Anxiety Triggers: What are Anxiety Triggers?
Anxiety triggers are events in life that trigger or cause an anxiety response in your nervous system. This anxiety response could be an increase in your heart rate, tension in your chest or stomach, confusing thoughts that seemingly arrive unbidden, or an overall nervous and uncomfortable sensation that you find difficult to describe. As you begin watching for these events in your life, you can pick out some reasonably easily, but others are a bit more hidden and not so obvious.
Most of us go about our lives reacting to life events without giving much thought to the fact that we are in reaction mode most of the time. This is why I think learning about mindfulness is such a benefit, but I’ll save that discussion for another blog.
We live as reactive beings.
It behooves us to learn about what creates anxiety throughout our days so that we can learn the tools to adapt to the stresses and “act” rather than “react” all day every day.
Because we spend our days reacting to situations in life most of the time, I believe it behooves us to learn about our reactions and ways to control the nervous responses and anxiety resulting from everyday encounters. That involves learning about our triggers (automated responses) so that we can remove the trigger (if possible), train our nervous systems to respond in a healthier way (perhaps by desensitizing), or use our free will to manage some of the sneaky ways triggers manage to find their way into our activities when we aren’t watching for them.
Anxiety triggers are events in life that trigger or cause an anxiety response in your nervous system. This anxiety response could be an increase in your heart rate, tension in your chest or stomach, confusing thoughts that seemingly arrive unbidden, or an overall nervous and uncomfortable sensation that you find difficult to describe. As you begin watching for these events in your life, you can pick out some reasonably easily, but others are a bit more hidden and not so obvious. They start in our early days as children because, as humans, we are conditioned to look for threats in our environment and then learn to avoid or account for the danger. Primarily, we watch for physical threats to our bodies, such as dangerous animals and plants. Maybe it’s something more obvious, like open water or heights, that causes anxiety. When in cities, we watch for traffic. We watch for violent human beings who can find their way into our lives from several sources. We also watch for threats to our emotional well-being, such as bullying and emotional manipulation or embarrassment.
The sources of triggers are particular to who you are and the environment you grew up in. Triggers can come from anywhere in life. They can result from situations at home, school, work, recreation, or devotional time. Seriously, triggers can stem from anywhere. They can start in childhood or anytime in your adult life.
Spend a moment looking at what drives your anxiety and why. Look at the people in your life. Look at behaviors that bother you a lot. Is there a “beginning” in your history where that trigger started? What happened? Was there a routine occurrence of an event that leaves you, as an adult, wrapped in anxiety because that event repeated itself often? It can be seemingly minor as an adult looking back and easy to dismiss because you are labeling it now as a childish response. As a child, however, you had no such filter.
If you find yourself anxious when bringing up a memory, you know you landed on a critical anxious memory. Take three intense belly breaths, expanding your belly in front, and feel your ribs expand in your back. Expel each breath slowly over 6-8 seconds. Take a moment and write down what you remember. Consider getting some anxiety counseling to help you manage your anxiety because this is only one memory that makes you uncomfortable. There will be more to uncover; learning to work with these memories and automated nervous responses healthily will help you feel less anxious for the rest of your life.
