Can You Identify Your Emotional Triggers?

Loud noises. Raised voices. Contentious news reports and problematic coworkers. We all know people, places and situational events that directly impact our emotional triggers. They often send us spiraling with sudden intense emotions that can be difficult to manage and hard to process.

But when everything feels so heavy all the time, how do you identify your emotional triggers so they don’t continue to overwhelm you? Where do you even start solving the real issues that are building beneath the surface?

Psychologist Susan Albers, PsyD, says combatting your emotional triggers starts with increasing your awareness and ends with taking new and different actions.

What are emotional triggers?

Emotional triggers (or mental health/psychological triggers) are environmental, interpersonal, sensory or cognitive situations that spark sudden, intense negative reactions. These triggers are deeply personal and vary from one person to the next, but they can be as subtle as the smell of a specific perfume or as direct as someone criticizing you for the way you look or act.

“Emotional triggers cause you to experience thoughts and feelings that are often disproportional to the actual event that’s taking place,” explains Dr. Albers. “It’s like a knee-jerk reaction that you’re having, and it’s often as a result of past trauma, pain or a stressful situation.”

Some examples of emotional triggers include:

• A car backfiring might cause a spike of anxiety because it reminds you of a past accident or gunshot experience.
• A romantic partner raising their voice in an argument might trigger intense anger similar to what you may have experienced when your parents yelled at you as a child.
• Repetitive news coverage of traumatic events might cause sudden, intense sadness or grief if it reminds you of a time you were sad or you feel particularly tied to those present-day events.
• High-stress situations that may trigger feelings of self-doubt or shame, inspiring you to people-please as a way to de-escalate the situation, make everyone else happy and increase the safety of your environment.

In a lot of ways, your emotional triggers are often directly related to the needs of your inner child and unprocessed feelings, thoughts or emotions you’ve experienced in the past. Other mental health conditions can also increase the frequency or urgency of your emotional triggers, including:

• Anxiety
• Depression
• Borderline personality disorder (BPD)

“With BPD, there is often a frequent trigger of feeling abandoned,” notes Dr. Albers. “With depression, there are often experiences that trigger feelings of hopelessness.”

How to identify your emotional triggers

“We often feel the same triggers over and over again. It’s like being on a hamster wheel,” illustrates Dr. Albers. “When we start to identify patterns in particular triggers, that’s when we know they’re happening.”

But how do you take a step back and gain some perspective when you feel like you’re spiraling? According to Dr. Albers, it helps to focus your attention on the causal relationship between the thing that’s triggering and the physical symptoms or emotional feelings you’re experiencing.

“Whenever you feel like you’re being triggered, our initial temptation is to avoid it or escape it. Sometimes, people turn to unhealthy coping mechanisms like drinking or scrolling on their social media or they have a strong reaction like anger,” she explains. “Instead, we have to welcome in those feelings and ask ourselves some really important questions to dig deep into what the trigger is trying to tell us.”

Following these steps can help you gain some perspective on what’s causing your emotional triggers to fire.

1. Label your emotions

Identify your emotions very clearly. Are you feeling angry, anxious, hurt, abandoned or frustrated? This activity may seem nuanced, but putting an actual, intentional label on the feelings you’re having can actually help you confront those feelings more clearly.

“Studies have shown that naming our emotions can help to regulate our feelings and help us to calm down. It adds validity to what we are feeling, instead of trying to push it away or ignore it,” explains Dr. Albers. “When we’re able to put a name on it, we can also find a way to heal it. So, if you’re feeling angry versus anxious, you may have a different intervention, depending on what that particular feeling is.”

2. Identify how and where you feel your triggers in your body

How are these triggers affecting your physical body? Where are you experiencing pain points, tension or tightness? By doing a body scan of the physical symptoms that come up during your emotional triggers, you can recognize how your triggers affect your body while focusing on treatments that directly solve those physical ailments.

