Tackling Your Triggers; Learning What Leads To Failure
Bad habits can happen to anyone. From late night snacking to a lack of motivation to work out, these bad habits can derail your desire to live a healthy lifestyle. More often than not, these bad habits can be traced back to some form of a trigger mechanism. Think about it, as humans we typically behave as a reaction to a feeling or an outside environmental factor. In order to change behavior, we need to look at what causes that behavior in the first place.
There are two core types of behavioral triggers: emotional and environmental. Today we will look at both types and analyze how they can derail your success.
Environmental Triggers
No person can exist in a bubble. Environmental triggers are those things that surround us everyday that can lead to negative behavior. It is important to recognize these types of triggers in order to overcome them. Some examples of environmental triggers could include:
- Social situations like holiday parties or dining out, especially if alcohol is involved. Drinks can lead to lowered inhibitions and allow for poor decision making.
- Certain types of foods can be an environmental trigger as well. Doughnuts in the breakroom or a candy dish at the office can lead to bored and/or distracted snacking.
- Large portion sizes or eating straight out of the package can also lead to bad behavior in terms of food. Without looking at the portion it is easy to eat more, even after you are full.
Emotional Triggers
Emotional triggers are a little more difficult to pinpoint and conquer. These include eating when bored, sad, or happy. Treating yourself when you have had a good day or even a bad day… all act as emotional triggers that derail progress. Some examples of emotional triggers include:
- Snacking to replace or enhance your feelings, both good and bad, without really being hungry.
- Allowing memories or habits to inform behavior, like eating more of grandma’s apple pie because of the happy memories associated with it.
- Using food to help you feel more in control when everything else is spinning out of control.
Tackling The Triggers
Identifying what your personal triggers are is vital to understanding how to conquer them. So often, when we are triggered we can find ourselves fall into a shame spiral of behavior. From minor setbacks to major self destruction, sometimes seemingly innocent and innocuous events can spiral into major emotional events.
Why do we have triggers? Well, in short it’s because we were all children once… children who experienced pain or suffering at one time or another. As children we didn’t always know how to handle those feelings. As adults, those feelings can come back and create some painful, embarrassing, or out of control behavior.
Perhaps it was a mean comment in elementary school or an embarrassing moment in middle school that now manifests itself as a need to snack. Maybe it was an insecurity in your youth that led to a reluctance to tackle your body image now. It is important to remember that EVERYONE has an embarrassing story or a difficult trigger. You are not alone.
In order to tackle these issues, one must really understand the triggers. The process of getting to know them can be difficult, but it can also be empowering. Knowing and understanding them can help us heal and become stronger and better people. Understanding the emotional and environmental triggers can prevent them from derailing your progress.
Getting By With A Little Help From Our Friends
Like we said before, everyone has triggers. The difficult part is understanding, addressing, and moving beyond the behavior. It is important to tackle these issues in a supportive and empowering environment. This is the goal of Maureen Wielansky and the Cooking Healthy Academy program. Together we help create a community that allows people a safe space to engage and interact, exploring their triggers in a healthy manner while creating healthy new habits.
Learn more about the Cooking Healthy Academy program today and sign up for our evening text reboot now.
