How to stop getting triggered | Lauren Nanson | TEDxSouthHowardAvenue

foreigner let's play two truths and a lie, you already know this game, so I'm going to tell you three things about myself and you have to guess which one is the LIE. I like to put ketchup on my steak. Two. I never understood the coveted facts. three I really don't care about Star Wars How many of you think you know the LIE well? I'm not going to tell you because this is the game I'm actually playing trying to activate them. It worked? The truth is that they activate us all. From time to time, how many of us think about asking ourselves the question what is the difference between the truth and the trigger?

I know I used to do what my triggers told me to do, like one time I saw this guy walking barefoot and I

stop

ped wearing shoes. That same day I experienced a brief sense of empowerment as I freed my toes until I realized that shoes were a really cool invention and would put them back on right then and there, whenever I saw something that went against conventional, I just joined right away. It was fresh. I got out of college and became an adult for the first time and I was starting to question some of the mindsets and beliefs that I grew up with and I think we all go through a season where we do this so I moved to Oregon to get some totally different. from my native Texas culture, but just when I was starting to feel like I had found my way out, my entire inner world became toxic and became unbearable.

You see, I would be fine one moment and then the smallest thing would make me break out and I would have emotions. The daily breakdowns in a conflict I was constantly dealing with was that I no longer trusted anyone in authority and I was especially

triggered

when someone had a strong personality that reminded me of my father, so I was invited to a group dinner at his house. this marriage. and they were quite welcoming, but the husband was very charismatic and told a lot of jokes like my dad, so we were all sitting in his living room and suddenly I started crying and everyone was looking at me wanting to know what was happening. wrong but I couldn't even speak there was really no truth to what I felt the man hadn't done anything wrong but I ended up leaving without explanation.

I look back at this behavior and think how embarrassing, how did I do it as a 24 year old adult? I didn't have enough control to get through dinner with a good partner. I was that person, the trigger person. Have you ever been that person? Honestly, for me it was like the more aware I became, the more emotionally sensitive I also became and became. to the point where I just couldn't stand life, I became seriously ill and no matter how clean I was eating it didn't get better, in fact it got worse until I lived in a nightmare with both my emotional and physical health problems and then I found out it was cancer, so because of how sick he was, he could barely walk across a room.

I was forced to

stop

working, leave the state I had moved to, and move back home to my parents in Texas, which I admit. It was my worst fear because instead of running away as far as possible from the pain that came up around my dad, I would have to face it every day, so one day I was lying in bed feeling terribly sick from the chemo treatments and I decided to kill. At some point I came across a Winston Churchill film. I knew a little about Winston Churchill at the time. I knew he was a British Prime Minister in a World War II hero and people quoted him all the time.

That's it, so I thought. I should probably watch it and find out why it was so important while watching the Winston Churchill movie, I noticed that he demonstrated behaviors that I wasn't entirely comfortable with, he yelled impatiently at his secretaries and he had this wild wit that he would use. against his political opponents I felt so uncomfortable that I almost turned off my laptop in disgust. I guess you could say I was pretty activated, that was the first time a hint of self-awareness surfaced and I thought to myself, why am I

getting

so offended by a dead person?

War hero who possibly saved the 20th century and if the world saw him that way how could he think he knew better? What if instead of my anger telling me something about Churchill's character, my anger told me something about myself in a moment? I walked away from the person who provoked me that I couldn't control and became the only person I could control. I didn't have a word for it at the time, but I was starting to develop a little thing called resilience. Resilience is something that Honestly, the emerging generations, Millennials and Gen Z, don't do very well, although we are well aware of the psychological buzzwords that have become common and I am sure many of you have said these words as often as I do.

My boss is so narcissistic. I am eliminating toxic people from my life. I'm dealing with the trauma of my childhood, but even as these psychology words fill our vocabulary, mental health in America is on the decline, teenage depression and suicide rates have increased. since 2014. And right now one in seven women at American colleges think she has a mental disorder. So what caused this mental health epidemic? The answer is multifaceted and complex, but there is one thing that is definitely making it worse and that is the culture of overprotection against anything that causes negative feelings, as Jonathan Hate and Greg Lukyanov point out in their book The Pampering of the American Mind by Avoiding Triggers It is a symptom of PTSD, not a treatment for it.

