Emotions are like a trigger; the moment you pull it, the bullet of reaction fires before thought can intervene.
Bruce Lee - 1940 - 1973.
This morning, a fire inspection was conducted in the building in which I live. I had no notification, and it was by chance that I had decided to go home and change into smart casual for a business breakfast I was about to have, rather than stay in my smart gym gear.
It’s a busy building in that there are a few busybodies who live here.
Everyone was out in the hallways, and I was wondering what the kerfuffle was about. It seemed no one else was aware of the inspection either.
Where across the course of your day today, could you consider where it might be that you gauge your level of compliance?
By that, I don’t mean how often you check your fire alarm system.
I mean the more subtle form, the emotional compliance. The internal wiring.
The kind that gets triggered when someone knocks unexpectedly on your door, or in your psyche.
We often comply without realising. Not out of safety… but out of conditioning.
You nod when you want to shake your head, you say yes when your gut says no, and you smile to smooth over discomfort, your own or someone else’s.
These are the quiet triggers.
The ones that flare not from fire alarms, but from tone, timing, or tension.
A look. A text. A silence.
And if you’re not aware of them, they run you.
Like outdated safety protocols that no longer apply but still get followed, just in case.
Where across the course of your day today, could you consider where it might be, that you identify and write a list of all your triggers?
This may sound like a curious process, but the idea is to be trigger happy, rather than trigger crappy, when you get triggered.
My smoke alarms go off at the slightest bit of smoke. I mainly cook steak in the backyard over coals, and I only have hot showers just before bed. On the occasional occasion, I am so tired that I forget to turn on the exhaust fan, the smoke alarm goes off, and all the busy bees start to buzz and get annoyed at me.
Now, my early to bed, early to rise,
Keeps me away from those meddling spies,
Who whisper and mutter and dramatise,
My habits and actions they seem to despise.
These hot shower alarms are at 8 pm, so it's not a huge inconvenience for the neighbours, but one of many things they get upset with me about.
One neighbour didn’t see or hear me coming as she was gossiping to another about the fact that I don’t recycle.
I popped up around the corner and called her out on this. She said she went through the rubbish and that because there was Berocca in one of the rubbish bags, she assumed it was mine. I don’t use Berocca, but my response had quite a few B words in it.
I was triggered.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be trigger-happy.
Not in the action-hero sense. Not in the let ’s-blow-things-up kind of way.
But in the everyday way. The unconscious, unfiltered, automatic kind of reaction we all have when we feel something deeply, usually before we know why.
And this morning, it struck me:
What's the purpose of being trigger-happy?
Because when a trigger lands, and they always do, what matters isn’t whether it arrives…
What matters is whether you observe it.
Where across the course of your day today, could you consider where it might be that you observe the triggers in your environment that aren’t necessarily on your original list?
There used to be a TV show when I was a kid, called “Hey Hey It’s Saturday” On that show was a segment called “What cheeses me off”
Viewers would write in with their cheeses and their offs.
I remember thinking how many of the things that cheesed people off wouldn’t have cheesed me off until I thought about how I might feel if it were me in the story.
Trigger awareness is self-mastery.
The mind, once stretched by a new way of thinking, can never return to its original dimensions.
It’s the same with your body, it’s the same with your finances, and it’s the same with your emotional default settings.
So the next time you're triggered, pause and ask, “Am I reacting or responding?”
“Am I behaving in a way that supports who I say I want to be?”
Because emotional triggers are like little truth tests.
You don’t fail them.
You just get to see where the real work still lives.
Here’s the thing. Awareness doesn’t mean you never get triggered.
It means you notice the smoke before you panic about the fire.
While you’re thinking about that, think about this and have a Gr8 day!
Be well
DL
"A trigger isn't about the other person. It’s an echo of your own unfinished story."
Esther Perel - born August 13, 1958.