Triggered? How to Transform Stress, Anxiety & Trauma Into Strength

Ep 113. 

Feeling Triggered? Here’s What It Really Means – and How to Take Back Control In today’s fast-paced world, terms like stress, anxiety, trauma, and being triggered are thrown around constantly — but what do they really mean? “I’m so triggered right now” has become a common phrase in everyday conversations, often used flippantly. But underneath this language lies a serious, scientific process: your brain and body reacting to deeply rooted emotional and psychological stimuli.🔍 So What Is a Trigger, Really?
 A trigger is more than just something annoying or uncomfortable. It’s a psychological and neurological signal that activates our fight-or-flight response — the same mechanism tied to PTSD, chronic stress, and trauma. Loud noises, crowds, or a negative comment from someone can instantly activate stored emotional responses, causing anxiety, panic, or even anger.🎯 But here’s the good news: Triggers don’t have to control you. By becoming aware of your mental and emotional triggers, you can learn to regulate your responses, build emotional resilience, and even use positive triggers — such as exercise, music, breathwork, or mindful movement — to bring yourself back into balance.💡 Want to feel less reactive and more in control? Recognizing your symptoms of stress — physical tension, irritability, overwhelm — is the first step to rewiring your response. When you shift your perception, you shift your reality. Instead of spiraling into chronic stress, you can learn to pause, reset, and recover. This turns what used to be a breakdown into a breakthrough.✅ Whether you’re dealing with trauma, emotional burnout, or just daily stress — you have the power to adapt more effectively.🧠 Understand your triggers. Shift your state. Reclaim your peace.🌍 Subscribe, follow, and share this message — someone you know may need this today. Take care. Walk well.

Transcript

Welcome back folks to episode 113 of the Running Man Self-Regulation Skills Project podcast with me, your host Dr. Armando Dominguez, PhD in Health Psychology, licensed professional counselor and an adjunct professor at our local community college. What we're going to be discussing today is going to be triggers. Triggers on the good side.

What it is that brings us good feelings, those things that bring us up that we use as enhancers, performers, and also recollections of euphoric recall, if you will. And then those triggers that most everyone talks about, and those are the negative triggers and how our associative mind and our way of categorizing those things that are stressors and our way of associating things from old memories to teach us in a feed forward fashion can cause us to be very.

trigger sensitive. Now to kick the discussion off, we're going to start off with the term trigger and we'll kind of define what that is, not only in the common colloquial, the way people speak about being triggered or having triggers. This is usually something that is involved in when we are trying to describe what anxiety is, what is stressing to us, what might cause us anger. So the word trigger has actually been thrown around quite a bit and lost a bit of its

Defined nature when we're talking about it in the common speak But what is an actual trigger one not the one on your pistol mind you but rather those things that are mental emotional and stress Triggers to us that might cause us to have negative recall or what's called a dysphoric recall and also those things that may cause me stress such as being angry or could cause me to go into an episode of anxiety panic or worse where I could get into a fight flight

or even anger to where destructiveness and that not only means outside towards others, but even towards self wherever the emotional becomes in quotes unbearable and we will qualify that in quotes term unbearable here shortly the other term that we're going to kind of determine as part of the definition of what we call triggers today is going to be

armando (02:59.138)
the euphoric trigger and there's a book that I'm reading right now. They have a really cool term for it and the writer author of the book, Martha Beck wrote beyond anxiety, curiosity, creativity and finding your life's purpose. has some really good techniques in there, but the term that I really liked, I'm going to lift it for this conversation is a positive term for a trigger that brings on euphoric recall and what we call a resource or maybe even a performance enhancer. And she calls it an

glimmer, J-L-I-M-M-E-R. And let's think about that here a little bit, but still trigger no less because we would call those the incident points or maybe even the kickoff point that would ignite a response, whether it be good or bad or emotionally, but in the more positive sense, the glimmer trigger, the positive trigger would be one that brings about good feelings. I will give you a, for instance, the method that I usually use to teach people to become self-aware of how our visual mind

mind works at this is before we even get it to the verbal so it's a very pre verbal lower level of brain reactivity that occurs whenever I am doing a recall of let's say a lemon so if you remember lemon you know that lemon or one of many tens of thousands of lemons you may have seen during a lifetime or even even tasted on your own or anything sour and whenever we think about it within a fraction of a moment we start to salivate or we start having gustatory sounds maybe even some stomach acid and growling in the stomach

