Triggers: What They Are, How They Form and Why You Should Care

Hey everyone! Thank you for being here and hanging out with me today. Over the next few weeks, I'm going to talk about triggers. It's an important topic. It’s something we have to do a lot of work around. We have to be aware of the impact and the presence of triggers in our lives. 

Before I dive into this, let’s get clear on what triggers are. If the concept of triggers are new to you or you've heard about them yet not quite sure exactly if you've ever experienced a trigger before or don’t know what they are, I want to address triggers from the perspective of how they form. Let’s talk about some of those basic things because knowing what they are and how they form will actually help you identify them. That’s been my experience and how triggers have worked for me. The key step of identifying them allows you then to work through them. And that is the most important thing. 

Over the next few weeks I will share how triggers have kind of blindsided me lately even though I consider myself pretty far along in my healing journey with my eating disorder. I have been kind of taken aback by the impact that some triggers have had on me. I was not expecting it at all. So I will be sharing that later on, but first I want to discuss a little bit about the foundation of triggers so you understand my philosophy and beliefs around triggers.

When I was reading about triggers before this episode, one thing I read was that the word “trigger” has been used more casually in our language. I believe this is accurate. It seems the word “trigger” is heard everywhere. Instagram, Facebook and TV ads have trigger warnings.  It’s obvious the sensitivity around triggers is everywhere. Everyone's being alerted about something.

Here's the truth. A trigger is more than something that just makes you uncomfortable or upset. Sometimes people think they're triggered simply if they get angry about something or if they’re uncomfortable. They believe that's a trigger. But it’s not.

Triggers go deeper. They're tied to mental health conditions like an eating disorder, ADHD, PTSD, OCD, anxiety disorders, addictions, depression, bipolar personality disorders and more. What needs to be understood is triggers are more involved than just saying, “oh yeah, I was so triggered because that made me really mad and upset”.

A trigger is a stimulus that evokes a painful memory. The stimulus is a sensory reminder related to a traumatic event. The stimulus could be anything like lights, sounds and smells. These stimuli elicit the anxiety and the panic you felt during the traumatic event. And when you encounter a stimulus that was at that traumatic event, when you encounter that later on, the stimulus reawakens and can worsen your symptoms around that traumatic event. That is the trigger. The anxiety, panic, racing heart or breakdown follows the triggering stimuli.

I think there's more to triggers than most people understand because many of us use the word so casually.

Let’s go deeper on how triggers can form. First, a traumatic experience occurs. And it must be known that “trauma” is relative to each individual. The depth of trauma a person endures is based on the person’s perception and genetic makeup. For example; how you respond to an event can be different from how someone else responds to it. An experience could be terribly traumatic for one person but someone else at the same event could perceive the experience differently and thus have less or no trauma due to their genetic makeup.

OK, so if you view something as a traumatic experience, what happens in that moment is, your brain stores the surrounding and stimuli. Your brain does this because its primary job is to protect you. To make sure you survive. And if you encounter a traumatic event, it remembers all the surrounding stimuli so that the next time that you encounter the same stimuli it has a warning system set. This is to protect you from pain and to keep you safe. So whenever you come across the same stimuli again, you’re reminded of that traumatic event and it's your brain's job to keep you safe so of course it's gonna say, “hey remember what happened last time when XYZ happened or you experienced this, something bad happened so beware. Be prepared because something bad might happen again”.

If triggers are a problem for you it is important to connect the stimuli to the details of the traumatic event because this can help you later understand why you have such a strong emotional or physical response to the particular stimulus. This is why it's good to know what a trigger is and how they form and how to identify them. When we understand our triggers, we can heal from them.

I’m going to give you a couple of examples from my own life and I hope by doing that you can see where your triggers may be coming from or start to identify some that you may be dealing with. Referencing my experiences will also help show how deep and involved triggers are.

Previously, I shared about my dad's heart attack and I shared the story about how I stood on the street and I could hear the ambulance sirens and I was standing there waiting and wondering if the emergency response team would make it in time. As I stood there and listened to the sirens, it sounded like they were just beyond our street but you know how sound carries. It was crazy how the sirens sounded like they were getting closer and at the same time they sounded further away. It really played with my mind. I stood there and listened to the ambulance sirens and the police sirens and the sirens from the fire trucks. Eventually all three came. First the police came and they had their siren going so there were a lot of sirens that day and then there was the ambulance and the fire truck’s siren. It was the policeman 1st and then the fire truck arrived and then the ambulance. So there were all kinds of sirens and I was standing there listening to the sirens wondering if my dad was gonna live.

Traumatic experience, big time! The sirens were at the center of it and for so many years after that day whenever I would hear sirens I would relive it. I would immediately be transported back to my front yard, standing right next to the street. I remember what I wore. I remember the time of day. I remember where the sun was. I'm standing there and I can feel it and it would be so hard 'cause every time I would hear sirens years later, I’d shut down. My breath would catch in my chest and that pain and that fear of that day, that worry about my dad and whether or not he was gonna live.

If I had to go forward at the age of 17 without my dad. Wondering what I would do without him. Wondering what my mom and brother and I were gonna do without him. Reliving all of that. It was terrible. Yet it is a perfect example of a trigger.

The stimulus was the sound of the sirens. I even remember what I was wearing that day but the main thing that my brain stored in that traumatic event was the sound of the sirens. So it took me time to work through that. That is the first example I want to share.

A second example of a trigger is something I’ve experienced more recently. It just happened within these last couple months. My daughters and I, who by the way, one of my daughters just turned 9 today at the time of recording this. Today is actually her 9th birthday. Happy Birthday, Ava. But at the time this trigger event happened she was 8 and I have a 4 year old, Adeline. 

