Our puppy doesn‘t sleep outside her crate

Hi everyone!

Our Border Collie mix is currently 7 months old. She’s still very playful, but from month to month she’s becoming more reasonable and mature. She sleeps through the night since week one, which is great.

During the day, our routine usually looks like this: she’s awake for about an hour, then we put her in her crate to sleep. She usually sleeps around 2 hours and lets us know when she’s awake again. That rhythm works well overall.

The thing is: she only sleeps in her crate. Outside of it, she just can’t seem to properly relax or nap.

She’ll only settle on her bed if she has something to chew on. If she doesn’t have a chew, she destroys the bed. Biting people isn’t an issue anymore – but she just doesn’t know how to “do nothing” outside the crate.

She has accepted the crate in the sense that once one paw is inside, she walks all the way to the back and waits calmly for me to close the door. But she will not go in on her own, not even for treats. I always have to carry her to it.

She also only truly relaxes in there if she’s alone. We’re currently working on getting her used to sleeping in daylight, and that’s going okay. But if someone is in the room, she really wants to get up and join them.

Some days she’s the sweetest dog in the world. Other days she’s a tiny hyperactive monster. I assume that’s normal adolescence?

We’ve researched the breed and make sure she gets plenty of mental stimulation. But this doesn’t change whether we’ve done a lot of mental/physical exercise or barely any at all.

It’s not a huge disaster, but we would really love for her to be around us freely during the day without being “confined.”

Does it get better? Or is there something we should be doing differently?

Thank you really much in Advance and sorry for this Long Text!