Catching Ourselves Before We React

Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today I'm going to talk about taming our triggers. So we all have things in life that test and trigger us. For example, maybe there's one person at work or in your family that can always say just the thing to get under your skin. Sometimes what triggers us is the traffic jam or the slow queue or the computer malfunction.

Whatever it is when we're triggered, we might lash out in anger, we might shut down or withdraw passive aggressively, we might try to now stress by reaching for food or alcohol or some other substance, or we might bury ourselves in work or shopping. We might even blame things on everyone else. We all have all of these somewhat automatic reactions when we get triggered, our own personal brand of trigger. And here's the problem. You know, many of these automatic reactions are pretty unhelpful ways of dealing with stressful situations in the sense that they often only make things worse, creating more suffering, stress and conflict, both for ourselves and for others.

So how can we then break free from these automatic reactions? How can we catch ourselves before we react? Well, basically, we just need to bring awareness to our pattern of reactivity before we act it out. So in the beginning, if we can just catch ourselves as we're being triggered and note to ourselves when the feelings of strong emotions are arising, you know, just mentally note to ourselves, okay, I'm being triggered right now. That's a really great place to start because awareness of what's happening is the first step to change. It starts to give us the mental space to step back from what's happening so that we can catch ourselves before we play out the reaction. So once we note, okay, I'm being triggered, we can just become present, maybe take a breath, and from there, we have the possibility to choose a different way forward.

We can respond instead of reacting. Whatever you do from there, you can choose a way forward with awareness instead of automaticity. And in this way, you gradually learn to tame your triggers and respond to life with awareness, clarity, and wisdom. So that's the invitation for today, to practice taming your triggers as best you can. As always, thank you for your practice and your presence here with us.

And now let's settle in for today's meditation.