Self-Awareness Saturday | Developing Awareness (Part 5) | Learn Your Emotional Triggers

Self-Awareness Saturday | Developing Awareness (Part 5) | Learn Your Emotional Triggers

Last week I went over the fourth step, seek out honest feedback, so this week I'm going to over step five: learn your emotional triggers.

If you missed last week, click HERE to catch up and read it!

People with a high sense of self-awareness can identify their emotions right as they are happening. If you don't have a higher sense of self-awareness its easy to repress your emotions and even deny their causes.

"The strengths that have helped you to succeed are also your greatest emotional triggers when you feel someone is not honoring what makes you special."

When your brain recognizes that someone has taken or plans to take one of these important things away from you, your emotions get triggered.

What’s your reaction? Its fear or anger and you rationalize with yourself as to why it makes sense to feel that way. Maybe you lose trust, maybe you lose courage and maybe you react in such a way that it actually could negatively impact your relationships in the future.

The crucial thing you have to do is -- catch yourself reacting when your emotions are triggered. Once you are able to do this, then you can determine if the threat is legit or not.

Need some examples to get your gears turning?

Here are some pretty common ones:

Need for acceptance

Need for attention

Need for balance

Need for comfort

Need for consistency

Need for freedom

Need for fun

Need for love

Need for order

Need for predictability

Need for respect

Need for safety

Need to feel included

Need to be in control

Need to be liked

Need to be needed

Need to be right

Need to be treated fairly

Need to be understood

Need to be valued

Some of these needs will be important to you but others won’t hold any emotional trigger for you.

When something emotionally triggers you, you react because you feel as though you aren’t getting or will not get one of these things that are so important to you.

If you want to start controlling your own emotional triggers here’s a good place to start. Skim back through that list and find the three that most frequently set off your emotions when you don’t get those needs met. Be honest.

Let me just say for any of you wondering while reading this, no those needs are not “bad.” There’s nothing to feel ashamed of. If you want an answer, here you go. The reason you have these needs is because at some point in your life, the need SERVED you.

What I mean by that, for example, is let’s say that your life’s experiences have taught you that success occurs when you are able to maintain control, establish the right environment, and surround yourself with those who appreciate you for being that way.

Conversely, the more you become devoted to these needs, the more your brain will be searching for situations that threaten your ability to have these needs met. This is when your needs become emotional triggers.

If you don’t consciously acknowledge the need that is triggering your emotional reaction, you will become enslaved to the need. However, if you are honest with yourself about your needs, —that we had expected people to treat us in a particular way and had hoped our lives would go as planned—then we can begin to see life more objectively.

So what do you do when you’re in the middle of being emotionally triggered?

You shift your emotional state in order to think through what your trigger is.

Practice these 4 steps:

First, relax; take a deep breath to release the tension in your body. Then, detach from the situation, clear your mind of all thoughts. Then, drop your awareness to the center of your body just below your navel. Feel yourself breathing. Finally, focus your mind and choose one word to describe what emotion you want to have or who you want to be in this moment.

It may sound crazy, I get it - BUT developing awareness is all about the mindset.