Every day, we come across things that really get under our skin. It could be a cryptic "We should talk..." message, someone cutting us off in traffic, or even just some criticism. These incidents are called triggers, and they happen to all of us. But guess what? Learning about and managing your reaction to these triggers can be your greatest ticket to personal growth.
In this blog post, we'll explore triggers - what they are, why they produce such a big reaction in us, how they affect us, and how to handle them on the spot. Plus, we'll look at addressing their deeper causes for lasting change. So let‘s dive in and begin learning how you control what stresses you!
The Triggering Experience
Triggers are those incidents when something seemingly insignificant sets off an intense emotional reaction within us. Even in the cases where the incident is not so insignificant, if you later notice that your reaction to the situation might have been out of proportion with what was actually happening, then you were triggered. These triggers evoke a cascade of emotions, thoughts, and physical sensations that can be overwhelming at times.
Let’s take a common example: Imagine being stuck in traffic and someone dangerously cuts in front of you without signaling. Your initial reaction might be a flash of anger, your heart starts to race, and perhaps even a few choice words fly out of your mouth.
Or picture sitting at your desk, and an email notification from your boss pops up with the subject line, "Come to my office." Instantly, your palms might start to sweat and your thoughts spiral into a whirlwind of worry. This is you being triggered (and if neither of these examples trigger you, then just think of one that produces a similar type of immediate reaction in you, and that’s an example of your trigger)..
Your reaction to triggers are the immediate, visceral responses that accompany them after they happen, making them hard to ignore. In order to be able to control what stresses you, the first step requires your awareness that these reactions are even happening.
The Neuroscience Behind Triggers
To understand triggers and why they cause such reactions in us, we need to peek into the intricate workings of our brains, which have a built-in alarm system called the amygdala. This tiny, almond-shaped structure is responsible for triggering our fight-or-flight response when it perceives a threat and leads to the phenomenon known as the "amygdala hijack."
While you probably have already heard of the fight, flight, and freeze reactions, there are some other reactions that can also happen:
Freak-out, when you become irrational and start frantically engaging in tasks that have nothing to do with the trigger; tending, when you start caring for others instead of paying attention to what you need; and befriending, when you get closer to the person who is triggering you in the hopes that that will keep you safer than being their enemy.
Triggers can activate any of these reactions within us, even when the threat isn't physical but rather emotional or psychological. Understanding this neural process helps us grasp why triggers can be so intense and challenging to control.
In short, when we perceive situations as threatening our safety, whether physical, social, professional, or relational, we are likely to find ourselves in the grips of a strong trigger reaction. While we don’t all get triggered by the same things, we all do have things that trigger us. And while reacting to them is wired into our survival biology, experiencing them in our everyday lives can leave us breathless and overwhelmed in their powerful embrace.
This brings us to the question of how triggers affect our day-to-day decision-making and overall well-being.
When we're triggered, our decision-making abilities take a hit. Empathy dwindles, perspective narrows, and creativity stalls. Essentially, we're not our best selves when our triggers are activated. The amygdala hijacks the parts of our brains responsible for rational, empathic, and creative thought, and as these parts go offline, we are literally limited to only the survival-based options that remain.
When this happens, our bodies are the first to react—heart racing, sweating, accelerated breathing, muscle tension—and this is immediately followed by a slew of emotions such as panic, despair, anger, sadness, frustration and fear.
Our thoughts follow suit, thinking things like:
Why is this happening to me?
I’m not good enough.
They hate me.
I‘m getting fired.
How dare you?
I need to get out of here!
You‘re so selfish!
There‘s nothing I can do.
While this amygdala-hijack model is an overly simplified explanation of how the brain works, it can provide us with an easy-to-understand picture of what’s taking place in our brains in the moment we get triggered. This helps explain why it can be so difficult to self-regulate and calm ourselves down in these moments.
However, not all hope is lost. With the right tools, you control what stresses you, so let’s switch gears and focus on practical things you can do right when you feel triggered to change your state.
