Avoiding triggers and staying connected to God
Ever want to bite someone’s head off just because they had the misfortune to cross your path when you hadn’t eaten lunch? Or hadn’t gotten enough sleep the night before? Or when you were already angry about something else? Ever sit alone — or worse, in a crowd — and feel lonely and irritated at anyone and everything?
When I was on Father Dave’s radio show in June, we talked a little about HALT. Ever since then, I’ve been wanting to write more about it. Self-help is full of acronyms and aphorisms and a lot of them are more cute than useful, but this one is a keeper. Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired: When you feel irritated or anxious, one — or more — of those four conditions is likely at play.
And if not noticed and tended to, they can lead you to very bad places: explosions at others, self-destructive acts, relapses into addictions.
The genius of HALT is that it reminds us of several things at the same time:
- To halt before we act out, and reconnect with the divine.
- To tend to our physical and emotional well-being — not just go running around on fumes without eating and sleeping.
- That these feelings are ephemeral, and once we see them for what they are and let go of our attachment to them, they lose their power over us.
[Read the rest of What Works: How Sweet to Do Nothing at bustedhalo.com.]
