Manage Your Triggers

Have you ever had an instance where you are in a great mood until you encounter something—or someone—that makes you react emotionally? Perhaps it is a reminder of a traumatic event that happened in the past, or maybe it is a particular kind of an interaction that makes you suddenly feel irrationally upset. These are called emotional triggers, and they can be extremely challenging to cope with on a daily basis and particularly destructive of your leadership impact.

Identifying and managing your emotional triggers can make an enormous difference in keeping relationships and projects on track, even in the most stressful of situations. If you are wondering what your emotional triggers might be and hoping to learn how to deal with these triggers, continue to read on for more information.

Where Do Emotional Triggers Come From?

Emotional triggers stem from many different factors and they affect people in a variety of ways. What’s important to note is that emotional triggers are unique to each person. These triggers can be influenced by past experiences, current challenges and future fears but are directly related to our expectations of the world and others, also known as needs. They may be related to issues for safety, work environments and the actions of others around us.

Simply put, emotional triggers are events, things, experiences, or potentially even people behaviors that cause us to view them as a threat or reminder of past discomfort and pain. These stressors impact our minds and bodies according to our perception of them and engage our “fight or flight” mechanism. These reactions present themselves differently depending on your personality and needs preferences. Here are a few examples:

Anxiety Triggers

The symptoms of anxiety triggers are best defined by feelings of worry, discomfort, and unease. Anxiety triggers can become chronic, meaning that they reappear frequently. Simply talking to someone on the phone about upcoming changes in the workplace, time demands, and lack of support could trigger severe feelings of anxiety, mistrust, and wariness.

Anger Triggers

With this type of emotional trigger, the reaction that occurs as a result of the trigger usually comes out as anger or frustration. Many times, anger triggers leave people feeling out of control—they might find that their heart starts pounding and their breathing becomes shallower. Additionally, anger triggers can cause outbursts of profanity, threats of violence, yelling, and other aggressive behaviors.

These emotional triggers may lead people to lash out at the ones that they love or even at themselves. There are also factors that can make anger triggers more intense and harder to control and acting on violent impulses could seriously erode your leadership confidence and trust as well as put you in serious danger. 

Insecurity Triggers

These triggers stem from lack of well-defined rules and boundaries and can cause the individual to “freeze” and refuse to agree to anything, become over-perfectionistic, and refuse to participate until all information is available, accurate, and reliable

This emotional triggers list is not extensive in that it only gives a glimpse into the broad types of triggers that you might be struggling to identify, regulate, and avoid. 

Learning How to Deal With Triggers

The first step in learning how to deal with triggers is to identify and be aware of the emotions you experience in response to a variety of situations. Emotional triggers often arise from standard, daily interactions like being rushed, feeling overlooked or not appreciated, being frustrated from lack of progress on a project or not having the data needed to make accurate decisions.

Some people use a journal to keep track of their emotional and behavioral responses. Other people practice mindfulness to stay grounded in the present moment. With mindfulness techniques, the goal is to recognize when something might be an emotional trigger. Then, you can prepare yourself to respond in a way that keeps you and others around you safe.

Perhaps most importantly, if you are looking to learn how to deal with triggers, the most effective method is to contact us and complete the Birkman Method assessment. It provides a wealth of information on our occupational interests, usual behaviors, and strengths, but most importantly, in the light of this blog, in depth reporting on our behavioral needs and preferences as well as suggested strategies on controlling and minimizing the negative impact of our stress triggers. As we learned earlier, emotional triggers can vary significantly and they only become harder to cope with when there are underlying mental health conditions such as anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, phobias, mood disorders, and more.

Leave a comment and share which of the above triggers are most common for you.