On any given day, you possibly experience an array of emotions—excitement, unease, frustration, joy, and disappointment. These emotions often arise from specific events, such as meeting with your boss, discussing current affairs with a friend, or spending time with loved ones.
Your response to these events can differ based on your frame of mind and the circumstances surrounding the situation. You can manage your emotions by following some simple steps for handling emotional triggers.
What Is a Trigger?
A trigger can be any word, person, event, or experience that immediately causes an emotional reaction. It is like being shocked by a noise: the noise is the trigger; the shock is the response. Our reactions to emotional triggers are often extreme, lasting longer than what makes sense for the event. It is as if we are still getting startled by the sound of that slammed door hours later.
Not every trigger is negative. Triggers can also spark joy or happy memories, like the scent of a flower reminding us of a beloved place or a photo bringing back cherished moments. Still, we generally use “trigger” to describe negative stimuli that start with sadness, anger, or fear, as well as hurt, shame, and despair.
When triggered, our bodies enter the survival response: fighting, fleeing, or freezing. Our hearts may race; we break into a sweat; we become paralyzed. The sympathetic nervous system is activated to protect us from perceived harm. However, we may overreact—escaping too quickly, fighting too intensely, or freezing for too long.
These reactions can start to impede our ability to live our lives. When a trigger creates only a survival reaction, it is a dead end. But they can create a process of healing, too. They can guide us toward areas where we have emotional healing to do. A trigger can actually be a blessing when it motivates self-reflection and growth.
How to Manage Your Emotional Triggers
1. Acknowledge Your Feelings
These emotions are a natural part of daily life. They can awaken your triggers, and that’s completely normal. Be kind to yourself. Don’t compare your past and present life. Your past experiences may be over, but the emotional wounds may still be healing. What happened in your past stays in the past.
Learn from your past while focusing on managing the present moment. Keep reminding yourself of this so you can choose a healthier response to your trigger. This is among the first steps for managing your emotional triggers.
2. Listen To Your Mind and Body
A significant step in learning to distinguish your triggers involves paying attention when situations produce a strong emotional response. Beyond intense emotions, you might also experience various physical symptoms of anxiety, like:
- a pounding heart
- upset stomach
- lightheadedness or dizziness
- sweaty palms
3. Step Back
When you notice any of these signs, stop to reflect on what just happened and the response it activated. Say you spent the afternoon cleaning your house and reorganizing the living room. When your partner gets home from work, you wait eagerly for them to comment. Instead, they go to the fridge for a snack and then sit on the sofa without saying a word.
You feel hurt and disappointed that your hard work went unacknowledged, and you start to get angry and frustrated. You can feel your heart pounding and your palms sweating. It takes everything in you not to snap and say something bitter. Instead of pouring your heart out, try to control yourself.
4. Trace The Origins
Try to follow these feelings back to their roots by thinking about other situations that made you feel what you are currently feeling. Maybe it suddenly felt as if you were a teenager again, trying to make the house look perfect to earn approval from a distant parent who was often away.
When the emotional trigger is fired, you are transported back to that particular time in your life when you felt nothing you did was good enough.
5. Be Aware of Projection
Many trigger reactions involve projection, where we unconsciously transfer feelings from past experiences onto current situations. For example, if one of your parents was verbally harsh toward you, you might be triggered by anger in others. This is because your body is afraid of repeating that original sequence, even though anger and violence are not unavoidably linked.
Or maybe your first partner left you for someone else, and now you are uncertain of your worth in every new relationship. We often predict outcomes based on our past experiences. While it is always possible that anger may lead to violence or your new love interest may fall for someone else, that would be a coincidence, not an obvious thing.
Most importantly, when we make our reactions about others, it leaves us defenseless because we can’t change them. When we take control of our reactions, we take a step toward healing and letting go of the past injury.
6. Allow Yourself Some Space
Physically leaving the scene can help you to avoid emotional overwhelm. Excuse yourself and take a short break. This can help you avoid spontaneous reactions that you may regret later. Once on your own, try some deep breathing or grounding exercises to calm down your nerves and soothe yourself.
The goal here is not to entirely avoid the circumstances that triggered your emotions. You are just providing yourself a chance to cool off to handle the situation more calmly and effectively. Once you feel more relaxed, you may return to the circumstance with a clearer head and calmer mind.
Read More: 9 Tips For Effective Workload Management
7. Practice Knowing and Showing Your Emotions
Emotions are much like muscles—they strengthen when expressed and exercised appropriately. They grow stronger and healthier when expressed in balanced, constructive ways. Similarly, if we have concealed an emotion like anger or sadness for most of our lives, our capacity to cope with that feeling becomes weak.
This is one reason a reaction may feel uncomfortable or exaggerated when triggered. If we practice knowing and showing our emotions, we tend not to react wrongly when we have strong feelings.
8. Keep an Open Mind
In most cases, people in your life don’t make you feel bad intentionally. Some of their actions or words that upset you might stem from their own emotional triggers or other factors you’re not aware of.
Your partner walked in and didn’t notice you had completely changed the living room. Perhaps they got some bad news or had a rough day in the workplace and needed some space to relax before talking about it. Everyone has unique emotions simmering beneath the surface at any given time, and you may not know what is going on if they don’t tell you.
It is also easier to misunderstand behavior or intention when you don’t know someone well. This makes it even more significant to reflect on their perspective.
Conclusion
Have you seen the Disney animated movie Inside Out? This movie shows how people can be controlled by their emotions every second of every day. Each day, we experience a wide range of emotions. We can feel happiness, sadness, excitement, frustration, or distress.
All your emotions can be connected to the different events that are happening in your life. Both simple and complex life events can act as emotional triggers. You can be triggered by the loud noise from your neighbor’s home or the news you heard on television. It’s not healthy to let emotions overwhelm you constantly. There are some steps for managing your emotional triggers that we can practice.
