Senior dog
Old dogs who become restless, confused or anxious in the late afternoon and evening are often experiencing sundowning. Here's what's happening, why, and what genuinely helps.
Your old dog has been fine all day. He's been pottering around the kitchen, settling in his bed, asking for his lunch on time. Then, somewhere between four and six in the evening, something shifts. He gets up. He paces. He stares into the corner of the room. He whines for no apparent reason. By bedtime he's wired, restless, sometimes circling the rug for fifteen minutes before he can settle.
This isn't bad behaviour. It isn't stubbornness. It's almost certainly a thing that has a name — sundowning — and it's one of the more common late-life patterns in senior dogs.
This guide is what to do about it. The short version: it's manageable, often without medication, sometimes with. The full version is below.
Three things to know up front:
The classic pattern: the dog has a normal morning and afternoon, then in the late afternoon or evening becomes:
Some dogs only show one or two of these. Some show all of them. The defining feature is the time of day — symptoms ramp up in the late afternoon and through the evening, and often peak around bedtime.
Many owners describe it as "her evenings have got difficult" or "he's a different dog after about five." That phrasing is a strong tell.
Sundowning in dogs has the same fundamental cause as sundowning in humans with dementia: as the brain starts to struggle, the cumulative cognitive load of the day catches up. By evening the dog has fewer reserves, lower tolerance, and (in dogs with declining vision) less ability to use the dimming environment to orient themselves.
Three specific drivers stack up:
The biggest single cause. Around 14–35% of dogs over 8 have some degree of cognitive dysfunction, rising to over 60% by age 15. Sundowning is one of the most common ways it presents. A dog showing sundowning behaviour over weeks should have a vet conversation about cognitive dysfunction specifically — see our CCD early signs guide for the full DISHAA framework vets use.
Older dogs often lose hearing and vision gradually. During the day there's enough light, sound, and routine activity to orient them. As the light fades and the household quietens down, those orientation cues drop. The dog finds it harder to navigate, harder to know where their people are, harder to feel grounded. Anxiety follows.
Pain doesn't peak in the evening for everyone, but for many dogs the day's accumulated movement catches up. They settle stiffly, they can't get comfortable, they get up and try a different bed, then another. What looks like cognitive sundowning is sometimes pain-driven restlessness — and pain medication (see our Galliprant vs Librela vs Onsior comparison) often resolves it within a week.
A useful question to ask your vet: "Could this be a pain pattern rather than a cognitive one?" The answer changes the treatment direction completely.
Most dogs with sundowning improve with environmental and routine changes alone. Try these in roughly this order.
The single most under-used intervention. As the sun starts to go down, turn on lamps and overhead lights in the rooms the dog uses. Don't dim them until the dog is settled for the night.
The reason: many sundowning dogs are partly responding to fading light cues. The brain misreads the change in light as something to be wary of. Bright, even indoor lighting maintains the daytime cue and many dogs settle visibly better.
This sounds too simple. It works.
Sundowning dogs do markedly better with predictable evenings. Same dinner time. Same toilet trip after dinner. Same wind-down routine in the same order. Same bed in the same place.
Avoid moving furniture. Avoid rearranging the kitchen. Avoid having unfamiliar people in the house in the evening if you can help it. The dog is using the routine to orient themselves; small changes that wouldn't have bothered them three years ago now create disorientation.
If you have to break routine (a friend visits, you're out for the evening), have someone the dog knows take care of the wind-down. Routine + familiar person = mostly OK. New routine + new person = bad evening.
A late-morning or early-afternoon walk that's a bit longer than usual takes the edge off evening restlessness for many dogs. It's not exhaustion-as-cure — old dogs shouldn't be exhausted — but a properly satisfied dog tends to settle better.
Avoid walks late in the day if your dog gets confused easily; the unfamiliar fading-light environment can make things worse.
A specific place — usually their bed, ideally in the room where the family naturally is in the evening — that you build into a wind-down ritual. Take the dog there at the same time each evening. Sit with them for five minutes. A small treat. Calm voice. Maybe a chew.
Over a few weeks this becomes a strong cue. The dog associates the time + place + ritual with settling, and the cognitive load of "what should I be doing right now?" drops away.
Adaptil is a synthetic pheromone (mimicking the calming pheromone a mother dog releases) that comes as a plug-in diffuser. Evidence is mixed but a meaningful subset of dogs respond noticeably. Cheap to try (around £25 for a starter kit, £15 a month for refills), zero side effects, available without prescription. Worth a four-to-six-week trial.
