While triggered, people may panic, feel overwhelmed, cry, act out, withdraw, or react defensively. Trigger symptoms often include: Feeling scared, panicked, anxious, or unsafe. Elevated heartbeat, sweating, and difficulty breathing.
A behavioral trigger or stressor is any stimulus that impacts our behavior. They are an action or situation that can lead to an adverse emotional reaction. Triggers are individualized experiences that vary widely from person-to-person.
Triggers can be people, places or things, as well as smells, words or colours. Emotional triggers are automatic responses to the way others express emotions, like anger or sadness. For example, you may not have a problem interacting with an angry person, but find it hard to deal with someone who's crying.
What is a trigger? In psychology, a “trigger” is a stimulus that causes a painful memory to resurface. A trigger can be any sensory reminder of the traumatic event: a sound, sight, smell, physical sensation, or even a time of day or season.
A trigger is a stimulus that elicits a reaction. In the context of mental illness, "trigger" is often used to mean something that brings on or worsens symptoms. This often happens to people with a history of trauma or who are recovering from mental illness, self-harm, addiction, and/or eating disorders.
Primary triggers are internal, dysfunctional personal beliefs that we learned in childhood. We can trigger ourselves into feeling ashamed if we don't measure up to standards we've adopted for ourselves. We can easily activate our inner critic to ruin our day or our life!
With practice, the reaction to your emotional triggers could subside, but they may never go away. The best you can do is to quickly identify when an emotion is triggered and then choose what to say or do next.
Triggers can include sights, sounds, smells, or thoughts that remind you of the traumatic event in some way. Some PTSD triggers are obvious, such as seeing a news report of an assault. Others are less clear. For example, if you were attacked on a sunny day, seeing a bright blue sky might make you upset.
Here, I'll discuss three types of trigger: external, internal, and synthetic. These each have different strengths and weaknesses, and each can be used to design great behaviors that form lasting habits. Let's look more closely at each type of trigger.
It is normal to have strong reactions following a distressing or frightening event, but these should begin to reduce after a few weeks. People can experience a range of physical, mental, emotional and behavioural reactions.
Take a break if you can
If you're able to, try to get yourself to a nice quiet space where you can calm back down. Try using your breath to slow your mind back down. Being triggered can also make you feel like you're short of breath, so it's important to make sure to focus on breathing in and out, nice and slow.
We may be “pseudo-independent” and see ourselves as just fine on our own. Because we have adapted by disconnecting from our own needs, we often perceive others as emotionally “needy.” When we feel triggered by our partner, we may see their attempt to connect as needy, dramatic, or overwhelming.
Another reason we get angry over small things is that we personalize everything that happens to us. So even if something has nothing to do with us, we can't help but take it personally. This can lead to feeling like we're constantly under attack, making us angry.
Sometimes, you may be able to identify what it was that caused you to have this reaction, but often people who encounter a trigger do not recognize what it was that set them off. It can feel like it comes out of the blue. This is very normal.
“I am sorry that my action triggered you. But I think this is really about your past trauma which is causing you to be upset. You should find a therapist to help you to sort this out because your overreaction is very upsetting for me. This apology shifts the narrative.
The psychic or emotional tears occur when stress, pleasure, anger, sadness and suffering (or physical pain) is registered in the cerebrum. It triggers the endocrine system to release hormones to the eye area which causes tears to form.
There are five common types of maintenance triggers: breakdown, time-based, event-based, usage-based, and condition-based.
With PTSD, a trigger is something that brings on memories or reminders of a traumatic event. For example, flashbacks are often prompted by a trigger. The flashback causes you to feel as though you're reliving the traumatic experience (or some parts of it) all over again.