4 Simple Steps to Create Coherence in the Body & Heal Emotional Triggers

Understanding why you feel “triggered” emotionally is your best first step.

When you were younger, if someone spoke behind your back for example, harmed you physically, mentally, emotionally, or you witnessed any kind of abuse throughout your life, your nervous system essentially “hard wires” that into your autonomic nervous system as a biological memory. If it’s not fully integrated, this leads to a memory which is linked to an emotion. That memorized emotion holds the biological response of the original event.

When you happen to think about these experiences days, weeks, months or even years later, when it is brought to the forefront, it is brought back as an emotional trigger. Alternatively, if you experience something, say you get rejected as an adult or you run into someone you had a falling out with in the past, this can cause your body to remember these “hard wired” memories and make you feel emotionally triggered in the present moment.

How Triggers Feel Like

These emotional triggers will push play on the biological pathways that may make you feel anxious, sad, nervous, scared, or any other emotion that you may associate with the day it was originally formed. You may become sweaty, notice that you’re frantic, and feel the urge to get away from the situation you are currently in, even if it feels irrational to you at the moment. This is your “fight-or-flight mode” and creates a dominant sympathetic neurological tone.

There is no guarantee in life that nothing bad will ever happen to you. You may have grown up in a loving, supportive family environment, and then you experience big trauma later on in life. Or, like me, you may have had a traumatic childhood and used those experiences later on to jump-start your healing journey. Living in “fight or flight” mode puts you in a constant state of stress. Your nervous system is taking on so many new emotions, thoughts, and feelings, but isn’t able to process it fully.

You can also experience smaller things in your life that each have their own trigger that creates trigger “spot responses”. Letting these ongoing, mini triggers build up in your biology can lead to feelings of anxiety or depression over time. It can also leave you with physical aches, pains and diseases which ultimately diminish your feeling of wellness and impacts your life vitality.

For those who have created a pathway to healing focused on integrating these unprocessed emotions fully into the nervous system, these triggers show up less and less. Instead, these people have collected the tools and resources to continually integrate them into their biology and use them on their life journey. They have transcended their emotional triggers by creating a dominant parasympathetic nervous system with a state of ongoing coherence and I want you to be able to as well.

Read more: Dr. Sukhi Muker shares two ways of shifting away from letting fear control your life into a place of being far more present, conscious and connected.

Healing Emotional Triggers Through Coherence

The ultimate source of emotional triggers is unprocessed energy that’s stuck within your nervous system. 

A key way I assess if I have emotional triggers (or stress that needs to be processed and integrated) is by measuring Heart Rate Variability (HRV) and Vagal tone (10th cranial nerve). These two measurements are the greatest predictors of your long term health, wellbeing and quality of life. HRV and Vagal tone will be low if you have a lot of emotions coming up, and will be the signal that you need to work through any stress or trauma locked in your nervous system.

Because all the neurological centers are connected within your body and managed by your central nervous system, when one neurological center is triggered, the signal gets wired up to your brain, and you loose coherence. It is possible to process this stuck energy and re-create coherence within your body.

Creating coherence within your second neurological center is the key to transcending your emotional triggers.

Your second neurological center sits right below your belly button and between your hips. When emotions get triggered, they trigger in this place in your body, the superior mesenteric plexus. This is what leads to that awful gut feeling when you’re emotionally triggered.

As you begin to increase your HRV and Vagal tone by creating coherence, you will be living with more emotional freedom, greater health and quality of life. You will no longer be held back by the shackles of yesterday’s stress and trauma. 

Unlike a lot of people, I don’t believe in positive thinking and a “positive mindset” mentality for core authentic healing at the biological level. This is because if you are sad, depressed or have anxiety and only rely on positive thinking, it’s not strong enough to override an entire biological process. These emotional triggers are primal functions biologically in your body and the key to healing them is to address the root cause of the problem. 

In life, we have effects and we have causes. To be effective in creating the life we desire we don’t want to chase the effects such as anxiety, depression or physical pain. These effects are our body’s intelligence system telling us, “hey something deeper is going on in here”.

What is the cause of that effect? A stress or trauma locked within your biology and nervous system creating incoherence within your whole system. Address the cause, the effects go away.

4 Steps Of Regaining Coherence

1. Lie down supine on your back and close your eyes (sensory deprivation facilitates integration). Be sure your spine, head and neck are in a neutral position.
2. Place your hands 1 cm below your navel on either side, bring your attention and awareness to this area and connect with this part of your body.
3. Begin taking long, slow and deep breaths making sure with every inhalation your hands rise as you’re breathing into your belly and with every exhalation they collapse deeper into your body. The optimal breathing pattern is breathing in for 5 seconds, pause for 2 seconds, exhale out for 7 seconds, pause for 2 seconds, repeat. (This specific breathing pattern increases vagal tone and HRV which creates coherence within the autonomic nervous system (ANS)).
4. Continue this for 10 minutes; 5 days a week for 30 days to see results.

This four-step process creates coherence within your second neurological center by unwiring and unfiring old unprocessed patterns.

Coherence is a state that allows the ANS to go through neurogenesis which is laying new neurological hardware. As this occurs your nervous system will transcend the dominant sympathetic state of these triggers to become parasympathetic with more coherence. 

As you create more coherence, it allows you to process and integrate old stresses, traumas or challenges. You begin the process of being less controlled by your old or hard wired emotional triggers from the past and you can more easily manage your daily stress. You can have a memory or experience from the past that would normally trigger an emotional or reactive response and now you have space to pause and see it. Eventually as you continue to integrate these unprocessed patterns you become less and less affected by these past experiences. 

The more time you spend in a state of coherence the more you will be able to fully process and integrate any stress or traumas and get to the root cause of your emotional triggers. This will allow you to live longer, happier, and healthier than you thought possible. My wish for you is to live with full coherence within your body and life to feel deeply peaceful and healthy.