“You’re moving from your head into your body to help to calm down all those bodily sensations that you’re feeling,” says Dr. Albers. “Our anxiety and emotions affect us in different ways, so your muscles and shoulders could be tense, you could feel a pit in your stomach, you may start breathing heavily or you could start shaking.”

3. Ask yourself, ‘Is this familiar?’

Now, it’s time to connect the dots. Take everything you feel and think in the moment that you’re feeling triggered, and ask yourself if you’ve ever felt this same way in the past.

“Reflecting on how familiar these experiences are might take you back to a time when you know earlier in your life that you felt a similar way,” suggests Dr. Albers. “Maybe it was a bad argument with a parent or maybe it was in a traumatic situation during an accident — whatever it may be, identifying the origin of these emotional triggers can give you a starting line to address them.”

4. Compare your present-day feelings to your past experiences

“Our minds have a very hard time distinguishing what we’re feeling from the past versus the present,” shares Dr. Albers. “Because our amygdala is responding as if that same traumatic situation is happening in the present moment, you want to bring yourself from the past into the present so that you know that you’re not reliving the same thing. This situation is different.”

Journaling about your emotional triggers is helpful, particularly because it allows you to identify behavioral patterns and situations that occur over longer periods of time. Having the ability to look back and review those experiences may help you process them better or allow you to have some distance so that you can reflect on them more fully.

“It’s really important in the long-term to keep a list of your triggers, how they feel and what’s happening when they’re triggered,” she adds. “Spotting them in the moment is a game changer. If you’re able to do that, it can completely change the trajectory of your response.”

How to manage your emotional triggers

Now that you’ve identified your emotional triggers, what do you do with them? For starters, you’ll want to embrace the feelings and physical symptoms you experience, while also finding different approaches to resolving those complex disruptions. Here’s why these solutions work when trying to defend yourself against your emotional triggers:

Challenge your negative feelings

Cognitive restructuring is key when dealing with your emotional triggers. That means you’ll want to challenge some of those negative and distorted thoughts that may be fueling the triggering response and replace them with more rational thoughts in the moment. Over time, the goal of this process is to help train your brain to think and react differently when these situations come up again in the future.

“For example, if you feel abandoned, bring yourself to the present and remind yourself that you have many supportive people in your life even though you feel alone at this very moment,” recommends Dr. Albers.

Take different actions to help regulate your emotions

You want to find ways to ground yourself in your present-day reality. That might look like:

• Taking a break.
• Going on a walk.
• Doing deep-breathing exercises.
• Practicing meditation.

“Anchor yourself in the present moment to calm down the amygdala so that you know that you are not in true danger at this current moment in time,” states Dr. Albers. “It may take some getting used to, but over time, grounding yourself will come more easily and feel more natural.”

Try gradual exposure

“Sometimes, when you’re experiencing a trigger, it feels like going from 0 to 100,” recognizes Dr. Albers. “Instead, you can gradually expose yourself to your triggers a little bit at a time to get yourself habituated or acclimated.”

For example, if you find loud noises overstimulating, you can start small and then gradually expose yourself to louder and louder noises for longer lengths of time. As you grow more comfortable with loud noises and you continue to ground yourself, you may become less susceptible to your emotional triggers in response to loud noises in the future.

Seek emotional support

Above all, finding the right therapist is often key to solving your emotional triggers, particularly because the triggers are so unique to you and your personal experiences. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is especially helpful in identifying your emotional triggers and improving your behaviors over longer periods. Psychoanalytic therapists who specialize in shadow work may also be helpful, but know that what works for someone else may not always work as well for you.

Truth is, it can be hard to see the forest for the trees when you’re so intently focused on the details of how your emotional triggers affect you. But having that additional, unbiased person to turn to in times of trouble can certainly help you reflect and find a better path forward.

“Everyone has triggers, whether they know it or not,” emphasizes Dr. Albers. “A therapist can guide you to navigate your triggers by helping you identify them and respond to them in different ways.”