Coping in the Moment vs. Deeper Healing: Short-term Interventions
Fortunately, there are ways to cope when triggers strike. Simple techniques like mindful breathing and grounding exercises can help you regain control of your emotions and reactions. These strategies are essential in the heat of the moment, but they're only the first step. Check these out, but make sure to also read the next section that introduces how to heal your triggers at the true source from which they come.
1. Use Your Breath
Having a variety of breathing techniques in your toolbox is essential, as they are the fastest way to signal your brain to pause and reduce panic. Here's a visual guide on one of my favorites, called the 3 Breaths:
2. Take an Intentional Pause to Respond
Develop the habit of taking a momentary pause after a trigger occurs and before reacting. This pause allows for self-reflection, increased self-awareness, and the opportunity to choose a more thoughtful response instead of an impulsive reaction.
The key behavior in this pause is for you to notice that while your reaction is intense, you can still be an observer of it. And if you are able to observe it, then it is not entirely you. Your observing self is your pure you, and from this place, you can choose a different response.
ETC or "Emotion, Truth, Choice" is a tool that guides you through 3 questions to deescalate your triggered mind, connect you with helpful thoughts, and provide you with new choices.
Remember to take a deep breath before steps 2 and 3, calming your amygdala-hijacked brain as you do so each time. Through that, you gain access to more perspectives and options.
3. Use Your Body
Reconnecting with the body is important for grounding and managing triggers and stress effectively. Let's start with an exercise that combines breath with the additional element of some minimal body movement.
Abdominal Breathing
Place one hand on your stomach and one hand on your chest.
Deeply inhale through your nose and feel your stomach rise.
Slowly exhale through your mouth and feel your stomach fall.
Repeat several times. This promotes relaxation and calm by drawing attention to the quality of your breathing movement.
Visualization
Visualization exercises help enhance the effectiveness of breathing techniques by drawing on the power of your mind. They can help deepen the connection with the breath, allowing for a more profound experience of relaxation, focus, and mental clarity.
Height Visualization
Close your eyes and imagine your body from head to toe.
Feel the length of your entire body as you hold your attention from just below your feet to right above your head.
Width Visualization
Continue now by bringing your awareness to the left side of your body.
Stretch your attention slightly beyond the left side of each body part, including your legs, arms, torso, and face.
While still holding some attention on the left, shift your focus to the right side and repeat the process, allowing yourself to fully feel the width of your body.
Depth Visualization
Finally, visualize the front of your body, including your legs, stomach, chest, and face.
Extend your attention just slightly beyond the surface.
While holding attention on the front, shift your focus to the back of your body, encompassing your legs, bum, back, arms, neck, and head.
Notice the full depth of your body as you keep yourself connected from front to back.
All of these techniques are like quick fixes, helping us regain our composure and navigate through challenging situations in the moment they happen. However, these strategies are just like a bandaid you'd apply to a wound. They provide immediate relief and prevent further damage, but they're not the ultimate solution.
If you truly want to manage your triggers in a sustainable way, it's time to dig deeper into their roots.
Triggers Are Like Wounds: Long-Term Healing Approach
While the techniques above help to down-regulate your system in the heat of the moment, you may still be wondering why these incidents are triggering you in the first place, and why they keep coming back. After all, not all triggers create the same reaction in everyone.
I may be triggered by a long line at checkout, whereas you may find it totally fine; you may be triggered by someone interrupting you when you’re speaking, and it doesn’t bother me at all. To understand your specific trigger reactions, you need to look into your past.
Consider triggers like wounds from your younger self. These wounds often have their roots in earlier life experiences, such as traumas from our past. These experiences create emotional wounds that may remain dormant until something triggers them.
Any situation that you experience in which you are left feeling unable to protect yourself—whether emotionally or physically—can result in a wound. Especially as children, when we are often dependent on others for our safety, these experiences can leave us afraid of getting hurt again should we encounter them. So we develop a reaction to them that attempts to keep us safe.
These traumas are not only limited to what I call big-T Traumas (such as experiencing physical or mental abuse, violence, harm, etc). They also include small-T traumas such as any daily event that hurts us and doesn’t get resolved properly. Being verbally bullied in school, having a parent leave you waiting when you thought they would pick you up, or losing a pet can all be small-T traumas that still leave an unhealed wound in our lives. As we grow older, we get reactive and protective anytime we encounter a situation that touches or activates that wound.
