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Triggers

For a psychiatric recovery exercise, I had to write things that trigger paranoid or delusional thoughts or psychotic episodes for me. Listing them publicly might help my friends better understand why I decline to do certain things. So, here they are:
  1. Going outside at night, although I still enjoy and try to do this for the stars and the solitude.
  2. Being alone at night- I try to overcome this one to be "more adult." My service dog helps.
  3. Watching shows with certain content- I don't really know what content will be triggering until it starts to be triggering, and then I hit "skip." This is part of why I rarely watch shows with other people; I know I can't just skip triggering content as easily with others. 
  4. Talking about religion lends itself to delusions and hallucinations for me.
  5. Talking about the supernatural or non-science-based extra-terrestrial phenomenon does the same.
  6. Lack of sleep is also a common trigger for spiraling thought patterns and negative coping mechanisms.
So, those are the triggers I filled out on the worksheet. The other two questions it asked were "how can I deal with this" and "did this help" for each trigger.

If you deal with psychotic thoughts, identifying and avoiding triggers might help decrease it. It's helped me over the past 2 years to decrease it a lot in my daily life, although I still have episodes.

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