It is 8pm. Your 11 month old dog has been walked twice, and they are doing laps of the living room with a cushion in their mouth. An hour later they are still going.
Zoomies themselves are ordinary and mostly funny. The problem is the part afterwards, when there is no way back down and the evening never ends.
Why the extra walk made it worse
A tired dog and a wound-up dog look similar from the outside. Adding a third walk, a ball thrower or a game of chase raises arousal again at the exact moment you wanted it to fall.
Relaxation is trained as a behaviour in its own right, in short repeatable sets below the dog's threshold. It is not a by-product of exercise, and it does not arrive on its own because the day was long.
Three things to change today
Move the last walk 90 minutes earlier, and make the last 10 minutes of it sniffing on a loose leash rather than fetch.
Put a 20 minute chew or a scattered handful of food at the hour when the laps usually start. You are pre-empting the tip, not responding to it.
When the laps begin, stop talking, stop chasing, and open a route to somewhere dull. Excitement follows attention, and a room with nothing happening in it drains faster.
Tonight, 5 minutes, on a mat
Put a towel or mat down beside your chair while the house is already quiet, before the evening peak.
Every time your dog's feet are on it, drop a treat between their front paws without a word. Feed 10 treats over 2 minutes.
Then stop and read something for 3 minutes with your dog still on the mat. Sitting there doing nothing with you is the skill.
Behaviour change is built from management plus reinforcement. The chew is the management, the mat is the reinforcement, and the two together are what shortens the evening.
Where the settle has to happen
Practise on the mat in the quietest room first, then the room where the family sits, then the room where the laps happen. Change one thing at a time.
If your dog cannot take a treat calmly from your fingers on the mat, the room is too busy for the practice. Working below that point is the condition for learning.
Safety note
Frantic circling, pacing or spinning that arrives suddenly is not the same as zoomies. Nor is circling at odd hours, or circling with panting, licking, or no way to interrupt your dog at all. Book a veterinary examination, because sudden behaviour change warrants one and pain often presents as a change in behaviour.
What changes with age, and what does not
Some of this eases as adolescence passes. Responsiveness to your cues dips around the onset of the stage and returns later in it, and the evenings usually shorten with it.
No one can tell you which month that lands in for your dog. What you can do now is give the coming-down a place to happen, so there is something to return to.
Tonight's version, in one line: mat down at 7pm, 10 treats, then 3 quiet minutes.