How to be a Boss to Your Triggers!?Triggers make you reactive but not responsive

Triggers make you react unwillingly and you do want to own your reactions, don’t you!?

You can stop living this life on autopilot, feeling this sense of no direction in your reactions, and you can own everything you do or say. You can do it, so let’s see how!

Table of content:

1. What is a trigger?
2. Why triggers are there?
3. Why are you actually triggered?
4. How to identify your trigger?
5. How actually manage your triggers when you feel that you are triggered?

1.What is a trigger?

Let me explain for those who are wondering what is a “trigger”. A trigger could be a situation, word, sentence, or intonation even that calls back past emotions and makes us react now in a certain way according to the past.

For example, the trigger is:
The guilt you feel when you set a boundary
The pain or sadness you feel after rejection
The anxiety you feel when you are faced with uncertainty

They can be positive and negative. Sometimes triggers can be inherited from our parents and family. In this case, it is very difficult even to distinguish them as they have deep roots and not an obvious explanation, but it is not impossible, just harder.

When a trigger comes, you have an immediate reaction in your body. There are processes of self-protection that prepare you to fight, freeze or flight. Cortisol goes through your body and brain, adrenaline hits its heights. When this happens stress runs over and you are not able anymore to take any normal decisions or act reasonably.

You start reacting, not responding. This is the time you usually would not have clear memories or any explanation of your actions.

In order to manage them, you better understand them. So WHY, HOW?

Let’s start with your WHYs?

2. Why triggers are there?

You are a human. You have history. You have experience. You do have memories that can pop up anytime, especially when there is something familiar to the memory happening to you right now. And here comes the trigger.

Explained like this, you can see this is a natural and healthy part of any human experience.

Triggers only remind you about painful events in your lives that you need to acknowledge in yourself as well as in others. If you mock them or want to hide from them shows how deeply you want to avoid your emotions.

Running from your emotions can only attract the same but more powerful triggers.

3. Why are you actually triggered?
As I said above you have our experiences linked to painful feelings. Imagine, you reopen a wound that hasn’t had the chance to heal.

For example, you are getting angry, burst into tears, and shout when you are told what to do because in the past you have been always controlled.

And now your HOWs!

4. How to identify your trigger?

4.1. Analyze when from “OK”, you become “not OK”. What exactly did make you feel that way? What has happened? Maybe:

• a message from a friend
• a look from the neighbor
• a remark from your boss
• action/comment from your partner

4.2. Put a name on your feelings. Describe them. It will be useful to notice how you felt when you were triggered.

Maybe you felt:

• anxious
• shame
• sad
• angry
• scared

For sure the feelings above have their body reactions. Do not forget that most of the feeling occurs first in the body before we are aware of them.

For example:

• sad can feel like heaviness in your chest
• anxious can feel like extensive sweating, heart-pounding
• shame can feel like a pit in the stomach, red face

4.3. Get to the root of your triggers by answering on paper these questions:

• When in my life have I experienced something like this?
• What do I remember when I experience it?
• Are the feelings familiar to something?
• What thought did come with the emotions?
• Is there a specific event or a moment from my childhood that create similar emotions?

5. How actually manage your triggers when you feel that you are triggered?

• Take a deep sigh. It helps to slow down before rushing into reaction. If it is needed take two or twice. That calms down your neuro system.
• Change the position of your body, start walking, stretching, and have a sip of water — any action that will prevent you from the reaction. Take this time for yourself even if you need to stop the conversation, walk out of the room.
• Journal (if you can at the moment of the trigger or after) about your feelings and emotions, thoughts, and reaction. This will help you to make sense of the situation and help you be less reactive next time.
• Accept your feelings. Do not judge why you are feeling this or that. Let it pass through you. Triggers give us this opportunity to heel their root cause.

Brain Tracy has said:

The biggest enemies we have to overcome on the road to success are not the lack of ability and a lack of opportunity, but fears of failure and rejection and the doubts that they trigger.

Triggers are one of the milestones toward your self-confidence, emotional intelligence, and empathy for yourself. When you understand how your body and brain react to certain situations/experiences, you will have much more power over life.

Can you imagine that?
Who doesn’t want that?

So let’s start working!

Happy mind, happy life!

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