My Anxiety Files - Triggers

Icy spiders running up and down the back of my neck.

            I learned the term “triggers’ while in therapy this year.  I guess I’ve known what they are and what they can do to my anxiety, but giving them a name and identifying my own emotional triggers has been invaluably crucial to not remaining a quivering heap for the rest of my life.

            An emotional trigger can really be anything.  It can be an event, or music, or a tone of voice, or a situation, or anything that stirs an emotion in you. The smell of baked bread reminds you of your grandma.  Every time you drink a certain brand of beer it you feels like you are in college again. Matthew Broderick reminds you of crappy high school memories.  Anything.

             The anxious have to be aware of these triggers because we have trouble controlling the severity of our emotional reactions.  Remembering your long lost grandma is one thing, but the triggers that bring back terrifying feeling or feelings of dread can ruin entire days, weeks, or months of our lives, and we might not even know why.  Something as innocuous as a distant car screech can unintentionally make an anxious person a complete wreck for an entire day.  The inciting trigger was just a noise that excavated feelings of a bad car accident, or the memory of a family member who died on the road.  Anyone can have these thoughts, but people who battle anxiety know these triggers can snowball out of control.

            I have several triggers.  I don’t think I’ve pinned them all down, but I may have isolated the big ones so I know what’s happening.  (Yes, writing about them will illicit the same feelings as the trigger.  It’s cool.  I’ll walk it off.)  First, my head.  Not my brain, my head. I absolutely cannot stand getting touched on the head.  When they were tiny, my kids occasionally whacked me on the head during playtime and I felt a surge of rage that the tiny little tap did not warrant.  Whenever I’ve bumped my head, it’s not just the pain, I feel like I need to punch someone.  It subsides, but there is still the mystery of why.  Maybe I got knocked around in the head as a little guy.  I don’t remember.  But this is a strong and immediate trigger.

            Another severe trigger is the sound of high winds.  I lived through the 2004 hurricane season in Florida, as did a lot of people I know.  Three massive storms hit our tiny little house and eventually took chunks of our roofing off.  This was the first time in my life I had prolonged anxiety attacks.  I had them when the storm hit, when there was news about the next storms coming, and while dealing with scared kids and power outages for weeks.  It was 3 or 4 months of hard core panic attacks. Ever since then, if it is windy outside, (even though I’m in Oregon!) I have trouble sleeping or concentrating.

            The beach.  I don’t have too much of a problem on the west coast, but the beach is not a source of fun memories like it is for so many other people.  The beach was a backdrop of my childhood, and it wasn’t cool.  Hot sand, grittiness, stickiness for salt water, warm sodas, douchey party people, the smell of Hawaiian Tropic.  I don’t like seeing it on TV much either.  (Save Lost, of course.)

            There are lesser triggers, of course.  Wealthy people, angrily vocal parents, turquoise, and Weezer’s Pinkerton album are a few.   Of course I have pleasant triggers, too. Smoked food always reminds me of my family’s camp in upstate New York.  Oranges remind me of having fun at Disney as a little kid.  (Buttery popcorn also brings me there.)  REM, Blind Melon, and Foo Fighters remind me of my kids.  Rush reminds me of good times in high school. Stephen Colbert triggers memories of my wife, and I see him all the time. Triggers aren’t all bad.  I’d even say for the good ones, I may be at an advantage because I may actually feel them stronger because of my attuned emotional antenna.

            I only write about this for two reasons.  I’d like everyone with anxiety to understand that the emotions that triggers stir within you can be handled and processed without your world coming apart.  Once you’ve recognized a trigger and it is out there in the world, you can treat it as such.  It’s like avoiding too much salt in your diet.  You try to stay away, but occasionally, it’ll get in there.

            The other reason is to create a little understanding from those who don’t have this problem.  There are millions of people with broken brains; their emotions are out of whack.  They aren’t weak and crazy; they are functioning adults with wonky coping mechanisms. Every once in a while when the wind blows or they hear an old song from the '70s they behave a little irrationally.  Be a little patient with your loved ones with anxiety, maybe they can return the favor when they have to put up with your dumb shit.