Challenges or triggers are the people, places, or things that “set you up” or overwhelm you and may lead to unsafe behavior.  A challenge can be as broad as anger or as specific as “when my friend says…” It is important to identify your challenges and the things that cause you high levels of stress.  What are your challenges?  Who are the people that rile you up?  What are the emotions, places, relationships, and events that stress you out?  What phrases can you not bear to hear?  
 

We all experience pain.  It is our response to pain that defines us.  How do you deal with emotional and mental pain?   Do you:
 

• Ignore your pain?
• Feed your feelings?
• Isolate?
• Focus on other people’s problems?
• Lash out?
• Drink or use drugs?

 
Learning to deal with your emotions is an important life lesson.  Here are few things to keep in mind to appropriately handle feelings.
 
Practice open communication:

How do you see your world?  Do you see things as right or wrong, good or bad, all or nothing?  This type of thinking is known as “dichotomous” or “black and white thinking”.  Black and white thinking leaves you viewing your world in mandates.  “I must be perfect or else.”  “I must be thin.” And when you only view your world in mandates (shoulds and shouldn’ts) you are unable to see alternatives. The problem with this type of thinking is that you leave yourself with very little room for mistakes.

 
We strive to understand why things happen to us and around us.  Understanding why events happen can help us respond to the event.  It’s important to have an accurate understanding of why the event happens so we can choose the appropriate response.  We can evaluate behavior in two ways.  We can attribute behavior to a person’s disposition or to external circumstances.
 

Anger is a powerful emotion that can shape our relationships.  Our experiences with anger may leave us seeing it as being positive or negative and shape our use of it.  However anger is neutral.  Anger is ok.  It is how we use and respond to anger that can be positive or negative. For many the response to anger may be negative more times than not. "Stuffing" and "Escalating" are two common anger styles.
 

Anger can bring about extremes in people – sometimes we become overwhelmed, turning into a raging hulk or sometimes we avoid anger and push our feelings away. Where you fall on the anger spectrum – overwhelmed by anger vs. avoid/deny anger – may depend on how anger was addressed in your family.  Take a moment and think about what happened when you were growing up and someone got angry…  
 

Any of the following issues: anxiety, stress (physical, mental, or emotional), difficulty sleeping or racing thoughts, can put a strain on your way of life if they are experienced in high doses.  Though medication may be advisable, there is another tool that has the potential to provide relief, and is much less expensive – your breath.  Deep abdominal breathing, also known as diaphragmatic (pronounced dye-uh-frag-matic) breathing, can produce a calming response ultimately leading to relaxation.