increasing it could be a favorite food but for the argument today is going to be lemon why lemon because often that will cause a very distinct and easy pathway to follow and that is from the picture in our mind or recollection to the pituitary pituitary gland dropping but to or tell your hormone and therefore kicking off the salivary cascade so we have salivary amylase ready to digest in expectation of food now that's not a high thinking

in to acting and can also be remembering a favorite food for we may wind up going hmm and our body gets into it moments after once we start actually categorizing categorizing naming and labeling what it is I'm remembering as far as a favorite food for instance but the reason I want to pull this up is that it's very easy to bring up an event or a memory that can bring us negative responses not unlike what that but to

armando (05:28.752)
hormone did and mind you a hormone gets into the bloodstream and we have to metabolize that just like we would blood sugar versus an electrochemical response wherever Let's say we have a spinal reflex we touch something hot with our hand or a hand pulls back before we can think Goes to the spine as the hand is pulled back. It is made safe and there's no thought process has in higher cognitive Reasoning involved now it splits off and it gets there and we become consciously aware moments later, but not on like that It's on it's off. It's very much like a

so to speak, whereas with the hormone it stays in the body for a time and we have to metabolize that out. So

Why is this important? Well, whenever we're differentiating triggers, so to speak, we also have to differentiate what would be considered, let's say the length of time or duration or the shelf life of the response, so to speak, because this is very important to determine, well, how can I manage this? This is a podcast about self-regulatory skill and also self-awareness. So we know what to regulate in ourself. So let's start with this. So what would we call a

negative response? Well, things that make me feel bad. Well, feelings are going to be in the body. Okay, the emotions we may feel, the emotional load can become very uncomfortable if it is, let's say a fight flight, or I am feeling threatened or scared, shocked or angry, or even sad for that matter. Those things that make me feel in a more negative sense, not so good, make me feel out of balance or maybe less happy than I was.

moments later and let's say I wasn't happy at all but just kind of neutral but yet I go under the wave.

armando (07:07.326)
of what we'd call our baseline and now we're more on the depressive side, the more upset or angry side, or maybe even a little melancholy and a little dull, such that even our physical body starts to respond a little slowly. We tend to feel overwhelmed and exhibit signs of what we would call learned helplessness. And learned helplessness in the larger sense is what becomes depression when we're in an environment where one, we can't escape, two,

were helpless to change it and too hopeless to change because I don't know what to do to make the change happen if I could. And often anger comes out as a result and that can become self-destructive or even destructive of things and acting out and this sort of thing. So,

Triggers can bring about that whole cascade of different responses. And when it starts being plugged into what we'll call our social norm, our interaction with other people, this is where we start seeing snide remarks, snappiness, where people start betraying each other and talking behind each other's back. And we see this amongst women and men both. Women tend to want to preserve relationships and men tend to...

pretty much speak it straight in most cases and try to get it finished right then and there. There are different approaches with the same idea and that's get away from the pain or stop the pain, whatever way we can do that. And the way it manifests in the social sense whenever we're getting along to get along, we might start looking like snakes to each other.

We may be backstabbers. may be irritating of others. We may be overtly rude and ugly, or we may start ignoring people. And remember when we spoke on the last podcast about the currency of attention being the currency of life and kindness, whenever we attend to somebody and validate them by our, our, not only our presence, but our attention, but when we remove that attention or when we give a negative attention and negative commentary.

armando (09:04.816)
that will impact someone else's social scheme or their role so to speak, where they won't get accepted or they may get removed or kicked out of the group so to speak and whenever we were cave people a long time ago that would be not only tragic it'd be lethal. Doesn't matter how dominant you are when you're part of the pack, when you're by yourself you have this nice red one on the front that says look out for me.

But on the back, have a bright red six that says, come and eat meat on the baloney sandwich. Come on, tiger. I know you're hungry. And that's a bad thing. So whenever we are looking at triggers, often we speak about the negatives that come around. What are those triggers? And we talked about our associative awareness. will go towards the positives here in just a moment, but our associative awareness is something that we become aware of only when we point out what is triggering me. Often it is associative.

non-awareness that occurs whenever we have triggers and we don't know why things happen. Now the very fundamental aspect of this is that my environment feels unsafe. My assumption of safety that I walk around with that nothing's going to happen, nothing could happen, or I'm not worrying about the possibility of any happening at all that could be dangerous or threatening to me. This is where I walk around what's called the oblivious white zone by Jeff Cooper, famous marksman and gun.

So white means totally ignorant and not paying attention, not being aware, self-aware, or especially aware of the environment in the immediacy. And there's no preparation or expectation to need to prepare so that you're running around basically fat, dumb and happy, blissful and blind, so to speak. And they say that ignorance is bliss. And is it really?

In most cases, once we find out what's really going on, no, it's not. We feel kind of dumb, maybe even stupid a little bit and wish somebody would include us in, or maybe wish we would have been more aware. So being environmentally blind is also very dangerous to yourself and your progeny or offspring. So safety often is in our hands. So how can I meet my own assumption of safety is the question that needs to be answered. If that hasn't been met, then I'm probably more apt to be easily triggered by

armando (11:21.402)
things that are surprising, not expected. And what I'm going to do is kind of invoke one of the earlier lessons I taught in the earlier part of the podcast that talks about endless variation, never surprise. This is an old ninja principle that Dr. Glenn Morris mentioned in his book, Path Notes, but it is one that comes from Masaaki Hatsumi and the ninjutsu school, the legit ninja school from Iga province in Japan. But what is cool about this, if we really look at it, not unlike in math, constants never surprise. So why?

Why are we surprised in our environment and why is it that we wind up getting so triggered so quickly so often? Part of it is that lack of awareness of those things that are our triggers that I've mentioned earlier. So once we become aware of a situation where I have anger and I start talking to somebody and I start to slow down and pull back and really take a look at things and take it apart little by little.

We understand that whenever we have traumatic events occur, we tend to imprint certain things, details that are important that our brain says, you remember these bits, they were wearing a red suit with a white tie and they had a black pin and they were swirling wine in a glass whenever the trauma happened. So therefore I better remember every one of those details. Could be the smell, could be the sound, and it may not be those exact things that'll trigger you, but anything that may be remotely similar could become

not unlike a trigger so to speak. remember those things. And to point out that people that struggle with any kind of traumatic recall, not necessarily those with just PTSD but PTSD in particular, yes, or people that have anxiety and panic as a result of a prior trauma but no PTSD.

their memories tend to be hyperfocal towards certain details and those are the symptoms that they will remember, not symptoms but details rather, that they'll remember and the symptoms that arise from that have to do with

armando (13:14.444)
distorting what the memories like memory is malleable and Fidelity is low regardless of how well you say you remember things rarely do people remember with an exact photographic memory Perfection that just doesn't occur. We have an inclination We have only our perspective from our viewpoint from the first-person observer how I experienced that and it may be different from someone else and someone else could be there and not get the trauma that you get or the vice versa because of where

you're at and how you relate it to it. So often our body will remember those things as very important.

And let's say years later we go through an experience wherever we're, let's say, at a dinner with a friend, a good friend across the table, and they happen to have a glass of wine, no big deal, you see them drinking it. But whenever they put it down and swirl it a certain way, and it reminds you of the swirling glass of the person with the red shirt and the white tie that you remembered, even though it was just the action, maybe even the sound or the smell of it, or just the view wherever the liquid, red liquid of that wine swirling in the glass is enough that it will trigger

you may get angry and want to punch somebody as a result of that and not know why. But once upon review, we may realize that, that's what happened then that was similar and being able to take it apart takes time. Not everyone does that. And not everyone has the luxury of having a therapist or even being able to take the time to look at things that way. Some of us don't want to look at things because we may get close to the things that make us very triggerable. And that may actually found a

give us insight into what that trigger is and sometimes we spew that upset that anger irritability that stems from a fight-flight response that says I'm safe that's really just saying get away from here because I'm uncomfortable and it's species survival itself survival this is where we have to learn how to have compassion and patience with ourselves and take a little time and realize that

armando (15:16.14)
This machine that we have everybody and their mom that you've ever met everybody and their mom that you will ever meet from this point forward today listening to this going forward has the same wiring that you do and under the right amount of stress and duration they will react in very similar ways and some of it's very ugly some of it's very embarrassing some of it's tragic to say the least and there are many people that I know in my short lifetime

I've seen that are no longer here that as a result of believing that things were unbearable and they couldn't get away from things That they took their own lives and that's a scary thing now There are many that struggle and are victimized and I'm not speaking to these But there are many that believe based on what those triggers brought about those emotional loads That distorted what they were seeing and what they were believing at the time to the degree that they either hurt themselves someone else or they no longer are breathing above ground second one like the

of us and I'm not gonna say the word but you know what I mean. So the next point what I'd like to touch upon is the triggers in a positive sense these glimmers that Martha Beck mentioned in her book and I really love that term is really amazing because these are the things that are our performance enhancers these things that help us not only be better but do better and have outcomes that are not over a long lasting but evolve us in a sense to we become much more adaptive

much more flexible and response, much more creative and it lets us tie into those things that are not only our flow but our creativity wherever the art that

things within our hearts can come out and we can express and share that not just with others but with the world and with ourselves sometimes just a space outside of me where I do this and it just feels good that's enough and that's definitely a cool thing whatever that expression may be no matter how quiet you may keep it in your mind in your heart sometimes it needs to come out but these glimmers are the things that we if we like listen to music or play music for instance remember and they bring us good feelings that

armando (17:17.973)
lowers

our negative immune function in the sense that it is continuously responding to stress and this is wherever we cool down where we start going into a parasympathetic response wherever our vagal tone starts to settle down a little bit where we get off of the fight-flight merry-go-round that roller coaster that doesn't want to stop and we start minimizing how much perpetual chronic stress we have so therefore we cut down on the cortisol and the glucocorticoids and the inflammatory response that occurs

in our body as a result of being exhausted and being tired even though not under physical threat those responses that occur whenever one is threatened occur when we deal with a day-to-day stress and it can become misinterpreted but also these are the things that not only engender chronic stress and illness in our body but over time can develop into cancers and this this sort of thing

and heart conditions, arteriosclerosis, atherosclerosis, and other things such as arthritis that are all very tension and stress-borne, not unlike diabetes and the the dysregulation of one's metabolism, wherever we are more apt to get ill.

in the metabolic sense. That is really kind of wild, but these are the things that we develop if we don't learn how to glimmer, so to speak. So a couple of quick points. What are some glimmer methods or positive triggers that I can give myself? One is realizing that much of what I tell myself, myself speak, myself talk, how I talk to myself is very important to how I respond to my environment and how people respond to me. How I carry myself often has to do with how

armando (19:02.456)
I believe myself to be. Now there are times, yes, we may get after ourselves a little bit. The idea is not to derogate with heart and finality as if it's an absolute, but sometimes it's like, made that mistake. And sometimes there are mistakes that are costly, but the idea is not to punish yourself as a result because we are human. Allow yourself to make mistakes. If you have children, allow yourself to be imperfect and let them see you make mistakes and learn how to overcome them. And maybe sometimes laugh at yourself. That's an okay thing.

laugh at things sometimes. Not rudely or in a way that's disrespectful, but one where ever it's like, well, could have done better with that. And then move on to the next. And then we are less apt to be grasping at that idea or that ego of our, of our self image that we have that tends to become not only crystallized, but something that we protect with our own life. You ever seen somebody get upset because they're answering words?

and responses that are verbal with physical threat and anger and upset heart rate racing and physical tension, fist ball up, this sort of thing. What are they protecting? If your self image, your ego is merely a concept, an idea is merely cognition occurring, neurotransmitters firing, how substantial is it? When you stop thinking it, it doesn't exist, but don't tell anybody that they might get offended because what if it's real? Doesn't that mean we disappear?

That is rhetorical, but I'm also being comical. Well, technically, yes, we're in between those impulses. We have this continuous memory or idea of what it is that we are, but it's not us. It's merely our conception of who we think we are.

And our self-image is what we want people to believe that we are. Now, this doesn't mean we're liars, but we're actually projecting what it is that we want for ourself and what we'd like our world to reflect back to us. If we're putting out our best, we want people to reflect their best back to us too. We don't always get it.

armando (20:57.262)
But there's kind of an unspoken presupposed expectation there. That's important. So a couple of things. One is what is a good, useful trigger to bring about happy things? Sometimes maybe it's a picture. If you have a little baby or maybe a little puppy or a kitty and you see their picture and it makes you go, aww.

That's a good one and that will actually shift what it is that you're doing What's another thing that you can do the double sniff technique that we talk about? Inhale twice through your nose and that's something that dr. Hoogerman talks about that's been scientifically tested and Realizing that that actually shifts our gear in a physiological sense. It's not just merely changing your mind. Okay I'm not gonna be upset now It's not like that because our mind our cognition at that level is the least powerful of our brain the most powerful

part of our brains, that part that is autonomic, but it's also the part that's nearest that visual capacity where I think of things or recall things. may be triggered by the verb is in recognition, but whenever I pull up a picture of a lemon or a favorite food and I salivate, that physically changed me within a fraction of a moment, 150 to 300 milliseconds before it's ever conscious, higher conscious thought. That's pretty fast and pretty powerful, but that's also 400 times faster than your best reasoning. So don't kid yourself. We tend to overvalue our

cortex. And how can we use this understanding to make better triggers? By remembering those things that are important to us. Sometimes our triggers can be using our senses, smelling something that's very pleasant, tasting something that tastes good.

maybe even touching something soft and furry like that little blanket that we got from Amazon. And sometimes it's just listening to music that's good for us. These are things that do help us self-regulate. And when we associate those things with a down regulation, we do have a drop in heart rate. We do have a drop in perceived tension. And whenever you see that you have a way out and a way away, a point of egress that you don't necessarily have to stand and deliver, there's nothing that says you have to stand there and be in an

armando (23:02.286)
all out verbal punch out with somebody. That doesn't mean you're a coward.

Whenever we're talking about people that have been considered cowards and yellow were the terms that often came out of the Civil War that they had a yellow stripe running down their back or there were chicken or whatever. And most people would make fun when people would urinate or defecate themselves. And there are many that came back in World War II that didn't, for instance, understand physiology until the nineties, eighties and nineties, where we were able to recognize that that was an autonomic response when you jumped out of the plane over Normandy.

No kidding you crapped and pissed yourself, but they still went in there they still fought and took care of the boys that they went in with and brought their people back. That says a lot they were heroic, but they could not by their shame accepted fully 60, 80 years.

Age and they were unable to accept that until they found out that that's natural because they wouldn't speak of it They wouldn't dare because they didn't want people to think that there were cowards or yellow because they were going on a belief that was one faulty to a concept that was developed and Accepted just by primacy because everyone was repeating it and we didn't have the signs to break that down and and back it up With the sense that okay This is physiological not unlike animals that you can't they run and they get terrified and they they release their bodies

and urinate. No kidding, that makes them lighter, makes them faster and less apt to get toxic shock if they have a punctured bowel. When they're getting captured or eat or something's attempting to hurt them or eat them and when we understand that there's always more to what's going on.

armando (24:37.558)
We're also less apt to believe things the way they look, especially if our heart rate goes up and we start getting angry fast, we're more apt to become assumptive, believe what things look like, take things for black and white. It's up and down my way or the highway versus the possibility that there's some gray area there and I may be misinterpreting. So one of the first things you can do physically is to step back, literally take a physical step back and not inhale, but rather exhale.

This grounds us and centers us a little bit, but that also slows down that cascade that takes us into fight flight much too quickly to where it could become out of control and then become something that later is one of those things that I have to live with the consequences and circumstances that come from whatever it is I may have done good, bad or indifferent. That's a lot of information, a little bit on self-regulatory skills and also what triggers are and what positive triggers are glimmers and how we can use them to resource.

and improve our life and our sense of well-being so to speak in our environment and also what you can do specifically physically like breathing out instead of sucking wind to help keep one from going into the fight-flight response. So what I'd like you to do

is if you listen to this podcast and you like the content, please share it with people. Go to the YouTube channel and subscribe, like, and share if you can. That'd be wonderful. I would love to have that happen. And on top of that, I've been speaking to a few folks that I'd like to interview and we're getting closer and closer to that getting gathered up. And what I'd like to tell you is thank you for your listenership all over the world. want to tell you thank you for the comments and also the feedback that I've been getting by email. And if you do have any comments,

or feedback, please send it to the gmail at running man get skills project at gmail. I'd love to hear from you. Take care. Walk well.