Show Notes:

On today’s episode we are wrapping up our Trigger Happy series by talking about trigger prevention. Let me be really clear that when I say trigger prevention, I do NOT mean AVOIDANCE. Preventing triggers is an active state, it means being engaged and working to reduce the likelihood that something potentially or actually triggering will yield a strong stress reaction. It is a pre-emptive effort at unpairing or limiting the extent to which a stress or trauma-related pairing produces all of the survival responses we’ve been talking about throughout this series. Avoidance on the other hand, is about just not coming into contact with triggers at all. Avoidance is a passive state…although it doesn’t always feel passive when you’re driving way out of your way to avoid driving by that one intersection or have to find an entirely new place to shop to avoid that one grocery store, or whatever the case may be. Avoidance is trying to let your brain off the hook to not have to do the big reaction, but as we discussed a couple of weeks ago, it actually creates a whole new set of problems. You see, as we avoid something our brain thinks, yep, this is a great idea, and it will work harder and harder to continue avoiding that trigger…and it will start to generalize that trigger to other pieces kind of like it…and as we avoid more we actually create increased anxiety and reaction to the trigger. Not so off the hook then, are we?

For our purposes, I am going to break trigger prevention down into two major categories that I’m going to call Personal Resilience Strategies, and Event-Related Resilience Strategies.

Let’s start with personal resilience strategies. Have you ever noticed the difference between doing something challenging on a day when you have had lots of rest, feel calm, feel meaningfully connected to others, and so on; versus on a day when you’ve barely slept, feel frazzled and find yourself feeling lonely and adrift?

When we face triggers, it is energy depleting and a resource suck. If we enter those moments already depleted, there is only so much we can draw from, and once that is tapped out it becomes a LOT harder to cope with the trigger and manage it. This opens up a window for the trigger to feel so much more intense and to hijack you so much further into your stress reactions, further entrenching the trigger as an association with negative and stress-related experiences. So, when we talk about personal resilience strategies, we’re talking about the pieces that help us build a buffer so that when we interact with triggering we are entering the moment with the fullness of our energy and resources in place. If we can focus on building our personal resilience by investing in intentionally attending to and growing our buffer, we are more likely to prevent, or at least, reduce the intensity of impact from a triggering experience.

Like I said before, this isn’t an avoidance strategy – it’s an active strategy that requires that you invest in your buffer continuously and consistently. I know that sounds like a lot of work, but if I could promise you that investing here was guaranteed to yield less frequent or intense triggering, wouldn’t it feel worth it?

When we talk about personal resilience strategies, the focus is on strengthening the parts of our brain that help us feel calm, collected, and anchored – buffered from or quickly responsive to the random things that come up and try to knock us over. Working to enhance things like sleep, fitness, nutrition, hydration, being grounded and mindful, feeling nurtured, connected and cared for by self and others, and limiting exposure to counter-productive pieces like screens, substances, and other mindless numbing or counter-productive distraction. These are the focal points of personal resilience.

Now, I know that covers a lot of ground and might feel a bit overwhelming to tackle. Don’t get stressed out, the goal is not to go from depleted and struggling to do any of these pieces to jumping all in to all of them. That won’t be sustainable and sets us up to fail. For now, focus on just a couple of tweaks and then build off of it.

Need some ideas? Choose two of these suggestions and work on them for a week or two, and then try adding in one or two more. Slowly but surely, you will grow your personal resilience and it will invariably have an effect in supporting your capacity to navigate triggering. And side-benefit, they have a bunch of other advantages too! Try going to bed 10-20 minutes earlier than you might normally. Drink one full glass of water first thing after you get out of bed in the morning. Take a quality B complex supplement daily. Turn off screens 30 minutes before going to bed. Stretch for 5 minutes before going to sleep or stretch for 5 minutes on your lunch break. Delay alcohol or substance consumption by drinking one full glass of water first. Talk or text with a friend or loved one. Connect with someone who makes you laugh. Spend 5-10 minutes outside in the fresh air at some point during your day.

If you’ll notice, none of these things are big things. They are all small and do-able. If you incrementally work to bridge some of these pieces into your daily routine, the additive effect will be consequential in helping to grow your buffer and support your personal resilience as you face challenging days and triggering moments.

If you want to level-up your personal resilience beyond the starter suggestions I’ve listed here today – I’m going to suggest two things. First off, go to episodes 9-14 of season 2 where we did our Back to Basics Brain Health series and covered topics like sleep, fitness, nutrition, screens, mindfulness and so on, in detail with experts within each field. You’ll get additional suggestions to grow your personal resilience repertoire from those episodes. The other suggestion I would make is to check out my Beating the Breaking Point resilience training program designed specifically for First Responders and Front Line Workers. The program was built based on my experience working with those on the front lines and seeing the gaps in your training that set you up for major blows to resilience and sustainability, and I packed everything that is most important for you to know, along with tons of tools to develop a personalized resilience action plan, into the program. Those who have gone through the training have given really positive feedback and we’ve seen the program used by full staffs in an effort to promote resilience and wellness broadly within organizations. You can learn more by clicking the link in the show notes. Just as a quick heads up, we will be running a promotional reduced rate coupon code for this program starting next week if you want to snag the course for $100 off. Listen in next week for details or keep your eyes peeled for those of you who are on our email list or follow me on social media, we’ll post about it there as well.