Picture the three of us driving to a doctor's appointment. My girls were hungry and they needed a snack so they opened up, I don't know, it was something in a bag, you know some kind of cracker thing in a bag. And they're sitting in the back seat eating these crackers and we had just kind of been going through one of those cycles of just eating processed food on the run. It felt like they were on their 5th snack or food from a bag that day and it triggered me all of a sudden.

I started panicking and I felt my heart start racing because they were sitting in the back seat getting all excited like, “oh this is so great. Eating these snacks, this is what I want to eat”. Their excitement over it pushed me and I started lecturing them about how this is not something we can always do because it's not healthy. It's not good for our bodies to take in this food. I was losing it.

Thankfully we parked. I shut off the car and I had to sit there and take these deep breaths in. My heart was racing. I was kinda light headed and I felt this rush of panic coursing through me. It was almost like this out of body experience, too. So now we're getting out of the car and we're walking into the doctor's office and both my girls are looking at me with worried expressions on their faces. They were wondering if I was ok.

I asked myself, “what is going on why am I losing it over a bag of Snapped crackers”. And then it hit me. It was because I was exposed to so much processed food over the duration of my day.

What’s the big deal about being exposed to processed foods? Back when I was in the thick of my eating disorder, I thought food was my enemy. I said things to myself like, “food makes me fat. If I eat food I’m gonna get fat”. That was how I viewed food. And when my dad had a heart attack, I went from fearing food to thinking food was going to kill me. I connected processed foods to that type of fear. Processed food evoked a stronger reaction. The fear was so much stronger and today I still deal with the food fear even though it has subsided a lot. 

 Needless to say, I was triggered by my girls’ endless snacking. Their excitement over the food and the number of packaged snacks they had been eating was too much for me. We were on a few days of running with a crazy schedule. I saw the girls consume one too many processed snacks. Given my past experience of how I equated processed food and during that time when I was really struggling, I called processed food “bad food”. There was no neutrality with food. I viewed it as “bad”. And whenever there is a lot going on in my life and I feel busy and I’m running from one event to the next, anxiety sets in. I respond by grasping for control.

I snapped the day my girls ate too many Snapped crackers. I felt like I was losing control because of the food that I was surrounded with and seeing my girls eat one bagged snack after another sent me reeling. I perceived it as proof, like “Uh-oh, look at this. You don't have control over the situation. You're letting this back into your life. You’re letting big bad food in bags back into your life”.

I really blew it out of proportion and I kinda scared my daughters a little bit. They were worried. I was breathing heavier, my heart was racing and by the time we got inside the clinic, I made this connection I just explained. I thought, “Oh my gosh, this got me again”. I was triggered by the food that I associated as bad and that will clog your arteries and give you a heart attack and leave your child standing on the boulevard waiting for the emergency response team and she's gonna wonder if they're ever gonna make it.

The Snapped crackers got me like those sirens. Those dang sirens. I was triggered again by this food. It's almost like when I watch them eating it, I can see it clogging up their little beautiful arteries. I know that's not true. I understand that's not what's happening, but because of the traumatic event, because of my experience with my eating disorder and food and then it heightened and worsened by my dad's heart attack, this triggering moment with my girls and having them eat so much more processed food over a couple of days, I just kept internalizing, internalizing and all of a sudden I just exploded. I had a meltdown and yet it was a total trigger moment.

And this story serves as another example of how these triggers just kind of wiggle their ways into our lives. I want to highlight the significance of it and the importance of understanding them and starting to identify them in your life. Triggers can happen to the best of us. When my triggers blindsided me, like with the sirens and the food, it was a humbling experience. I was reminded that I still have lots to learn and many opportunities for growth.

With my girls specifically, I use trigger moments as teaching moments. When the processed food triggered me, it was a teaching opportunity. My daughters can view me as Superwoman sometimes and then in that moment when I was kind of unraveling and I had them worrying, they were looking at me like, “Are you ok”. They got to see that even their heroes need help sometimes. It's healthy to be vulnerable and I connected with them and it was a great teaching moment. I told them, “hey guys, I’m really sorry, that really triggered me back there”. I explained why. My 4 year old might not have understood, but my 8 year old did. I could tell by her face and we hugged and we said, “this is ok. We are ok”.

Triggers not only impact your life, they impact those around you. And for this reason it is a great responsibility for you to identify your triggers and kind of learn about them and see how they infiltrate your life. Look for patterns. I’m always going to ask you to be a detective. I’m always gonna ask you to do that detective work and look deep into your life. Connect pieces together. Try to connect the details of a traumatic experience to the stimulus so that you can understand why you're having a strong emotional or physical response. This is important work.

I hope you learned something from this episode, whether you came into it having somewhat of a knowledge around triggers or were completely confused by them. I hope you got something out of this episode that you can take away and can help you learn something new about yourself and about triggers. Maybe for the first time you're realizing some of your panic is originating from a trigger. That could be something very real for some of you. What we feel is real. We have to slow down and learn from it. It’s really that simple. You have to take the time and prioritize yourself and believe that you are worthy of understanding. You are worthy of slowing down and taking a look at your life.

Triggers are a process and they require time so we are gonna be spending more time on this topic. Join me next week and we will be digging into triggers even further and I will even show you on a deeper level how to use certain tools I use in my life and how you can use them in yours. Take care friends. I will see you on next week's podcast episode. Have a great week. Talk to you later, bye.