My rescue dog screamed the house down every time I left. What finally fixed it wasn't training.

I'm going to admit something I've never said out loud. Eight weeks after we brought Milo home, I sat on the kitchen floor at eleven at night and looked up the rescue centre's return policy.

He was a four-year-old Poodle who'd been in three homes before ours. On paper, perfect — soft, gentle, brilliant with my sister's kids. And the second the front door clicked shut behind me, he fell apart.

The neighbour left a note. Then a second note. I started structuring my whole life around not leaving the house for more than forty minutes, which is not a life, and everyone who has been here knows exactly what I mean.

Some of it helped a little. None of it touched the actual problem.

The third behaviourist barely asked about Milo's training. She asked one thing: where does he sleep — and I mean where does he actually feel safe, not where you've put a bed?

I pointed at the flat rectangular mattress in the corner. She asked me to look at it properly. Open on all four sides. In the middle of the room. Slid about a foot every time he stepped on it. He'd never chosen to sleep on it — he slept jammed against the sofa, wedged between it and the wall, back covered.

I was sceptical too. It sounded like the kind of thing someone tells you when they've run out of ideas. But once she explained it, it was hard to argue with.

She sent me away with one instruction: get him something enclosed, warm and non-slip, and put it where he already tries to sleep. Not where it looks tidy. I compared about a dozen — most were flat, half were the wrong shape, and the ones that weren't were £150 upwards. I ended up on Google and came across the KovePaws CalmNest and I ordered one in Champagne, size M.

He ignored it. Completely. I want to be straight with you about that, because every review I read made it sound instant. I put one of my old t-shirts in it, moved it to the gap by the sofa where he actually slept, and went to bed slightly annoyed with myself.

At about half two in the morning I came down for water and he was in it. Curled, chin on the rim, out cold. He didn't even lift his head.

The pacing stopped first. That was the thing I noticed before anything else — the eight steps back and forth across the living room just weren't happening in the evenings any more. He'd take himself to the bed at around nine and stay there.

I checked the camera after a Tesco run. Nine minutes of alert-but-quiet at the door, then he went to the bed and stayed there for the remaining fifty. No howling. Nothing chewed. That was the first time in eight months I'd seen that.

What changed was the baseline. He had somewhere to go. Before, when he got stressed, there was nowhere for that to land — so it came out through the skirting board and the front door.

This won't help every dog. It helps a very specific kind. If you're nodding at three or more of these, it's worth trying.

I nearly ordered a size too small. Measure your dog nose-to-tail while they're curled up, then add at least 10cm. If they sleep stretched out rather than curled, size up again — the rim only works if they can rest against it without hanging off the edge.

Not sure which problem you're actually solving? There's a short two-minute quiz that points you at the right thing — it's how I worked out I also needed something for the car, which is a whole other story.