The reaction may involve getting aggressive, trying to hide, creating distance, or any number of other behaviors that try to keep us safe. As we get older and repeat these behaviors over and over again, whenever we encounter anything that reminds us of the original trauma, these reactions become our our go-to reaction. They are like a scab over that wound that becomes rigid, hard, and inflexible.
As adults, while the triggers may no longer actually be harmful to us, if our amygdala senses them as threats then we are cast back into the same patterns of protective behavior that emerged when we first encountered those triggers.
It’s no wonder that we sometimes hear people say:
"Stop being such a baby," or "You’re acting like such a child," when someone’s reaction to a situation as an adult seems out of proportion with the actual circumstances they are in.
In those moments, the person triggered literally is resorting back to a protection mode that was (wisely) formed at a time when they truly did feel vulnerable to danger. These protective mechanisms were like armour that safeguarded us from anxiety, fear, and danger during those difficult times.
The problem is that these same behaviors that may have kept us safe then are preventing us from being able to live free and fuller lives today as adults.
More importantly, these emotional wounds won't heal by themselves. They linger and continue to cause pain until you take steps to address them. Delving into the root causes of triggers involves understanding where they come from and why they have such a powerful hold over us.
This entails revisiting the source of our wounds and understanding the protective mechanisms we developed in response to past challenges.
Understanding and Honoring the Initial Trauma
When it comes to dealing with triggers, it's important to think about how our mind's defenses, or protection mechanisms, come into play. These defenses affect how we react when faced with difficult emotions or situations. By understanding this connection, we can learn more about our reactions and, in turn, grow as individuals.
Honoring and understanding these protection mechanisms is a crucial step in becoming more self-aware and fostering your personal development.
Below is a table that presents protection mechanisms along with their descriptions, what they may have been initially protecting, and real-life examples where they could show up.
The next crucial phase is to question the assumptions that underlie these protection mechanisms. Life is dynamic, and circumstances change. The assumptions formed back then, as valid as they once were, may no longer be true if put up against the reality of your experiences today.
So, it's important to ask whether the assumptions formed when you were triggered are still valid now.
Go through and make a list of assumptions that are present behind each of your reactions to triggers.
Then, check whether the assumptions are still 100% true.
See if you can find examples where the truth of each assumption may be more flexible than you previously thought.
If you‘re not sure, create some experiments with the intention of trying to disprove some of your assumptions. You can do this by trying out some new behaviors and seeing if the outcome you were worried would happen when facing a trigger with some new behaviors actually does occur or if something else happens instead.
Go back and review your assumptions and see if they start to change. If your assumptions and underlying beliefs change, your behaviors will follow.
By challenging and changing these assumptions, we enable our protection mechanisms to adapt. Over time, our nervous system becomes less reactive to the same triggers because it recognizes that they no longer pose a threat.
This is the longer-term solution, leading to real healing and growth. It‘s not easy work. In fact, it‘s probably some of the most difficult. But those who embark on this journey of self-discovery are led down the road of true transformation.
Seeking the help of a therapist or trusted coach can also be effective. I've also gone deep into 'triggers' on my 'You Are What You Think' podcast. If you want to dig even further, you can listen to the 'Your Triggers Are Your Friends!' episode on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Final Thoughts
Triggers are inevitable in the journey of life. They can either unravel us or become stepping stones to personal growth. You control what stresses you. By understanding the triggering experience, recognizing the neuroscience behind it, and using coping strategies in the moment, you can regain control.
However, to truly master your reaction to triggers, you must take the path of self-discovery and healing, understand your protection mechanisms, and challenge the assumptions that drive them.
This journey, though challenging, leads to greater self-awareness, personal growth, and a more peaceful existence. So embrace the power to overcome your triggers, and you'll unlock the most authentic version of yourself.
References:
Cleveland Clinic - Amygdala - https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/24894-amygdala
Bailey R., Pico J. Defense Mechanisms. [Updated 2023 May 22]. StatPearls Publishing; 2023 Jan-. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK559106/
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