Why You're So Easily Triggered Right Now (It's a Margin Problem)

Summary: In this solo episode, Katie introduces the concept of margin, the inner space and capacity we have available to handle whatever life throws at us and why building it might be the most important thing an entrepreneur can do.

She shares a moving story from a client who was in a car accident and, for the first time in her life, did not spiral. She simply assessed the situation, checked on others, and took action. That calm was not luck. It was margin she had built through nervous system work.

Katie also opens up about a deeply personal season in her own life, watching someone she loves dearly fade away, and how she is navigating that grief by consciously protecting her margin, stripping back her to-do list, and giving herself permission to rest and feel.

Key Takeaways

→ Margin is the space you have available to handle whatever life throws at you. The more nervous system work you do, the more margin you naturally build.

→ Suppressed emotions cost energy. Shame, fear, grief, guilt and anger all require enormous energy to hold down. Clearing them out gives you that energy back.

→ Anger is never the primary emotion. It always covers shame or fear underneath. Diffuse the pain beneath it and the anger dissolves.

→ Signs your margin is low: snapping at people, bracing when someone approaches you, difficulty sleeping, being easily triggered. These are not character flaws. They are nervous system signals.

→ External stressors reduce your margin. When life gets hard, the answer is not to push through harder. It is to take things off your plate so you have space to actually process what is happening.

→ Rest is productive. Katie gave herself a completely unstructured Sunday and got more done than she expected, felt better going to bed, and showed up with more energy the following week.

→ You are an energetic being. Einstein proved that mass and energy are the same thing. The stuck emotions you carry are literally weighing you down energetically.

→ Protecting your margin is not selfish. It is what allows you to show up fully for the people and the work that actually matter to you.

Resources

• Website
• Free Mini Cogno Mondays
• Learn more about Cognomovement
• Try Cognomovement for yourself!
• Book a call with Katie

Credit: Tom Giovingo, Intro & Outro, Random Voice Guy, Professional ‘Cat‘ Herder

Mixed & Managed: JohnRavenscraft.com

Disclaimer: Katie is not a medical professional and she is not qualified to diagnose any conditions. The advice and information she gives is based on her own experience and research. It does not take the place of medical advice. Always consult a medical professional first before you try anything new.

Transcript

Katie Wrigley (00:29)
Welcome back to the Catapult Effect podcast. I am your host, Katie Wrigley. Today, we are going to be talking about margin. What do I mean by margin? Margin is that space that we have available to deal with whatever is going on. Work, kids, spouse, exercise, family, whatever is on our plate. That's our margin that we have available.

This idea for this episode came to me kind of in pieces. So one of my clients actually had been in a car accident earlier this year. And I didn't hear about it directly from her. I learned about it on Instagram as she was posting and saying that for first time in her life, she didn't actually freak out. And it was because she had created so much margin in part with the work.

that we did and in part with work she had done prior to that, but she had so much margin that instead of freaking out the way she used to, which full disclosure, every accident I've been in so far, I have freaked out. But I also haven't been in one since I've done all this work on myself. Knock on wood that we keep that up. But anyway, I really...

took that post to heart and I could still see the post like the pictures of the police and the first responders that were there, the smash car, like it hit. She just took a moment, looked around and was like, no, I'm actually okay. All right, how is everybody else? Let's call the police. Let's call an ambulance. Let's see if the other people are hurt. But she went into action without that massive anxiety spike and spiraling that way.

margin. Another way to look at it is like margin for life to happen. And so we are going to have life keep happening. You probably know this. If you've been on this earth for any significant period of time you already know life's gonna keep happening. You know what is that old adage is man plans and God laughs? Yeah pretty much. So we can try to control. We can try to have things move a certain way.

and you can be sure that your plans are probably not going to go the way that you envisioned. Not all the time. Maybe they go that way most of the time. That's actually pretty cool. So but a lot of times things are going to go sideways. And I've seen this over and over and over again and until the last six months.

I wasn't actually all that great about adjusting my to-do list around whatever margin I have available. But this time, I'm at a place where I'm so aware of that. And so we can create more margin in our life by allowing the body to release things that we're holding in there that are stressing us out. Things that are constantly sucking our energy from us.

