Course Details
The Dopamine Dive
A Practical Tool for Building Confidence, Calm, and Lasting Behavior Change
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that shapes pleasure, motivation, attention, mood, and learning. As a key part of the brain’s reward system, it encourages individuals to seek out experiences that feel good. When we elevate dopamine in a thoughtful, structured way, we can support counter‑conditioning, emotional balance, and stress reduction.
For dogs, the simplest and most reliable way to boost dopamine is through eating.
When eating becomes part of a purposeful training process, we can harness dopamine to help dogs form positive associations with environments, people, and situations that once felt overwhelming.
Many dogs struggle with fear, reactivity, over‑arousal, or difficulty adjusting to new places. These challenges often leave owners feeling frustrated or unsure how to help their dogs feel safe and successful. The Dopamine Dive offers a clear, science‑based path forward. Using a structured system known as the Dopamine Box, we pair controlled eating with carefully designed training sessions to elevate dopamine levels and create positive emotional responses in challenging contexts.
This approach is helpful for dogs who are:
• Anxious in new environments
• Reactive toward people or other dogs
• Sensitive to sounds or handling
• Overly excited or prone to jumping on guests
• In need of confidence‑building and healthier coping skills
Originally popular in the bite‑sport world, the Dopamine Box is used to build confidence, desensitize to sounds, develop duration, support scent work and tracking, and teach dogs to work under pressure. Its value extends far beyond sport.
In behavior work, the Dopamine Box can:
• Create a predictable, safe framework that helps dogs regulate their emotions
• Help dogs approach challenges with more optimism
• Encourage active participation in their own learning
• Serve as a visual cue that signals safety
• Provide a reliable “start button” that gives dogs agency
• Bridge classical and operant conditioning in a seamless, dog‑centered way
By modifying the box to allow visual awareness, this tool becomes applicable to a wide range of fear‑ and reactivity‑related issues—not just sound sensitivity.
The Dopamine Dive gives owners a humane, structured plan to help their dogs build confidence, settle more easily, reduce reactivity, greet people appropriately, and develop healthier coping strategies around dogs, people, and environmental triggers.
Karen has adapted the Dopamine Box so it can be scaled from simple counter‑conditioning to incompatible‑behavior training. It even works for dogs who won’t eat in public, because the process itself helps them learn to eat comfortably in new places. The system is portable, adaptable, and easy to integrate into daily life—supporting both emotional wellness and meaningful behavior change.
Teaching Approach:
Karen’s class blends sport world precision with behavior world empathy.
She teaches The Dopamine Box not just as a mechanical exercise, but as a holistic tool that supports emotional safety, agency, and long term behavior change. Lectures will be released at the beginning of each week for that week. There will be written lectures along with video examples.
Once foundation is in place, students will get individual guidance and detailed feedback on each post. Forums will be cleared at least 12 times per week, usually twice a day, although there will be some days that they will only be cleared once due to travel schedule during this semester.
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Instructor: Karen Deeds, CDBC Karen Deeds, is a Certified Dog Behavior Consultant through the International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants (IAABC). She is the co-owner of Canine Connection in Ft. Worth, TX with her husband, Bob Deeds, a retired Federal K9 Handler on Texas Task Force I....(Click here for full bio and to view Karen's upcoming courses)
