of Diminishing Anxiety is the idea of breaking the training into small chunks. By that I mean the level of anxiety is better managed if we ask for small steps in improvement rather than giant changes in one go. If the steps are small enough the gap between a horse’s thoughts and its feet never get too wide. A lot of wrecks occur when people feel their horse is going well and they get greedy and ask too much. This is often a mistake because before a person realizes it the gap between the feet and the thought is big enough to cause enough anxiety that results in a horse’s meltdown. It is better to let the learning occur in thin layers to avoid too big a separation between the thought and the feet resulting in a meltdown.
As I said earlier, this concept is directly related to our understanding of the cup of worry that a horse may carry. The less worry in our horse’s cup the more we can help him. In the process of trying to empty our horse’s cup of worry, I urge you to consider the Law of Diminishing Anxiety and how you can use that as a practical approach in developing a relaxed, calm horse with soft focus.