Ok, let’s move on to Event-Related Resilience Strategies. There are two parts to this category – the first is about risk reduction, and the second is about harm reduction. Risk reduction is a front-end prevention strategy. It’s about trying to minimize or reduce the risk that stressful or traumatic things will happen in the first place. Let me clarify again that this is NOT the same as avoidance. An example of avoidance might be avoiding an intersection because I was in an accident there and I find it triggering. An example of risk reduction is to be strategic about when I go to this intersection; practicing safe and defensive driving practices while I drive, particularly in this intersection; reducing distractions like the radio or other ambient noise while I go through this intersection, and so on. In terms of work-related stress or trauma, risk reduction might look like capping the number of shifts I put in for or limiting how much overtime I choose to take. It might look like being picky about which shifts I work or who I work alongside in an effort to promote my wellness and reduce the risk that I’m left as the only experienced worker with a crew of rookies, for example. It might look like setting really firm boundaries around taking my breaks to step away from the intensity; or being firm with protocols to prevent demands from coming in through backchannels and overwhelming my workload. The goal with risk reduction when it comes to event-related resilience is to reduce the chances of being thrown into high stress quite so frequently. It gives our brain the sense that we are actively working to protect it and safeguard it from an excess of damage. And when we do this in coordination with personal resilience strategies, we give our brains their best chance of being able to manage through stressful or triggering experiences when they have to with the greatest capacity possible – which means that our brains are then more likely to be able to utilize our trigger management tools to help us navigate through triggers rather than getting sunk by them.

On the flip side of risk reduction, which is a front-end effort at preventing exposure to bad things; harm reduction is a back-end effort to reduce the degree of impact that an event has when something bad has happened. When an event happens, we have some choices about how we choose to hold it. How we tell the story, even just in our own heads, matters in terms of how our brains will connect meaning and significance to the event. If you have a call that is just catastrophic in terms of facing human suffering, the story you tell is likely to focus on the overwhelming intensity of what took place. And that’s ok – it’s honest and accurate…but it may not be complete. Our tendency is to really focus in on HOW awful that thing was that happened, and how we feel like that’s a representation of the world around us on a larger scale. But we can lose track of recognizing or giving any air time to who we were within the situation. How we did the best we could. How we followed the training to the letter. How we could only take actions with the information we had at the time. How we survived a hard thing rather than telling the story from a position of victimhood. Seeing the others who helped and knowing there is good in the world in the form of the helpers. Recognizing that while we didn’t shape the event that happened, we stepped in to shape the outcome it would have for those involved, and that that matters.

When we tell a story of the value we brought, the effort we brought and the meaning that has to the story, we hold the story differently. Now let me again be careful in clarifying that I don’t mean “spin” the story to be all positive and sunshine and roses – I mean offer yourself a more complete and accurate narrative of the events that unfolded that include the good along with the hard. Because neither exists in isolation. I am asking you to put intention into holding the tension.

Interestingly, what we know about trauma is that how we tell the story of a traumatic event, dictates in significant ways the likelihood that we will experience longer-term consequences of that experience including PTSD. If we want to reduce the harm that an event might have on our lives, we need to be conscientious about how we are telling ourselves the story of what took place, and we need to get intentional at shaping that story, not to lie to ourselves, but to hold a more accurate and full portrayal of what took place that balances what was terrible with what we can be proud of or know we tried, and so on.

When it comes to triggering, harm reduction event-related resilience looks like how I tell the story of my interaction with a trigger. Was it uncomfortable? Yes. But I also stayed in my body while I was triggered, and that felt different than kind of numbing out or reacting without conscious awareness. I also used my trigger management tools and was able to regulate my reaction quicker than I have been able to in the past, that’s cool. I know that it sucks to be triggered, but I also know that I did things differently this time and that if I keep it up, the trigger won’t stay so strong. I can be proud of me to trying and facing something uncomfortable, that says something cool about me that I’m the kind of person who can face hard things. And from there, I am going to further invest in my personal resilience strategies to continue to refine and grow my buffer to give me what I need when inevitably I face additional triggering. I might brainstorm additional ways to engage in risk-reduction event-related resilience strategies around this trigger to be proactive for the next time, and I’m going to trust the science that tells me that if I keep this up consistently my brain will gradually unpair this connection and I won’t have to work so hard to mitigate my reactions to this random trigger forever.

Reminder: The Self-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders & Front Line Workers is OPEN for registration until 11:59pm on Monday February 28th. If you are a new listener and you don’t know about the dare, here’s the quick run down: It is a 5 day challenge that invites participants to build a killer self-care plan to help protect and support sustainability both at work and in your life. You get daily videos that cover 5 key domains of self-care, along with worksheets and guides to help you develop and implement your own personalized self-care plan. You also get access to a private Facebook group where we connect, discuss challenges, problem solve and celebrate successes together…and I love giving away a few prizes along the way to keep you engaged and motivated – because investing in yourself in this kind of way is so important and I want to make sure that you see it all the way through. You’re worth it. If you are ready to be a dare devil, jump here to register, and make sure to register early as we are capping registrations.

Episode Challenge:

What two Personal Resilience Strategies will you be trying out over the coming week?? – Willing to share?? I would LOVE to hear from you, give a shout out on social media or shoot me an email and tell me what you’re working on!

Access our free downloadable Managing Trauma Triggers Workbook

Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.

Additional Resources:

Access our free downloadable Managing Trauma Triggers WorkbookSelf-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders & Front Line Workers– Registration is open! We are capping registration, so register early, it’s only $10! Sign up here.

Learn more about the Beating the Breaking Point resilience program, including our no-risk money-back guarantee. If you are ready to take your resilience to the next level, get ready to register – we’ll be sending out a reduced rate coupon code next week so you can score this program for $100 off!

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