How to Handle Emotional Triggers and Regulate Your Nervous System
- Tajda
- 6 days ago
- 8 min read
We all get triggered (all the time). We all deal with emotions (all the time). And learning how to regulate your nervous system when you’re deep in it—when the fear, overwhelm, frustration, or shame hits—is one of the most important life skills you’ll ever master.
With the right tools, you can regulate your emotions and nervous system within minutes. This means that you return to a grounded, safe, and empowered state, where you’re able to access your intuition, see new solutions, rewrite old programming, and step into your full potential.
This blog post unpacks the key insights and tools I shared in my latest podcast episode about navigating emotional triggers and regulating your nervous system. If you’re on an emotional rollercoaster right now, listen to the full episode so you don't miss any powerful insights I shared.
What Is a Trigger, Really?
A trigger is anything that disturbs your emotional peace.
It starts with something external (someone says or does something, you think of a memory). You make that mean something by interpreting it through the filters of your programming (consciously or not). That interpretation impacts your emotions.
This all happens within a heartbeat, so you really have to slow it down to see it.
Here’s how it works:
Trigger ➞ Interpretation (Thought) ➞ Emotion ➞ Behavior
This is the cognitive triangle in action. Your thoughts create your emotions, and those emotions influence how you act.
That's all nice and well when you're thinking empowering thoughts that create inspiring energy in your body and lead you to courageously taking action.
But when you’re triggered, you divert straight into survival mode.
Inspiration, peace, excitement go through the window, your system is now purely focused on you surviving the situation at hand.
Let's have a closer look at what happens in the moment of impact.
What’s Going On in Your Nervous System?
There are two branches of the autonomous nervous system (ANS):
The sympathetic nervous system
The parasympathetic nervous system
When you're emotionally triggered, your sympathetic nervous system kicks in, which is "in charge" of the fight/flight/freeze response.
If we were to slow it down, here are the processes that kick off in milliseconds:
Your amygdala (the part of your brain that is in charge of emotional processing) quickly assesses whether a particular situation is a treat or safe.
If, based on your past experiences, beliefs, the collective unconscious or even intergenerational trauma, it labels the situation as a “threat" it sounds the alarm.
You get a rush of cortisol (stress hormone, which releases over a longer period of time) and adrenaline (stress hormone, which releases within seconds).
The energy goes into your brain, which immediately starts to think of how you’ll get out of this dangerous situation - your brain shifts into a beta brainwave state.
Your jaw tightens. Your heart races. Breath becomes shallow. You feel heat, pressure, tightness.
Your body is in panic mode and all your old beliefs, stories and programming from your childhood (everything that hasn’t been healed or transformed) come to the surface.
Sometimes it feels like time & space don’t exist. You’re feeling EXACTLY the same as you did when you were 6 years old when your mom forgot to pick you up from kindergarten.
“I’m not good enough. I did something wrong. No one is ever listening to me. It’s all going to fall back on me.”
You’re in SURVIVAL MODE, in contraction, not thinking logically, just focusing on how to survive!
This isn’t random. It’s your nervous system trying to protect you using information from your entire life history and sometimes your lineage.
But here’s the thing: while your body reacts as if there’s a bear in the room, there’s no actual bear. It's just your interpretation of the situation.
And it's your interpretation that hurts.
If you don’t know how to regulate your nervous system, you can stay in this aroused state for hours, days or even weeks, not processing your emotions, not giving your body a break.
This can lead to chronic stress or anxiety, sleep problems, digestive issues, emotional dysregulation, burnout - when you're in this state, you're not in your power and you're not playing at your highest level.
🎧 Tune into the full podcast to hear more about the nervous system.
The Other Side of the Nervous System: Your Superpower
The parasympathetic nervous system, on the other hand, is your calm, creative, regulated state. It's in charge of resting, digesting, relaxing - this is where healing happens.
And... this is your natural state.
When it’s active:
Your breath deepens.
Heart rate slows.
Your brainwaves slow down - your brain shifts into alpha or theta brainwave state.
This safety allows your body to release feel-good hormones (oxytocin, serotonin, dopamine)
You feel present, safe, grounded.
You access your power and self-leadership.
When your parasympathetic nervous system is activated you shift from survival mode to creator mode. From disempowerment to empowerment.
This is why learning how to regulate your nervous system is so important! When you're in a relaxed state, you can:
step into your full potential
find productive solutions and create new opportunities
reprogram and transform your old limiting beliefs and unconscious programs
Emotions are Just Energy In Motion
With a trigger, a specific type of energy gets generated and activated in your body - we call that energy in motion EMOTIONS.
While each emotion has a certain flavour, density and vibration, they're neither good or bad.
We tend to put labels on certain emotions and say: anger is negative, happiness is positive, but really, they just "are".
