An offensive email from a senior manager drops into your inbox, a colleague takes credit for your month-long project during a meeting or bad news from a family member suddenly hits your screen while you are at work.
Immediately, your throat tightens, your heart races and hot anger or sheer panic threatens to hijack your professionalism.
In our high-pressure corporate hubs, we are constantly told to maintain absolute composure. This despite recent workplace mental health indicators suggesting that cognitive overload and burnout have made professionals more susceptible to acute emotional triggers than ever before.
Studies show that the physiological lifespan of an emotional trigger, which is basically the flood of chemicals into our system lasts a mere 90 seconds. And after that, staying in that state of anger becomes a choice fueled by our own internal narrative.
When an emotional trigger hits, your sympathetic nervous system initiates a fight-or-flight response. Your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for strategic decision-making and logic, suddenly switches off.
