Understanding Anchors & Triggers

An anchor is when your state changes in response to a trigger

We all have absolutely loads of anchors in our minds. We may not realise it, but we have. It is an anchor being triggered off that can cause an unexpected reaction from an individual.

An example of an anchor is when you walk into a cinema and get the smell of popcorn hit your nose as you walk in the door, and then you head straight for the counter to order up a bucket.

The smell, known as the stimulus, triggered a desire for the popcorn, known as the response, and hence is it any wonder that cinemas don't tend to invest in extractor fans near their popcorn units to get rid of the smell!

This is a basic anchor, but you will find many other anchors if you think about it. For example, when I go into a Starbucks it is an anchor or trigger (same thing!) for relaxation for me, I always feel chilled out in Starbucks and just wandering in and breathing in the smell of fresh coffee is enough to change my state.

Some common positive anchors can be :-

Hearing an old song on the radio that takes you back to a holiday, or a time in your past when you were really happy.

Looking at a photograph of a wedding or event and remembering what a good time you had.

Picking up your old teddy bear from when you were a child and it bringing back memories of being safe and worry free.

Some less positive anchors can be :-

Hearing a police siren when driving and panicking you are being stopped for speeding.

Seeing someone who looks similar to someone you had an argument with once and it brings back the anger.

Being lonely or needing comfort and going to the kitchen to find it

So if you do something and can't understand it, for example why did you suddenly eat a piece of ham out of the fridge, then you need to look for the anchor.

The way of looking at it is "How did you know that it was time to do that?"

Using the example of the cinema I knew it was time to buy popcorn when I got the heady smell of butter as I walked in the door, so if I don't want the outcome, the buying of the popcorn, then I need to stop or avoid or change the trigger.

With the less positive anchors such as overeating when you get a trigger then the good thing is that you weren't born with anchors, you didn't come into this world knowing that when you hear the horns in the street outside that an ice cream van is about to arrive, therefore if you learn an anchor you can also unlearn or collapse that anchor.

The reason that sometimes people "struggle" with triggers is that they feel they are out of control. People will say "I ate one biscuit and it triggered a binge of the whole packet" but actually that isn't true.

The thing with anchors is that they are in the domain of the unconcious mind, in other words they aren't concious thoughts, so you don't think "I can hear a police siren so it must be a police car", you just know because your unconcious mind knows what that sound is.

Therefore when you get a trigger to overeat it can make you feel out of control because your concious mind doesn't get time to say "Hang fire, you don't want those biscuits" because you have already eaten one.

Summing up, you basically need to find the anchor or the trigger for everything you do that ultimately has a negative outcome.

So as I said above "How did you know that it was time to do that?"

The next time you eat something you shouldn't, ask yourself the question, if you ate because you were bored then work it back until you find the trigger. Once you know the trigger then you are in control of whether or not you choose to release the trigger.

Have a great week! (that's an anchor for it's the end of this week's newsletter!)

Mike :-)