Why You Get Triggered (And How to Fix It)

Name: Why You Get Triggered (And How to Fix It)
Uploaded: 2026-02-25T22:00:32+00:00
Duration: 1 min 23 s
Channel: Jake Burhans
Description: In this instructional video, Jake Burhans explains that emotional triggers arise because past experiences are stored in the body as unresolved emotions…

25 Feb 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:23

In this instructional video, Jake Burhans explains that emotional triggers arise because past experiences are stored in the body as unresolved emotions. When an external event resembles the original situation, the stored emotion re‑emerges before conscious awareness. The root cause is the suppression or resistance to the original feeling, which causes the emotion to remain encoded in bodily physiology. Burhans proposes a solution based on non‑resistance: relax, avoid labeling the feeling, and treat the trigger as an opportunity for growth. By meeting the triggered emotion with a pattern interrupt—such as a state of calm or peace—the memory becomes labile and can be reconsolidated, re‑encoding the bodily memory from anger/frustration to peace. He references memory reconsolidation research and suggests practicing relaxation and pattern‑interrupt techniques to re‑wire emotional responses.

Chapters

All right, listen up. I'm going to explain to you why you're getting triggered and how to change it. So memories are stored not only in the mind as a story, but in the body as an emotion. The reason that an external event triggers you— someone says something to you, a situation happens, a sales call, you run out of money, whatever the trigger is— is because you had an experience in the past. You didn't like how that feeling felt. So instead of being relaxed and letting that emotion complete its biological, its physiological process, you suppressed it. Or you made up a story about it, or you acted it out, or you resisted it in some way, which stored it in the body. Now every single time you run into that external event, it triggers that emotion and it comes up, right, before your conscious mind can even think about it. And every time that emotion comes up, it's trying to release. But every time that you tense up and you suppress the emotion, you go, "I don't wanna feel this," you're keeping it stored in the body. So the solution is to relax, is to practice non-resistance. You basically need to look at triggers as opportunities to expand. That trigger happens, and if you relax and you don't label the emotion, you don't label it as good or bad, you don't make up a story about it, and you just sit with it, it's gonna dissolve, right? It's called memory reconsolidation research. You can look into it. But every time an emotion is triggered, it becomes what they call labile or editable. And if you can meet it with a pattern interrupt, with a new state of being, relaxation or peace instead of the anger or the frustration you've been meeting with before, you're gonna re-encode that memory in the body to be associated with peace instead of anger or whatever the past emotion was.