How to Ground Yourself When Triggered and Overwhelmed

If you often find yourself triggered, it can leave you feeling overwhelmed and disconnected from your life and relationships. But, before discussing how to manage triggers, let’s first define what a trigger actually is. A trigger is an automatic response to something in your environment that unconsciously reminded you of a previous trauma or threatening event.  In other words, your body or nervous system noticed a potential threat while assessing your environment.  

Defining triggers:

Triggers are your body’s attempts to keep you safe. After trauma, your body may interpret perceived threats as real and kicks in to overdrive trying to prevent another trauma from happening. There are a number of ways your body kicks in to overdrive during these moments, and those symptoms often get in the way of your everyday life. In trauma treatment, we typically notice the following symptoms: 

➕ Hyper-vigilance:

Heightened sensitivity and watchfulness over your surroundings as a way of avoiding a future trauma or stress. You might find yourself paying greater attention to your surroundings than usual. You might also seek excessive reassurance to know something is safe before proceeding. 

➕ Increased Startle Response:

Having an exaggerated response to things in your environment that are loud or overwhelming, signaling to you that something is potentially threatening. This might look like a big jump in response to someone walking into a room unexpectedly or ducking instinctively when you hear a car door slam. 

➕ Increased Energy and Anxiety:

Increased energy as a response to a potential threat is meant to help you get away from or fight the potential aggressor. Again, this is meant to help you survive something that your body has measured as dangerous or potentially traumatic. 

Grounding after a trigger: 

So let’s talk about what happens after the trigger. Although your body is trying to protect you, often you might been triggered by something that is not actually dangerous. So, here are a few steps for helping yourself feel grounded after a trigger: 

1. Make sure you are actually safe. This means you might need to slow down, get into a quiet space, take a break or step away from the stressor and breathe deeply. Ask yourself if what you are currently experiencing is actually dangerous. If the answer is “yes”, then your body is literally doing its job and your only task is to get yourself to a safe place. This can look like leaving, saying “no”, drawing a boundary, or stopping whatever you need to in order to establish safety. Remember, you can’t actually begin to heal or recover from trauma if you aren’t relatively safe. You can read more about that in our blog here.

2. Loosen your jaw and remove your tongue from the roof of your mouth. Our bodies react without a lot of conscious direction from our minds. In other words, we unconsciously clench our muscles and hold our bodies in certain positions as a way of readying ourselves to respond to a perceived threat. Remedy this by consciously releasing some of those anxious bodily responses by telling different parts of your bodies to relax. Start with your mouth and gradually move through relaxing other parts of your body. 

3. Remind yourself of your surroundings. One of the simplest ways to ground yourself after a trigger is to become mindful of your surroundings. This gives your mind a temporary break. Practice this exercise of identifying the following things in your environment:

   • 5 things you can see

   • 4 things you can feel

   • 3 things you can hear

   • 2 things you can smell

   • 1 thing you can taste

     Continue with this exercise until you feel relatively safe in your surroundings. Do not worry if you don’t reach baseline or complete calm. It’s nearly impossible to do that after a spike in your nervous system.

4. Focus on comfort. Once you’ve sufficiently calmed down, spend some time thinking about things you can do to comfort yourself. Your body and mind have just experienced something very stressful and the kindest thing you can do is to offer yourself some comfort. Think of things that are historically comforting to you and plan to do those things for yourself. Here’s a short list of ideas:

   • Calming tea or favorite beverage

   • Hot or cold shower

   • Warm blanket while watching your favorite movie

   • Loving on your pet/animal as a way to feel connected to another being while not feeling pressured to interact with another human. 

If you find yourself triggered often, this is a gentle reminder that you don’t have to continue living with this amount of stress. At Woven, we have trained trauma therapists that can help you understand your trauma response and guide you to find healthy ways to manage the distress that happens after a traumatic event.  

If you need support, you can book a free 30-minute consultation call with our warm and engaging therapist matchmaker. She’ll help get you connected with a therapist who’s a great therapeutic match (California residents only). We provide online therapy and have therapists who are trained in EMDR therapy. We also offer many different types of trauma therapy groups. All of our therapists specialize in trauma-informed care, and informed trauma therapy.  Book a call now and get started on your healing journey. 

All therapists at Woven Together Trauma Therapy are trauma-informed and specialize in treating all forms of trauma. We also offer EMDR, Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy, and Brainspotting which has shown to be extremely effective in treating and healing trauma. Want to read more about our unique therapy options?

These blogs talk more about the basics of EMDR:

• What is EMDR?

• EMDR: Your Questions Answered

• Woven’s Approach to EMDR

You can read more about Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy here:

• What to Expect in Your First Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy Session

If you would like to learn more about Brainspotting, check out our blog: What is Brainspotting?

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