It's all just energy that comes and goes. When you understand that, something powerful shifts. You stop fearing the emotion and can start tending to it.
One of the most profound insights I can offer you is this:
You are not your emotions - in fact, you're so much bigger. You're the container that holds the emotions.
When it comes to triggers, most of us don’t know:
What to do with our energy
How to deal with our emotions
How to come back into a state of calmness, peace, and empowerment, aka how to self-regulate and not self-abandon
How to do that fast, not wait for weeks until the emotions subside and you start to feel better, grounded and at peace once again
And that's what we'll look at next.
Regulating Your Nervous System
This is a great way to start self-regulating because doing a couple of very simple exercises can bring your heart rate down, slow down your breath, lower stress hormones and help you activate your parasympathetic nervous system (the one that’s in charge of resting, digesting, relaxing + where you access your highest potential).
Here's what you can try out:
Calming breathing exercises (they bring more oxygen into your body and into your brain, and help relax your body)
Box breathing (inhale 4 – hold 4 – exhale 4 – hold 4)
4-7-8 breathing (inhale 4 – hold 7 – exhale 8)
Sighing intentionally (try three long audible sighs)
Tapping the back of your neck (stimulates the vagus nerve)
Calming affirmations: “I’m safe. In this moment, I’m okay.”
Essential oils like lavender, ylang-ylang, or chamomile
You’ll know you’ve activated your parasympathetic system when your breath deepens, heart rate slows, and your thoughts soften.
Tending To Your Emotions
Since most of us don’t know what to do with all this energy, we either:
Avoid feeling the emotions
Indulge in the emotions
Neither strategy is really helpful because you keep carrying that energy and emotional tension with you over days, weeks, which impacts your motivation, wellbeing, happiness, creativity.
♦️ Avoiders tend to:
Keep themselves busy and distract themselves with work, food, scrolling
Rationalize what happened instead of feeling the emotion
Disconnect from the body and body sensations
None of this is bad, it’s just a pattern of behaviour: this is how you protected yourself when you were going through a challenge in your childhood.
It's important for you to create safety around certain emotions and learn how to hold them / stretch your capacity of being with them.
♦️ Indulgers tend to:
Ruminate on what they're thinking, rehash what happened, retrigger the moment of hurt
Stay stuck in emotional loops - this is when an emotion (which typically needs 90s to move through your body unless you keep it there by telling yourself a story!), turns into an emotional state which can last for days, weeks or even months
Identify as the emotion, can get stuck in feeling all the feels and self-loathing patterns
It's important for you to learn how to move the emotions through your body + question the thoughts that created the emotions (thoughts create emotions).
🎧 Want to know more about indulgers and avoiders? Listen to the entire podcast episode here.
How to Tend To Your Emotions
Instead of avoiding or indulging, tend to the energy and allow the emotions to move through your body.
Here's what you can do:
👉 Name the emotion: “I feel fear in my chest.”
👉 Breathe into it (any calming breathing exercise will help
👉 Move your body—walk, shake, stretch
👉 Journal or free-write with no filter
👉 Embrace the emotions with compassion
👉 Visualize the emotion like a child needing attention, not suppression
This helps the energy move through, instead of getting stuck and replaying in your system for days.
🎧 There’s also a guided meditation on the podcast to help release emotions—don’t miss it.
These tools are great for tending to your emotions in the moment. Of course, in some cases, they may need to be worked through with a professional in coaching or therapy.
Create Your Self-Regulation Toolkit
Here’s a bit of homework for you. Create a simple self-regulation toolkit so you know exactly what to do next time you're triggered.
This will help you shift into relaxation instantly and interrupt the pattern early:
🔹 Write down 1 affirmation that soothes your system.
🔹 Choose 1 breathing technique you’ll use.
🔹 Pick 1 tool for emotional release (journaling, movement, meditation, etc.)
Final Thoughts
Emotions aren't going anywhere. Triggers aren't going anywhere.
So one of the most important life skills you can learn is how to regulate your emotions and your nervous system.
When you master this, you’ll feel empowered to deal with any kind of situation life throws your way.
🎧 If you want to go deeper into this life-changing work, listen to the full episode here. It’s packed with value, tools and insights that can transform your life from the inside out.
Ready to take the next step?
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From my heart to yours
Tajda 🌷🫶
Author
Tajda Glazer
Professional Life & Career Coach, Psychological Consultant and host of the podcast "What If It Is Possible?"
I'm a lawyer turned Professional Life & Career Coach and I've helped hundreds of clients go from feeling lost, anxious, burned out and stuck on the hamster wheel, to finding their purpose and turning their dream life & career into reality. I believe in making changes from the inside out, in a way that feels easeful and aligned with you. ✨ I host the podcast "What If It Is Possible?", mentor students in reaching their goals, and help leaders elevate their conscious leadership skills.