A short food puzzle (snuffle mat, slow feeder, lick mat with a smear of pet-safe paste) given at the start of the witching hour does two things: it occupies the brain at exactly the time it's most likely to spiral, and it gives the dog a positive, settling task. Many dogs come out the other side of a 15-minute lick mat noticeably calmer.
If environment and routine changes don't fully resolve the pattern, medication options exist. All require a vet conversation.
A mild-to-moderate anti-anxiety medication, usually given as needed in the late afternoon. Helpful for dogs whose sundowning is mostly anxious. Cheap (£18–£25/month at UK practices, less with a written prescription). Side effects are uncommon and usually mild.
A daily medication used specifically for canine cognitive dysfunction. About 30% of dogs show clear improvement, another 30% some improvement. Worth a 2–3 month trial if cognitive dysfunction is the primary driver. Around £40–£60/month.
Often used in combination with trazodone for dogs whose evenings are particularly difficult. Helps with sleep onset and pain that's contributing to restlessness.
A milder option, available over the counter, that some dogs respond to. Worth trying before stronger options for milder cases. Discuss dosing with your vet — UK doses for dogs are different from human doses.
If pain is driving the restlessness, the right answer is the right pain medication, not anxiety medication. Worth ruling out specifically. See Signs your senior dog might be in pain.
A few things have decent evidence:
None of these are magic. They're "incremental help over months" rather than "noticeable difference in a week." Worth incorporating but not worth waiting for them before doing the routine and environment changes that work faster.
Sundowning often arrives alongside other signs of cognitive decline — getting lost in the house, sleep flipped (more in the day, less at night), reduced engagement with the family, occasional house soiling. Together these add up to a working diagnosis of canine cognitive dysfunction.
The CCD diagnosis is not a death sentence. With diet, supplements, medication, and routine modifications, many dogs live happily for 2–4 more years from first signs. But it's the moment to start tracking quality of life more deliberately — see the HHHHHMM scale — so the inevitable later conversations have actual data behind them.
If your dog has been showing late-day restlessness for two or more weeks:
Sundowning is hard on everyone. The dog's evening distress wakes the household. The pacing is impossible to ignore. Many couples we've spoken to describe months of patchy sleep before the dog's situation gets a name and a plan.
Two things matter for the household:
Talk to each other about it. Don't let one person carry the night-time burden silently. Take turns settling the dog. Agree what counts as "this is OK" vs "this needs the vet."
Loop in the people who help with the dog. Dog walker, daycare, family who visit. They should know the dog has changed and what helps. A consistent calm response across everyone matters more than perfect handling from any one person.
Is sundowning in dogs the same as dementia? Not exactly the same, but they're closely related. Sundowning is a behavioural pattern; canine cognitive dysfunction is the underlying condition. Most dogs with sundowning have at least early-stage CCD. Some have other drivers (pain, sensory loss) without dementia.
Can sundowning be reversed? Not really, but it can be substantially reduced. The environmental and routine changes that help most dogs hold for years. Medication, when needed, often takes the edge off enough that the household can get a full night's sleep.
Is it cruel to keep a dog with bad sundowning? No. Sundowning itself isn't a welfare emergency — it's stressful for the dog in the moment but doesn't compromise their broader quality of life if managed. Worth bringing the HHHHHMM framework into the conversation if you're starting to wonder, but a sundowning dog with otherwise good days isn't a dog whose time is up.
My dog only shows symptoms in winter. Why? Almost certainly the light. Shorter daylight hours mean the dimming-light cue arrives earlier and more sharply. Keep the indoor lights up earlier and brighter through autumn and winter and many dogs improve.
At what age does this typically start? Most owners notice it from age 9–10 onwards, sometimes earlier in giant breeds (7–8) and later in small breeds (11–12). Age alone isn't a diagnosis — many older dogs never sundown — but it's a red flag pattern worth taking seriously when it appears.
Superkin tracks the daily patterns that mark sundowning before they become a household problem — sleep disruption, evening restlessness, changes in settling time. The Sunday plan flags drift in the categories that matter, so when you walk into the vet you have a concrete two-week pattern to discuss, not a vague "she's been a bit different lately." For households where one person has been carrying the night burden alone, the shared visibility helps the rest of the family see what's actually happening.
Related guides:
Last updated 25 May 2026. This guide is general information and not a substitute for veterinary care. If your dog is showing persistent late-day distress, please speak to your vet.
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