How to Calm Emotional Triggers with Bilateral Stimulation

When an emotional trigger hits, ground yourself first, don’t dive straight at the memory. Once your body settles, short rounds of bilateral stimulation (BLS), the rhythmic left-right technique used in EMDR, can gently lower a memory’s emotional charge. Go slow, work one small trigger at a time, and stop if distress climbs past a 7 out of 10.

A song comes on, a smell drifts by, someone uses a certain tone of voice, and suddenly you’re not just remembering something, you’re back in it: heart pounding, stomach dropping, a wave of feeling that seems way out of proportion to a grocery store aisle or a Tuesday afternoon. That gap, between how big the reaction feels and how small the trigger looks from the outside, is what makes triggers so confusing to live with.

What’s happening in your nervous system when a trigger hits?

A trigger, per the APA Dictionary of Psychology, is simply a stimulus that sets off a reaction. What makes emotional triggers feel so outsized is what they’re connected to underneath.

EMDR’s own theory, the Adaptive Information Processing model, holds that intensely distressing experiences can get stored in a raw, unprocessed form. According to EMDRIA, the professional body for EMDR, present-day cues connected to that material can reactivate the original sensations and feelings almost as if the past were happening now. Your reaction isn’t an overreaction, it’s an old memory network firing on a new cue.

Patterns like this usually have roots in earlier experiences, and settling today’s triggers one at a time is real, connected work, even when the deepest material behind them is better handled with support later. If a trigger keeps tracing back to a difficult childhood memory, our guide to childhood trauma and EMDR goes deeper on that connection.

Ground yourself before you do anything else

Before you engage with a trigger or a memory at all, spend a minute somewhere calmer. Picture a real or imagined place where you feel safe, or run a quick grounding check: name five things you can see, feel your feet on the floor, slow your exhale. Staying inside your window of tolerance, the zone where you’re alert but still thinking clearly, is what makes the rest of this useful instead of overwhelming.

Structured EMDR therapy builds this same stabilization step in early, before any memory work begins (EMDRIA). Don’t start the practice below already flooded.

Go slow: one small trigger at a time

Pick one specific, containable trigger, not the whole category. “The way my old boss raised his voice” is workable; “every authority figure” is not. Keep sessions short, just a few minutes. This isn’t a race to process everything at once, and there’s no prize for going faster than your body can handle.

Know your stop point

If your distress rises above a 7 out of 10 and doesn’t settle back down, stop. Use grounding, and consider working with a professional rather than pushing through alone. That’s not failure, it’s useful information about how much weight this particular memory is carrying.

A short bilateral stimulation practice for triggers and memories

With the three steps above in place, here’s a short round of bilateral stimulation, the technique itself:

• Rate it. On a 0–10 scale, how strong is the charge right now, just touching the edge of your chosen trigger? Note the number.
• Bring it lightly to mind. The moment, the sensation, the feeling. Touch it, don’t dive into the most intense version.
• Add bilateral stimulation. Move your eyes smoothly left and right for 20 to 30 seconds, alternate tapping your knees or shoulders left-right (the “butterfly hug”), or use alternating left-right audio tones if you have headphones.
• Pause and notice. Stop. Breathe. Notice whatever shifted, a thought, a bit of distance, a physical release, without forcing anything.
• Repeat 3 to 5 short rounds, checking in between each one.
• Re-rate. Check your 0–10 number again. Many people notice it easing. If it climbs instead and won’t come back down, stop, ground yourself, and treat that as useful information, not failure.

Counting rounds and watching a clock while you’re activated is one more task than most people want mid-trigger. EmEase, a self-guided EMDR app, runs the same left-right technique for you with a moving on-screen target or alternating tones, paced however you like, in the web app. The beginner’s guide to self-guided bilateral stimulation covers pacing and choosing a method in more detail.

Does bilateral stimulation actually lower a memory’s charge?

Yes, with real evidence for the effect, and an honest caveat about the mechanism. A 2020 meta-analysis of 15 laboratory studies in the Journal of Experimental Psychopathology, pooling 942 participants, found that eye movements meaningfully reduced both the vividness and emotional intensity people rated for distressing memories held in mind. The same meta-analysis found other dual tasks, like counting, worked about as well, so what’s doing the work may be dividing attention generally rather than something unique to left-right movement, a genuinely open question in the research. A 2012 study in Memory tracked the timing of the vividness/emotionality effect: vividness ratings started dropping within seconds of starting eye movements, with emotionality following a little over a minute in.

That’s laboratory evidence about the technique EMDR is built on, not proof that a few minutes of self-guided practice resolves a trigger for good. It’s a plausible, low-risk way to take some heat out of a memory in the moment, not a substitute for structured trauma processing when a trigger is tied to something heavier.

When this isn’t enough

This practice is built for everyday, situational triggers: reminders that spike a reaction but don’t derail your day. It’s not the right tool alone if:

• The memory behind the trigger involves real danger, like an assault, abuse, a serious accident, or combat.
• Triggers show up often enough to disrupt sleep, work, or relationships.
• You notice dissociation (feeling unreal or checked out), flashbacks, or panic that frightens you.
• During the practice above, distress climbs past a 7 out of 10 and won’t settle.

In any of these, working with a licensed, trauma-informed therapist, ideally one trained in EMDR, is the safer path for reprocessing the memory itself. If a specific traumatic memory keeps resurfacing on its own, our guide on EMDR and PTSD covers what the research shows about therapist-led treatment.

You don’t have to earn the right to feel steadier. Settling what’s reachable today, one trigger at a time, is real progress, whether or not you ever get to the memory underneath it.