Read at Your Own Discretion: Trigger Warnings Make Us Fragile??

Oh, you are still reading! Trigger warnings do not seem to scare you – maybe because you have encountered them before. Whether it is 7 A.M. at the breakfast table and you are scrolling through the news, 2 P.M. in a lecture hall at university or 2 A.M. and you are absorbed in your social media feed – you occasionally stumble upon statements that are meant to prepare you for the potentially distressing nature of the content you are about to consume, allowing you to disengage from it (Boysen, 2017; Bridgland et al., 2023).

Although the term ‘trigger’ is commonly used in online culture to denote a piece of content that arouses adverse memories (Wyatt, 2016), it actually originated in the clinical discourse around post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (Fagan & Freme, 2004). In clinical observations of PTSD, triggers are described to cause a primarily physiological re-experience of the traumatic event (‘flashback’), sometimes accompanied by a state of dissociation and memory loss (Van der Hart & Friedman, 1992). It is not surprising that triggers are something you would want to avoid, and as humane beings, it is reasonable to want to protect others (especially your loved ones!) from suffering through the same stressful experience again and again and again. Across many disciplines, content creators and educators support or even demand the use of trigger warnings as a way to care for those who are affected. Warnings enable them to skip potentially triggering material to evade flashbacks, simultaneously providing a sense of autonomy through this choice (Lockhart, 2016).

However, not everyone agrees that it is inherently desirable to help people opt out of adverse situations and experiences. This seemingly heartless line of reasoning is often based on Nassim Taleb’s antifragility concept, which is one of the three ways in which he describes the properties of different kinds of systems (Taleb, 2012b). Taleb explains that fragile systems are ones that break down under pressure immediately, the same way a house of cards breaks down when you blow on it too hard. The second kind are resilient systems, which endure disturbances and bounce back to their original state, like a rubber band that you put under tension by pulling it hard before releasing it. Intuitively, we would argue that this is the optimal reaction to pressures and stressors – after the disturbance, you return to your initial state of peace. Taleb argues that we should not strive for resilience, but for antifragility, which defines a system that interacts with a stressor’s disturbance, but instead of bouncing back to its original state, the system comes out better and stronger than before. Think of your muscles that you tear apart with the strain of exercise and how they grow back stronger and bigger than when you first entered the gym (ibid.). Think of your body’s immune system that you regularly and purposefully weaken with the injection of harmful viruses – aka vaccines – just for it to come back more resistant and ready to fight a greater number of pathogens. It follows that antifragile systems rely on challenges and disturbances for them to prosper.

Applying this concept to the trigger warning debate, it is proposed that analogous to our bodies, our minds are also antifragile systems that grow stronger through exposure to stressors like unpleasant experiences (Manson, n.d.). This is because exposure will give us a basis to practise, develop and adapt the coping mechanisms we need in order to deal with the distress. Trigger warnings, it is argued, deprive us of this opportunity for improvement by pushing the narrative that you never have to be exposed to unpleasant experiences if you do not want to, because they are inherently harmful. In this line of reasoning, trigger warnings would make people feel entitled to disengage from any and all stressors, so people would choose to only be exposed to neutral or pleasant experiences (ibid.). As a consequence, our minds become fragile, since they do not get to interact with the stressors that would stimulate growth.

In support of this notion, clinical psychology indeed univocally finds that successful PTSD treatment necessarily includes exposure to trauma-related stimuli (Boysen, 2017; Bellet et al., 2020). The avoidance of trauma-related stimuli is further positively associated with PTSD symptomatology and severity, meaning the more you want to steer clear of upsetting experiences, the more you suffer once you do get in touch with them (ibid.). What is more, Jones et al. (2020) suggest that the avoidance of trauma-related experiences even strengthens the integration of the traumatic experience into one’s identity.

Nassim Taleb himself emphasises the importance of taking smart risks. By this he means that an antifragile system should engage in challenges that will stretch its coping capacity, but only to the point where it can safely recover from a stressor’s disturbance. For an individual from the general population, stretching one’s coping capacity might look like being unexpectedly exposed to unpleasant experiences from time to time, as they inevitably occur in life. This can take shape as seeing a dreadful traffic accident in the news, watching a documentary on WWII in history class, or reading about someone’s personal experience with suicide online. For individuals with clinically relevant reactions to distress however, taking the smart risk might look like exposure to distressing stimuli in a safe therapeutic environment with a trained and trusted clinician. A responsible creator or distributor of content will acknowledge that their addressed audience will be composed of people with different coping capacities. People with clinical disorders, like PTSD, can uniquely benefit from trigger warnings because it gives them the chance to decide if they are taking a smart risk or an unnecessary one. Even if one decides to take the smart risk and engage with distressing content, research has shown that personal control over aversive events reduces stress, like a smaller startle response for expected versus unexpected loud noises (Boysen, 2017). Nolan and Roberts (2023) similarly argue that for the general population, trigger warnings prepare you to emotionally regulate and be better able to critically engage with the following material. This is because openly stating that a piece of content has a distressing emotional impact on the consumer is to allow for meta-emotional and meta-cognitive reflection on the primary emotional and cognitive responses (Lai, 2011).

All that being said, why does research still consistently report mixed or null effects for the emotional impact of trigger warnings (Charles, 2022) – in other words, indicating that they do not consistently reduce negative affect following unpleasant experiences? Bridgland et al. (2023) propose that it is because we do not know how to regulate our emotions in order to properly prepare for the upcoming distress, because a trigger warning in and of itself only tells you that you need to prepare for something but not how. Instead of labelling trigger warnings as self-censorship (Lockhart, 2016), we could instead started valuing them for the anticipatory period they create and focus on teaching individuals how to fill this anticipatory period with effective emotional coping strategies. Such strategies are beneficial to critical reflection skills in the general population (ibid.; Nolan & Roberts, 2023). Admittedly, these are just proposals arising from the relatively recent debate surrounding the increased use of trigger warnings in online spaces and educational contexts. Further research is needed to establish how trigger warnings can be used for emotion regulation and critical thinking abilities. For now, it remains your personal, but more informed decision whether to use trigger warnings or not. <<