Triggers and Survival Mode

What is a trigger? And how it turns into Survival Mode.

Your feelings are bigger than the event. This is why, what it does to you, and how to get out.

By Judith Shekoni, creator of The Shift · Updated 20 September 2026
The problem

From trigger to Survival Mode.

Seven steps, from the moment something lands to the life you stop building.

  1. 1

    Where a trigger comes from

    Your body holds unprocessed feelings, and these rise to the surface when something similar happens again.

  2. 2

    Why it feels so big

    So your feelings are bigger than the event.

  3. 3

    What it does

    This overloads the system, and you react. Your body responds not just to the issue at hand but to the massive amount of energy released into your system, in effect shorting your circuit.

  4. 4

    How it becomes Survival Mode

    If this happens often, your system doesn't have time to recover and gets stuck in that heightened state. That is Survival Mode.

  5. 5

    Why it snowballs

    You are then much more easily triggered by anything: your child being slow, the car in front stopping, the people in front of you in the queue, someone banging your table. You can get caught in this loop. You live off adrenaline. You are wired. You become frantic, you lose the ability to relax and sleep, and there becomes little space and time in your life. Why you get triggered so easily.

  6. 6

    Why nothing gets done

    In this place everything feels urgent, a priority. Your system can't allocate appropriate energy to appropriate things. It treats everything as an emergency. From here you battle each day and nothing really gets done. And you risk getting ill, as your system is not operating properly.

  7. 7

    What it costs

    Dreams and goals get buried under the constant attack of the next emergency. Your life becomes just survival. Not thriving, and not building or creating something you dream of.

The way out

What The Shift does.

We come at the trigger from both sides: getting you out of the moment fast, and working on the system underneath so it stops happening.

  1. 1

    Know your triggers

    We teach you about triggers so you can notice yours and catch them in the moment.

  2. 2

    Detrigger

    We teach you how to Detrigger: get out of a triggered moment fast, and back to yourself. You Detrigger using the five steps of the S.H.I.F.T. Framework: Spot, Hear the old meaning, Interrupt, Find information and Take Action.

  3. 3

    Heal the system

    We then show you how to heal your system so you are not triggered by things.

  4. 4

    Resurrect the dream

    Then we take this new calm, sleeping, happy you and resurrect the dream that got buried under this constant loop of tension, anxiety and stress.

Free live · Tuesday 6 October · 7pm UK

Learn to Detrigger, live with Judith.

The Detriggering Workshop is a free live hour online. Come and see what changes when you stop fighting the reaction and change the state underneath it.

The Shift is personal development and education, not therapy or medical treatment.