In fact, therapists treat trauma patients by exposing them to the things that bother them in small amounts at first until they learn to get used to avoiding the triggers altogether. actually make the situation worse in the same way, the more we as a generation avoid the people and points of view that bother us, the more power they actually have over us it's time to redevelop the Lost Art of Resilience a study by The Neuroscience Society is fascinating on this topic. The study suggests that simply by applying resilience we can modify the genetic receptors in our brain, so in this study a group of mice were placed in socially traumatizing situations and most of them contracted stress disorder.

PTSD, as expected, but a small number of mice did not develop PTSD, so the scientists left them aside as abnormalities, except for those that did. PTSD, they medicated some of them with antidepressants, so then they compared all the brains of the mice and this is what they found: the ones with PTSD had developed negative gene receptors that caused anxiety and depression. The ones they medicated saw a slight reversal in the gene receptors, so they weren't that bad, but here's the fascinating thing: Those mice that never had PTSD to begin with had taken the negative receptors from the traumatizing situation and reversed them into positive receptors in the other direction, far outperforming medicated mice, these resistant mice prove that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, but only if you let it.

I will never forget the day I chose to be stronger after Winston Churchill offended me, after that, instead of using my triggers to lash out at anything that caused injustice, I started. Using my triggers as a personal litmus test to see if I could stay strong and in control. I was able to let go of the resentment I had towards my dad and began to gain value from the relationship and now I love being around men. those who remind me of him I really do, but years later, after I started developing this resilience muscle, I didn't even recognize myself anymore.

I found it easier to accept things that were conventional if I found them useful and many of them. of them were useful as shoes. I'm no longer the girl who has emotional breakdowns in public for no reason. Instead, I'm here talking to all of you, so how do we build resilience? Well, there are many things involved, but today. I'm going to teach you a strategy that will help you stay present and clear-minded the next time you feel motivated and you'll be able to do deeper work later, but this strategy is to help you be strong in that moment and it's called CEO. because you will become the CEO of your own mind and it is an acronym so C stands for calm, this is the first step when you feel compelled to calm down and whether your tendency is to fight or flee, you resist it and calm down your adrenaline. means imagine, this is where you ask yourself what the person I want to be would do if you have a vision of how you want to be, you will have something to aspire to when your emotions are high and O means opposite action, this is where you do the opposite of what you want to be. you feel like doing, so it's not enough to have a vision of how you want to be, you have to take action to make it a reality, so let's practice this together.

Calm CEO. Visualize the opposite action. and I'm going to ask for your participation, so I would like everyone to close their eyes and I want you to imagine that you are in a social setting and the person who provokes you the most walks into the room, now imagine what they are like. You feel when you see this person, some of you probably feel pretty excited, so with your eyes still closed, let's go over to CEO C, calm down, go ahead and calm his adrenaline. The opposite is a vision, so have a vision of what the opposite wants to be like. action, so now take an action opposite to what your trigger is telling you to do, okay, go ahead and open your eyes.

How many of you found your opposite action to be unbelievable? Then eventually, with practice, you will flow through this exercise like the calm of clockwork. Visualize the opposite action. and as you develop resilience, you will find yourself in situations where it is vitally important it will affect how you respond when someone at work falsely accuses you it will affect how you respond when a family member tries to pressure you it will affect how you interpret things on the internet that are trying to steer you away from things that you disagree with there is no area of ​​life that this skill does not improve resilience will connect you and empower you and prevent you from living in a world that simply is not In reality, you will see that your relationships begin to improve, you will begin to find the good in people you never thought you could, but it will take a lot of courage to make this change, so I would like to leave you with a quote: Fear is a The courage to react is a decision Winston Churchill, thank you.