Tim Arrigo explains how being triggered by past learned reactions drives unhappiness and maladaptive behaviors like overreacting and defensiveness. He advises identifying your triggers, understanding the thought patterns beneath them, and reducing their frequency, duration, and intensity through self-reflection and emotional regulation.
The one thing you need to change more than anything. This one thing is the reason why you're unhappy, the reason why you're constantly overreacting to situations, why you're defensive, why you're guarded, why you're contemptuous, why you stonewall, and why you have angry outbursts. This one thing in your life is holding you back, and it's the fact that you're constantly triggered. You're triggered, and you're not triggered because of anything in the external environment. You're triggered because of things that happen internally. The things that happen internally are the things that trigger you. We're never disturbed by external events. We're always disturbed by the perceptions that we have about them. The emotions that you feel when you are triggered is a byproduct of the perceptions that you have regarding the situation. I talk to so many men every single day inside the Total Breakthrough Academy, and this is the one area of their life that when we work on it, when we remove the barriers to those triggers, guess what? The frequency of the triggers goes down, so you don't have them as often. The duration of the triggers goes down, meaning You don't— they don't last as long. You don't stay in that state as long. And the intensity of those triggers goes down, which means what? The potency, how strong it is, goes down. Now, how do you get those 3 things, the frequency, duration, and intensity, to decrease? By what? Understanding your thought process, locating and identifying what your actual triggers are and what they're connected to. Because triggers are all about the past. A trigger is just a memorized reaction. It's just a memorized action. And a trigger can only be a trigger if it's connected to something from the past. It's any internal experience or external experience that is hardwired with specific events in my life where I've engaged in whatever behavior I engage in when I'm triggered as a way to, what, cope or survive. Your triggers, your reaction to those triggers, 90% of the time is something that you learned worked for you in a certain environment. You learned that it was productive in one environment, but it becomes counterproductive in another environment. What served you in one environment— overreacting, getting angry, shutting down, stonewalling, avoiding, pleasing, What you learned in one environment becomes counterproductive in a loving union. Identifying the triggers, removing the barriers, and understanding what they're connected to is your key to freedom. Because guess what happens when you're no longer triggered 24/7? And guess what happens when you are triggered, but you can quickly, quickly regulate that? Guess what happens? You gain back control of your life and you step into a position of empowerment in your life that you never thought was possible. And you understand that true control, true freedom, true power comes from the inside and controlling this and this, this 18-inch corridor between here and here. And you become less focused on micromanaging everything externally and you become more focused on looking within, self-reflecting, and being honest with yourself.
