Understanding your emotional landscape: How feelings shape your well-being

How to identify emotional triggers

Emotions come from somewhere. Since what triggers them varies individually, it’s often a personal journey to identify unique triggers of your own. Emotions show up daily; it is good to integrate this process as an active routine over a period of months.

1. Always pay attention

When performing this activity, the trick is to treat an emotion as the epicenter. Once you feel something, the next step is to identify what it is. Is it anger or sadness, possibly a mix of two emotions like jealousy and anger? As you do this, try to gauge the severity of the feeling as well; this could be an indicator of an underlying mental illness.

The next step would be to identify the manifestations of the emotion itself in the moment. Are there any felt symptoms like faster heartbeat, sweaty palms, confused thoughts, or a cramping stomach leading to diarrhea? For instance, you may notice that anxiety presents with faster heartbeats and sweaty palms.

2. Identify emotional patterns

The next step is to know how these emotions appear over a period of time, not just in the moment.  The trick to this is mapping out the body’s memory of said emotions, because the body does store emotions. It requires deep analytical and critical thinking and being open to accepting part of you that you may not like.

After identifying an emotion, ask yourself, when does this feeling show up? Recall all the times you had similar feelings and what happened before and after. Was it a gradual buildup, or did one thing make it a sudden onset? How long did it last? What was the immediate and long-term response to those episodes? This allows you to have a map of how emotions operate in your body, and you can be able to predict and mitigate such in the future.

For instance, you already identified anxiety as an emotion. You reflect and realize that you’ve had anxiety episodes close to 6 times the past month alone. When you dig deeper, you find that the attacks were triggered quickly when exposed to stress of any kind. The response you had was to sweat and shut down completely and need space to calm down over an hour or so. The attacks, while sudden and quick, do not seem to carry on for long or reoccur at close intervals.

4. Emotional monitoring

Now that you have identified your emotions and their patterns, it is crucial to have a way of accessing them over time. This activity allows you to map out what your dominant emotions are and areas where you are improving or getting worse. It also leads to a better understanding of what some people term as confusing emotions, which could be just a mix of emotions that are easily identifiable if you know what to look out for.

Tools to do this could be journals and tracking sheets. Take note of emotions, frequency, and related behaviors, and see if the behaviors are well regulated after some time or if the toxic reaction patterns have refused to go away. Note any changes made in the physical and social environment and how they have contributed to the emotional landscape.

After writing down about your anger outbursts as well as other emotions like sadness and anxiety, over time you realize that anger shows up a lot. You also realize that you get verbally loud after the triggers and may even throw hands. Afterwards you feel regret, but your ego doesn’t allow for apologies. You can then chart down solutions to that and monitor their progress. Things like, when angry, I'll walk away and not talk back, and if I do, I'll reach out later to say sorry.

Check back after a while and note if you followed through with your solutions and if the anger pattern changed. If there is no change, restructure the solution or seek out professional aid, as it could be a deeper emotional issue needing psychiatric evaluation. Do this for other emotions as well; do not neglect identified emotions.

5. Regular testing of understanding and capacity

Isolation can fool you into thinking that you have emotionally evolved into stability because you lack exposure. In order to know if your triggers no longer work or behaviors have changed for the better, performing controlled and uncontrolled exercises goes a long way.

Expand your social network and have an accountability partner if possible. This will put you in a situation where you get tested. For instance, someone could abuse you out of the blue in a social setting, thus presenting an opportunity to gauge how you will react. Do you stay calm or revert back to aggression? If you stay calm, then voila! Your emotional stability is improving.