Routinely, when Andrew walks into his house, one of his “hot buttons” activates, leaving him fuming. That term—hot button—refers to something inside us that, when triggered, results in emotional hijacking. We lose it.
“Before I walk in, I tell myself to just let it go and keep cool,” he explained. “It doesn’t work.”
What triggers him? “The whole place is a hot mess,” he continued. “Dirty dishes in the sink, clothes thrown everywhere, tables piled high with junk mail. Everywhere you look, it’s chaos.”
Susan, who finds herself in a similar conundrum but with a different trigger, feels equally challenged by her knee-jerk emotional reactivity.
“I work closely with a team, and one of my male colleagues consistently mansplains to us women, many who have more experience and are better performers,” she explained.
Pulling Triggers
So-called hot button triggers, whether from a person or a situation, can elicit a powerful emotional reaction, and very abruptly. In the brain, this stimulus-response occurs in less than one-hundredth of a second. What’s more, once it manifests, the so-called rational, thinking brain (prefrontal cortex) goes offline. The emotional brain has the steering wheel.
Now, while virtually all of us have hot buttons, the intensity of our reactions often leaves us bewildered. “Why is this such a big deal?” we may wonder. Well, core values, things we believe are important, are integral facets of one’s identity, so when others act in ways that undermine or ignore them, it can feel like callous indifference, at best, and a mental slap in the face, at worst.
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