Dallas Bragg explains how addiction triggers work: your brain floods with dopamine, signaling you to seek a high. You can interrupt this by slowing your breathing, grounding yourself, then choosing an opposite action like walking or calling someone. The counter-measure is personal, decided in the moment.
I think in order to get past triggers, you have to kind of understand what they are biologically. And so there's dopamine, the neurotransmitter in the brain that's released when it feels pleasure. When you get high, it's an escalated, a large amount of dopamine that gets released. So a trigger tells the brain that you're going to get on that ride again. So it's releasing this dopamine. What you have to do is understand that that's a biological reaction. So you take control of your body. You slow your breath down. You come to center. You start asking yourself, okay, what's happening in my body right now and how can I reverse this? That answer is really up to you. No one can tell you how to do that or what exactly needs to be done. Maybe you need to go for a walk right away. Maybe you need to call someone. Maybe you need to take a cold shower. Whatever comes to mind in that moment, your body's telling you, this is the opposite. This is what you need to do to slow me down. But you're in control, not the body.
