The 4 types of triggers & why summer can be the most difficult season

The beach. The bottle of Whispering Angel. Vacations. 

It's summer, and boozy triggers are everywhere you look. 

Let's chat about triggers and their impact on our journey to sobriety. 🌱 A trigger is something that sparks a reaction, like reaching for a drink. 🍷🚫 

Here are the four types: 

1️⃣ Emotional triggers: These involve feelings that lead us to want a drink. 🥺 Like feeling lonely and using a bottle of wine as an escape. For me, grief was a big emotional trigger. It made me sad, and I used to numb this with drinking.

2️⃣ Environmental triggers: These are places where we would usually have a drink. 🏞️ Like the pool, a favourite restaurant, a concert, or even the bar by the office. One of my clients said that her back patio was a trigger - when the sun came out, it equaled porch torch time, and she felt the need to drink. 🌅

3️⃣ Exposure triggers: This is when we're in the presence of alcohol. 🍺🍸Like being offered a drink at a party or stumbling upon the wine aisle at the grocery store.

4️⃣ Temporal triggers: These are linked to specific dates or holidays. 🎉 Like the 4th of July, birthdays, or Christmas. One client told me every Saturday triggered her because she had spent every single drinking for years. 

Understanding your triggers is a key step towards breaking free from them. 💪 

Looking at this information, we can also understand why summer is so tricky because we're dealing with all four, often simultaneously.