u/Green_Twist6596

I adopted him nearly a year ago now, hes around 3 years old at this point and I'm saving up for a bigger vivarium for him.

I know that it entirely depends on their personality, but I was wondering if there was a way that I could gently train him to be more comfortable? he's always been really skittish with everything and everyone, even when he wants to get out at night like in the video, I have to open it and stay completely still for him to even consider coming out, and if j move then he just goes completely still like in the video. when I take him out, hes really scared for the first few minutes, curls up into a ball and his heart is pounding. he's never bitten anyone, never even hissed I dont think, hes just so terrified and i feel so bad taking him out of the vivarium but i dont want him to just stay in there all of the time. after a few minutes of being outside of his vivarium I think he calms down. he doesn't react that much to touching, his tongue flicks are more relaxed and his heart stop pounding, but even then, if I put him on the floor to explore and then I touch him, he gets so scared he starts writhing. the breeder I got him from said she had many snakes, so maybe he wasn't very socialised?

two days ago I completely changed their substrate to a mix of coco coir and BAKED forest soil that I bought from a small business (they sterilise it but I decided to bake it at home myself just to be sure). their old substrate had an infestation of HUNDREDS of these small yellow to red spiders with big butts (money spiders maybe?) that just kept making eggs and creating more spiders. the soil was unsalvageable, there was too much of it to sterilise so we just decided to double bag, tape it and throw it into household waste so that it goes to a landfill (precautions because a few months ago one of my snails layed eggs and i didnt notice until they had hatched and i kept finding baby snails in the soil). my jade GALS is a lot smaller than my wildtype, and it worries me because it's shell doesn't look as healthy as the other one's either. I'm monitoring it but im scared that I'm doing something wrong, so stressing them out like this by moving them to completely new soil makes me worried that its going to make it worse.