Triggered

This episode talks about the neuroscience behind getting triggered and covers a technique to break yourself out of a triggered state. 

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Transcript

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Hey, my friends, today we're going to talk about how to change state. This has been very valuable for me, and so I'm going to share it with you. The most recent time I've used this is last week. It was my partner and my fifth anniversary of being together, and I came home from my exercise class and saw him, and I was excited. I asked him if he saw his present, because I had gotten him some rum cake, and it was in the fridge. And he said, Why don't you go shower or do whatever you're gonna do, and I'll drink this tea. And I knew that he was trying to get rid of me so he could prep my present, but it totally triggered me. I didn't like being gotten rid of, even though I knew why. It lit up the neural network in my brain attached to every single time someone hasn't wanted me around, usually for more mean reasons than wanting to prep a present for me. And that's the thing about these neural networks. It it wasn't just him trying to get me to be somewhere other than where I was. It was every single time someone has tried to get rid of me, or ditch me, or make it clear that I'm not wanted around. Because in our brains, these incidents all get connected together. So when our brain sees something similar, it can light up that pattern. It's a shortcut of the brain, so that, in theory, we can use what we know about similar situations in the current situation. It's a tool of survival. Our brains are trying to be helpful. But in these more painful things, it doesn't feel helpful. It becomes a trigger. This is how our responses become out of proportion for situations. It isn't just the situation we are in. It's every single similar situation in our entire lives all firing up. It's how you can suddenly remember everything someone has done wrong when you find yourself in a similar situation. Or how like when you get mad at someone for one thing, suddenly you find yourself rehashing and thinking about every single other time that you were mad at them. Because suddenly those neural networks are lighting up and you have ready access all of those memories. For me, this usually happens with getting my feelings hurt. Someone will do something that hurts my feelings, and suddenly I'm thinking about every time I've had my feelings hurt and feeling all of it all over again. It's those fucking neural networks. But knowing this is really useful. So when I started to have every single memory someone hasn't wanted me around, start to come up, and I started to feel the hurt associated with that, I could recognize that, hey, this just that neural network firing up. Like I know it's not even real. My partner doesn't want me around because he wants something to be a surprise, not because he just doesn't want me around. Just because I'm feeling this kind of hurt doesn't mean that anything has gone wrong. My brain is just activating an old neural network that unfortunately has lots of ammunition in it, and it can make me feel pretty bad. But I knew I didn't want to feel bad just because my brain decided that it should launch this particular programming. So I did state change. The the first step to changing your state is a pattern interrupt. We've talked about pattern interrupts on here before. The Pattern Interrupt I chose to use in this incident was passing an object back and forth between my hands, taking care to make sure that I crossed the midline of my body. This is an effective Pattern Interrupt because it forces both hemispheres of the brain to fire up. These patterns are usually concentrated on one hemisphere of the brain or the other, so forcing the brain to start using both can interrupt whatever program your brain has started running. So I stood in my bathroom passing a can of nasal spray back and forth between my hands until I felt my brain slide to focusing on this task more than anything else, and I felt the sadness I had been feeling lift. Then comes the second step. I brought to mind a happy memory and made myself think of that. It doesn't have to be extreme like the happiest memory you have. I thought about the flowers that used to be in my grandma's yard and how pretty they were. And that was enough. It got me out of that pattern that I didn't want to be in, and stopped the sadness. I was able to go forward and enjoy our anniversary being happy and in a celebratory mood. If you want more pattern interrupts, I also covered them in Episode 111 called Being Haunted. Pattern interrupts are a really great tool to have in your arsenal because of their simplicity. They are simple to do and effective. All right, my friends, try this pattern interrupt and let me know how it goes. Until next time, be well.