The Gap Between the Trigger and the Reaction Used to Be Bigger
People who describe becoming more reactive over time often frame it as a personality change — they used to be calmer, and now they're not. Looked at more precisely, what's usually changed isn't the underlying capacity for calm. It's the size of the gap between a trigger appearing and a reaction firing — a gap that's been shrinking, often gradually enough that the shrinking itself never got noticed, only its eventual absence. What the Gap Actually Does A gap between trigger and reaction is where choice lives — the brief space in which a response can be selected rather than simply happening. A wide gap allows for noticing what's happening, considering it, and choosing how to respond. A narrow gap collapses straight from trigger to reaction with no interval for anything else to happen in between, which is what reactivity actually is: not an excess of feeling, but an absence of the gap that would otherwise allow feeling and response to be two separate things. Why the Gap Shrinks Without Anyone Deciding It Should Repeated activation of the same trigger, especially under sustained stress or exhaustion, wears down the gap over time — not through any single dramatic event, but through steady erosion, the same way a path gets worn smoother with each additional walk across it. Nobody decides to become more reactive. The gap just gets narrower, incrementally, until a trigger that once left room for a considered response no longer does. What Gets Missed by Framing This as a Personality Change "I've become a more reactive person" treats the change as a shift in identity, which offers very little to actually work with — identity feels fixed, difficult to address directly. "The gap between my triggers and my reactions has narrowed" describes something mechanical and specific, with an actual lever: the gap that narrowed can, in principle, be widened again. Why Widening the Gap Is More Useful Than Trying to "Stay Calmer" Trying to suppress or manage the reaction after it's already fired is working downstream of where the actual mechanism lives. The higher-leverage intervention is in the gap itself — catching the moment between trigger and reaction and deliberately inserting something into it, even briefly, rather than trying to control the reaction once it's already underway. What It Takes to Start Widening the Gap Again Noticing, in real time, the earliest possible moment a trigger has landed but a reaction hasn't yet fired, and treating that narrow window as the actual point of intervention — since that's where the gap either holds or collapses.
Meet Ori — built to help you find and widen the gap between trigger and reaction, since that's where the actual leverage lives.
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Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai