Emotional triggers have a root cause which can be any kind of physical, emotional, or mental harm or abuse you sustained throughout your life. These experiences can become hardwired as a biological memory through your autonomic nervous system. Healing emotional triggers requires time and active awareness, which you can achieve by creating coherence.
Understanding Emotional Triggers
A biological memory forms when a memory is not fully integrated, causing it to become linked to an emotion. The emotion associated with that memory holds the biological response you would feel whenever you were reminded of that past experience. This experience would be considered an emotional trigger.
These emotional triggers can activate biological pathways that could cause you to feel nervous, sad, anxious, afraid, or any other emotion associated with the original experience. You might start sweating, notice that you’re agitated, and feel compelled to leave the environment you’re in, even if it seems ridiculous at the time. This is your “fight-or-flight” response, which results in a sympathetic neurological response.
You can even have minor life experiences that have their inherent trigger, resulting in trigger “spot responses.” Allowing these minor triggers to accumulate in your body might cause depression or anxiety over time. It can also cause bodily aches, illnesses, and diseases, lowering your sense of well-being and reducing your liveliness.
What is Coherence?
Emotion coherence is a metric that measures how consistent an emotional experience is over time. In the state of coherence, the autonomic nervous system undergoes neurogenesis, allowing it to come out of the sympathetic state these triggers cause you to be in. The triggers become more parasympathetic with more coherence.
Healing Emotional Triggers by Creating Coherence
These triggers appear less frequently in those who have developed a recovery path centered on properly integrating these unresolved emotions into the neurological system. Using the right tools and resources can create a dominant parasympathetic nervous system that is in a state of continuous coherence, allowing them to conquer their emotional triggers.
Any stress or trauma stuck in your body or nervous system can create incoherence. Creating coherence or regaining it is fairly simple and involves a deep breathing exercise. Here are the steps you need to follow:
- Lie down in a neutral position.
- Put your hands a centimeter below your navel on either side and allow yourself to become aware and connect with this area.
- Take slow and long deep breaths, breathing into your belly. Monitor your breathing pattern and try to inhale for 5 seconds, hold for 2 seconds, exhale for 7 seconds, hold for 2 seconds, and repeat.
- Practice this breathing for 10 minutes, at least 5 days a week.
With a month of regular practice, you’ll be able to see results as your neurological center creates coherence by unfiring and unwiring unprocessed patterns.
Creating coherence in your neurological center is necessary to heal and overcome emotional triggers. It allows you to process and integrate any stressful, challenging, or traumatic events. Thus, when you recall any emotional trigger, you’ll have the opportunity to pause and reflect on it, and it will affect you less. Staying in a state of coherence for longer can help you in understanding and healing emotional triggers.