Puppy separation anxiety, clinginess, distress when briefly alone, crying or howling the moment you leave the room, is extremely common, and it responds well to structured exposure during the socialisation window, roughly 3 to 16 weeks. Gradual, positive introductions to new people, sounds, surfaces, and short periods alone are the highest-leverage intervention available at that age, and they're free. A supplement isn't the first tool here; training is.
Signs it's more than settling in
Some fussing in the first few nights home is normal. Separation anxiety looks different: it happens specifically when your puppy is alone, not when they're simply excluded from a room while you're still in the house, and it tends to start within minutes of you leaving rather than build slowly out of boredom. Look for barking or howling that doesn't taper off, destructive chewing concentrated around doors and windows, house soiling in a puppy who's otherwise reliably toilet trained, pacing, drooling, or attempts to escape a crate or room. One or two of these on a bad day isn't unusual. A consistent pattern every time you leave is the thing worth addressing directly.
Why it develops
Puppies are wired to stay close to their group, so a jump from constant company to being alone for hours is a big ask if it happens too fast. The most common trigger is timeline, not temperament: two weeks of a puppy never being left, then a full working day alone with no warm-up in between. Big, emotional departures and arrivals make it worse, since they teach a puppy that your leaving is a significant event worth reacting to. Puppies with no prior experience of a crate or a settled "home base," and those recently rehomed or adopted, tend to find alone time harder at first, which is expected rather than a sign anything has gone wrong.
Building alone time gradually
The method that actually works is systematic and slow: start with your puppy settled in a comfortable space, step into another room for a few seconds, and return before any distress starts. Repeat this often, extending the duration in small increments, seconds to a couple of minutes, minutes to ten, only once the previous step is calm. Keep departures and returns low-key; no big goodbye, no excited hello. Practise your "leaving" cues, picking up keys, putting on shoes, without actually leaving, so they stop predicting distress on their own. Pair alone time with something to do, a stuffed chew or a snuffle mat, so being alone gets associated with something good rather than just absence. Building up to a full working day away should take weeks, not days.
Mistakes that slow things down
The most common one is skipping the middle steps: going from always-together straight to a full day alone because a puppy seemed fine for twenty minutes. Emotionally loaded departures and reunions are another, since the more dramatic the goodbye, the more there is to react to. Punishing anxious behaviour after the fact, chewed skirting boards, an accident on the floor, doesn't help either; a puppy can't connect a scolding to something that happened while you were out, so it just adds a second stressor on top of the first.
When to get extra help
If distress hasn't eased after several weeks of consistent, gradual exposure, or if it's severe from the start, constant panic, self-injury, complete refusal to settle even briefly, that's worth a conversation with a vet or a certified trainer rather than pushing through alone. It's a more common problem than it feels like in the moment, and earlier intervention tends to be easier than addressing an established pattern later. If you're past the puppy stage and still working through this, our guide to dog separation anxiety in adult dogs covers the same principles at a later stage of a dog's life.
Where BroonoCalm fits in
Training is the main lever here, before and after any product enters the picture. Calm is Broono's calming supplement, given as a soft chew, and it's suitable for dogs from six months old, the same starting point as the rest of the Broono range. Six months is roughly when a puppy's digestive system, metabolism, and bodyweight trajectory have settled enough to match the assumptions the formula was calculated against; below that age, a puppy is changing too quickly, week to week, for a fixed adult-style formula to track their needs reliably. The ingredients aren't unsafe for a younger puppy; the formula simply hasn't been calibrated for one yet.
From six months, Calm combines L-theanine from green tea, magnesium, passionflower, and L-tryptophan to support a calmer nervous system without sedating your dog. If anxiety is still present once your puppy reaches that age, the chew and continued exposure work sit side by side. Our health assessment can help if you're unsure which product fits your dog's stage. If anxiety is severe at any age, that's a sign to talk to a vet now rather than wait for a milestone birthday.
