What are Negative Emotional Triggers?
Emotions can be triggered by thoughts, events, people, or objects in the outside environment, or by events or sensations inside your body. You may find that spending time with a certain person may be a trigger for negative emotion. A weekly meeting with your boss may trigger negative feelings. If you can no longer play tennis due to pain, watching a friend play a match may trigger feelings of sadness. Emotions can be generated internally too. A scary thought ("I'll never recover") can trigger a negative emotion or spoil an existing positive emotion. Such thoughts may be so automatic that you may not even be fully aware of them. Haven't you ever felt sad for not apparent reason? Finally, sometimes a physical sensation, like fatigue, can trigger a sad, frightened, or angry feeling.
Negative emotions can make it harder to manage your pain. They can increase the strength of the pain signal so you hurt more, make you less likely to do the things that may help (such as exercise), make you more likely to do things that will make pain worse (such as drinking), and they may increase muscle tension.
Identify Negative Emotional Triggers
Before your can get control of your emotions, it helps to identify the situations, people, experiences, or thoughts that make you feel bad. You can start by completing a self-monitoring exercise to Identify Negative Emotional Triggers. The monitoring form can be found on the next screen. Print out several copies and monitor negative emotions and their triggers.
When you notice a. negative emotion (e.g., sadness, fear, anxiety, depression, loneliness), record the emotion and possible triggers on the form. After you have monitored for a few days, try to identify situations that seem to be regularly associated with negative emotions. Once you have identifeid some of your emotional triggers, you are ready to learn to manage them. Come back then to "Feeling Better" and complete "Manage Negative Emotional Triggers".