On Crutches, Horses, Mental Health, and Addiction

It’s been over a month since I tore my ACL. Left knee. Crutches. No riding, no running... no release. Add “mummy’s wrist” to the mix and even the basics - lifting, pushing, parenting - feel like a slow-motion obstacle course. I’ve been trying to stay gracious, but truthfully? My fuse is SO short.

In the quiet moments (those ever-increasing moments where I find myself staring into space, my mind blanked out in a form of what I can only think is "shut down") I’ve been thinking about trigger stacking. How stressors pile up, quietly and cumulatively. Pain. Frustration. Isolation. The loss of movement, of agency, of outlets. Not one big thing, but a dozen small ones that stack until something snaps.

It’s a concept we use often in equine behaviour science, and I see it constantly in my work. Most of the horses I’m called to help - especially those labelled “dangerous” or “difficult” - are reacting to a buildup of stressors: chronic pain, emotional frustration, and often, simple isolation and boredom. Their behaviour isn’t random. It’s a language. And it’s telling us something important (and so is ours!).

Lately, even my dog has joined the chorus. She’s high-energy, brilliant, and usually thrives on movement and mental stimulation. But I can’t walk her fifty times a day right now. I barely have the mental and emotional strength to scatter kibble on the lawn to distract her from whatever new hell she's unleashing on me. So she’s harassing the gardener, pestering me to play every five minutes, and inventing chaos where there was once calm. I know it’s not “bad behaviour.” It’s unmet needs. Her nervous system is doing exactly what it’s designed to do: seek outlets when the usual ones disappear.

When we lose our outlets, we reach for substitutes. And that’s where addiction creeps in - not as a moral failing, but as a coping mechanism. For me, it’s been junk food. Dopamine hits in the form of sugar and salt. A way to feel something when everything else feels stuck.

For horses that substitute often shows up as stereotypies - repetitive, seemingly purposeless behaviours like weaving, cribbing, wind-sucking, or box walking. These aren’t just quirks. They’re neurochemical survival strategies. Studies show that these behaviours trigger dopamine release, offering a fleeting sense of relief in an otherwise unstimulating or stressful environment. They are, quite literally, the drug equivalent for horses. In dogs it's chewing, digging, obsessively licking, and so forth.

It reminds me of the Rat Park experiment. In the 1970s, psychologist Bruce Alexander built a “rat paradise” - a spacious, enriched environment with toys, tunnels, and rat friends. Rats in isolation drank morphine-laced water obsessively. But rats in Rat Park? They mostly ignored it. Addiction wasn’t about the drug. It was about the cage.

That hit me hard. No one - human, horse, or dog - thrives in confinement (whether physical or mental). No one thrives in boredom.

Behaviour isn't random. Whether it’s a horse weaving in a stall, a dog chewing the furniture, or a human reaching for sugar at midnight - or something “harder” - the message is the same: I need something I don’t have.

What helps isn’t control. It’s choice (including freedom to leave a situation). It’s companionship. It’s the freedom to move, to connect, to feel safe enough to soften. That’s what I want - for myself, for the animals I work with, and for anyone feeling boxed in by circumstance.

Anxiety, depression, addiction - they’re not personal failures. They’re signals. Neurochemical alarm bells that something in our environment, our relationships, our routines, isn’t working. That something needs to shift. And when we listen - really listen - we can begin to meet those needs with compassion instead of correction.

If you’ve been feeling frayed, reactive, or just a little less like yourself lately… please know you’re not broken. You’re responding exactly as a nervous system should when it’s stacked too high.

I hope you'll join me in making space. For breath, for movement, for friendship. For not only recovery but for day-to-day living in a way that honours the whole being. Because really, popping a pill to numb our emotions or slapping on a collar to curb wind-sucking are not solutions.

#addiction #triggerstacking #mentalhealth #horsebehaviour #horses #dogbehaviour #dogs