At times, however, the response seems greater than the situation itself.
A small remark sets you off, your boss criticizes something that you worked on all morning, and then your best friend takes hours to respond, making you start to imagine scenarios of what could be happening with them that makes them unable to respond promptly.
Later, once the initial emotions have passed, the question arises:
Why did that get to me?
In most cases, it might not be about the event itself but rather its meaning for you.
Here lies the value of recognizing your emotional triggers.
Triggers don’t necessarily involve events that are of great importance – they are situations, comments, behavior or interactions that provoke an emotional response within you.
Recognizing them will give you an insight into why you act the way you do.
Every trigger is not always apparent.
In some cases, it would be when you are talking and you get interrupted.
In other cases, it would be when you receive some form of criticism.
Some examples include cancelation of a plan, unresponsive to your messages, public disagreement, use of certain tone, or exclusion from a discussion.
Two individuals can go through the same scenario and react totally differently.
For example, let us assume that there is an employee who has given feedback on the work of his or her two workers.
One takes the feedback and goes on while the other feels embarrassed or irritated.
In this case, even though the feedback was the same, it held a different emotional meaning.
We don’t just respond
to the event itself.
We also respond to
what we think the event means.
Your friend cancelling
dinner plans might just mean that something has come up.
But your mind can take
it to mean:
They don’t respect my
time.
Your coworker
correcting you may be trying to help.
But what you can
think:
They believe that I’m
incompetent.
Someone who needs some
space may just be overloaded.
But your initial
reaction might be:
They are moving away
from me.
This kind of thinking
process occurs quite quickly, sometimes even before we have a chance to think
of an alternative explanation.
This is why
understanding emotional triggers entails seeing past the event itself.
Rather than asking
only:
What happened?
It might be useful to
ask:
What did I think this
meant about me or the other person?
Strong feelings can happen very quickly.
Your heartbeat changes. You become tensed up. Your voice changes. You get a feeling of arguing, retreating, defending yourself, or leaving.
By the time you become aware that you are angry, your body might already have reacted to your feelings.
This does not imply that you cannot do anything about it.
What it implies is that becoming aware of your reactions early on will make a difference.
Perhaps you feel your shoulder muscles getting tightened up before the argument starts.
Perhaps you stop speaking up when you get criticized.
Perhaps you become overly defensive when you think that the other person is disappointed in you.
All these little cues can become helpful indicators.
The sooner you become aware of the feeling, the better your chances are of doing something about it.
A single difficult encounter does not tell you much.
Many encounters do.
In order to figure out your triggers, you should start paying attention to situations that seem to generate emotional responses again and again.
It is possible that criticism always makes you defensive.
Perhaps being ignored provokes anxiety.
Last-minute changes may result in extreme frustration.
Exclusion may make you withdraw entirely.
You could begin by asking yourself a few basic questions after you had a strong response to something.
What preceded my feeling like this?
What emotion was I aware of first?
What was I telling myself about the situation?
Had I responded this way in other similar situations?
What did I want to do next?
You should not be evaluating your answers.
For now, you are simply looking for patterns.
It makes a difference.
Just because you feel rejected doesn’t mean that you’re rejected.
Just because you feel judged doesn’t mean you’ve been judged.
Just because you feel ignored doesn’t mean you have been ignored.
Your feelings are valid but your initial understanding of the situation may not be complete.
If someone ignores your text message for hours on end, then your emotional response would let you know:
They are purposely ignoring me.
That’s one possible explanation.
It’s also possible that they are busy, they’re sleeping, they are driving, they are having some kind of problem, or they are just out of reach.
Identifying an emotional trigger doesn’t mean that you ignore your feelings about it.
Emotional patterns without awareness become automatic.
Something happens.
You feel something.
You respond.
And then you face the consequences.
To develop self-awareness and emotions involves making just a little more room within the process.
Something happens.
You notice how you feel.
You understand what the situation evokes in you.
And then you decide how you will respond to it.
This pause may take only a few seconds, but it can totally transform the entire conversation.
Rather than sending an angry message right away, you will wait.
Rather than becoming defensive, you will ask for clarification.
Rather than jumping to the conclusion that you have been rejected, you will see if there could be another reason.
Self-awareness does not eliminate emotions.
What it does is prevents each emotion from being an automatic response.
The two are different because controlling an emotion is not about pretending that it does not exist.
Saying, I should not be angry, does not mean that you will not feel anger at all.
Neither does acting calmly even if your mind is in a turmoil mean that you have controlled your emotions.
To control emotional triggers, you should first realize what is going on with you and say it to yourself:
Right now, I feel defensive.
This comment hit me harder than I thought.
I need some time before responding.
It may break the chain of your emotional response.
Then you can try various coping mechanisms: taking some deep breaths, stepping away, putting down your thoughts, rechecking your understanding of the situation, or talking when the intensity of your emotions calms down.
Controlling your emotions does not mean their disappearance.
Controlling them means stopping them from taking every decision for you.
An emotional trigger is not always something to be solved.
It often holds helpful information.
A pattern of frustration whenever people keep interrupting you may indicate a desire for respect.
Getting overwhelmed every time someone asks for another favor may mean that your personal boundaries are off.
The intense anxiety over making mistakes may be a way for you to notice the amount of pressure you place upon yourself to be perfect.
While the emotion doesn’t give you answers right away, it gives you clues about where to find them.
Instead of asking “how do I stop feeling this?”,
you may also ask yourself “what is this reaction telling me?”
This change will transform the emotion into information.
Self-awareness is never achieved when no more things bother you.
It could be that you know about your trigger point but still react to it.
Or it could be that you recognize midway through an argument that you’ve gotten defensive.
There are times when you only become aware of why things transpired several hours after everything happens.
It is still considered self-awareness.
Gradually, being aware of the event after it could turn into becoming aware during the event itself, which could further evolve into becoming aware before reacting.
