Only as long as it stays calm — for many dogs that is seconds, not minutes. Measured onset is a mean of 3.25 minutes to distress vocalisation and 7.13 minutes to destruction, so a first session of "just five minutes" is already too long.
Threshold means the level at which a dog can cope with a specific stimulus. One dog's threshold for being alone might be five minutes; after five minutes, the symptoms start. Staying under threshold means the dog is never left alone longer than that. That is the entire governing rule.
The technique underneath it is systematic desensitisation: exposure to mild versions of the feared thing that will not elicit anxiety, followed by gradual increases. Developed for dogs in the 1960s and 1970s, it is the same approach used for human phobias, and it has been found to reduce or eliminate separation-related behaviour problems.
Read the conditional. The exposure has to be mild enough that it does not produce anxiety. An exposure that produces anxiety is not a smaller dose of the same treatment — it is a different event with a different result.
Exposure at full intensity has a name: flooding. It is not a stricter version of desensitisation. Flooding can worsen the dog's perception of the stimulus and increase the flight or fear response; in worse cases the dog moves to a fight response and reacts wildly, which is where serious injuries come from.
Every workday you leave for eight hours while training four-second absences in the evening, you are running both procedures on the same dog. One lasts four seconds. The other lasts eight hours. This is the most common reason people report that desensitisation "didn't work" — the protocol was never running.
Latency to problem behaviour has been measured at means of 3.25 minutes for vocalisation and 7.13 minutes for destruction, which is why the initial separation has to be short enough that your absence never gets associated with the problem behaviour.
Most anxious responses occur within the first 40 minutes alone. So the bulk of the work is building up to 40-minute absences, increasing by a few seconds a session, or every couple of sessions, depending on what the dog tolerates at that level.
A few seconds per session sounds absurd until you compare it with the alternative: months of the dog rehearsing panic while you wait for it to grow out of it.
Why Your Dog Panics When You Leave is a 53-page guide in nine lessons, with every claim sourced in the margin of the page it sits on: finding your dog's threshold and protecting it, the training absence from one second upward, what crates and second dogs and bark collars actually do, and where medication fits. It comes with the Absence Ladder spreadsheet you log each departure in, and the owners' community.
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