A Better Use for Triggers

Tips & Quips—TIP

If you’re alive in the world today, it feels like it’s become virtually impossible to go through life without being triggered in some way. Triggers are those little moments that remind us of something from our past, or something that we are working on (or haven’t started working on yet), that needs to be healed or addressed in some way. They often catch us off-guard and can result in a moment (or longer) of emotional instability. As a result, we need to intervene on our triggers in order to restore some sense of balance.

Interventions can take many forms, but one of the things that is true is that the best interventions do not simply maintain the problem. In other words, they don’t put a band-aid on it without addressing the underlying issue. When we are triggered, however, that is the intervention most people choose as a first line of defense. I’d suggest something different that can be infinitely more helpful—and healing!—in the long run:

When you are triggered, try to look at it as a data point. 

A data point is just information. It’s neither good nor bad; it’s simply more information than you had before the trigger occurred. When you can look at a trigger as a piece of data, you can intervene differently. How? By mining the data, not the trigger.

This means that you are going to focus on what the trigger is telling you, not the trigger itself. When you do that, you will be able to make a different choice that will allow you to start to respond to your triggers in a healthier way, until, ultimately, they no longer exist. Mining the data for what to do, instead of digging around in the trigger itself, is a game-changer in navigating life with more ease and balance.