The amount of energy that we take to push down different emotions and so many of us, raise your hand if this resonates, so many of us were taught to push it down and keep going because we had to survive, right? We had something else that we had to do. We had something that was important and so we pushed down those emotions and we keep going and then when we go back to visit him again, we're like, it's not that big a deal because it's not really as active in the body. But the body is holding everything.

And these emotions, emotion is literally like energy in motion. And just as a side note, you are an energetic body. Einstein proved there is no difference between mass and energy. Energy is a version of mass, or mass is version of energy. I'm not that great at the physics, but at any rate, you are an energetic being. Einstein proved this. You can Google it if you don't believe me. But at any rate,

All those stuck emotions, those take a lot of energy to hold down. Shame, grief, fear, guilt, anger. Anger actually tends to be a very enticing level because it's the first level of all the ones that are really draining for us where we actually start to feel energized.

So it can be really, really appealing to be in anger. And chances are, actually not chances are, anger is never actually the primary emotion, even though it feels like it, anger is covering either shame or fear or some derivative of them. That's really what anger is. So we can usually diffuse the anger when we get rid of the pain or the fear, whatever may be under there. But at any rate, as we clear these things up,

And some of these, they may be, there's something fundamentally wrong with me. The normal emotional response to that is shame. If you're walking around with any part of you thinking there's something wrong with me, you, with you, you have a very heavy shame pattern.

that is going to suck your energy. That's just the way the body works. So my client was able to give more margin because she alleviated all this energy that had been holding her down. So she got all this extra energy back. She got all this extra margin. And as the end of 2025 wrapped up in 2026 rolled in, my nervous system was in a very regulated state and still actually is.

There are some big stressors that are going on right now. There's two really big stressors actually right now and one of them I have a little bit of control in. Not much. I've done a lot of things I can already control now at this point. It's just okay what happens from here but the other one I have no control over and it is watching someone I really love fade away in front of my eyes and it fucking sucks.

I'm just gonna be honest. It's one of the hardest things I've gone through. I'm try not to cry.

But for the first time in my life, instead of pushing it down and continuing to go, I looked at everything and said, okay, you know what? I don't have a lot of margin right now. I don't. And I looked at all the things that I have going on. My amazing clients that I get to work with. The really cool people that I get to interact with who are emailing me. My wonderful friends.

my loving parents. These are all people who really matter to me. They absolutely get the most of me. But what I don't have room for right now? Shit, that doesn't matter.

Like if you are someone that wants to keep getting in your own way and you don't want to come in and work with me in a professional way, like I can't really help you. And I don't want to sound faultless to do that, but it's draining to watch someone work against themselves sometimes. And I've had a lot of people that I've seen like, I know I can help you, but they don't want to help themselves, but they're, still reaching out.

And so I'm finding very polite ways to just let them know, hey, I'm here whenever you're ready to work on this. And then I'm just not engaging. I'm not telling them they're doing anything wrong because they're not. They're being themselves. And I want them to continue to be themselves. And it's up to them if slash when they get support in their journey. It's not up to me. But I'm looking at all of the things that I'm normally trying to do and scaling way back.

I'm giving myself a break on how often my house gets cleaned. And instead of doing one big cleaning, just like, this room could use a little bit, spend 20 minutes doing it versus like two or three hours doing a deep cleaning, which is what I usually do. That's just something that's not going to happen. Another thing that I usually enjoy, but it's also work and it's tiring, is gardening. And I have a beautiful yard.

But the soil here sucks. It's a sand base. So it sucks all the nutrients out. Like I've got daffodils out back and they aren't even blooming anymore because the damn sand is taking all the nutrients out of them. Even though I'm putting out all the good thing on top, it's just it's not working. So I'm like, you know what? This is something that can go because right now in order for me to have as much margin as I can, I need to have as few things on my to do list on the weekend as I absolutely can.

And this is the same for you. We want to actually, we want to get the system to be able to hold as much margin as you possibly can. But life and things outside these external stressors, they're going to adjust the amount of margin you have. And yes, I am continuing to work through my grief around watching this person I love dearly fade away. I am continuing.

meet myself with kindness and grace and love and ask for support and reach out to people who have been in similar situations who are really amazing support for me. Hopefully you guys know who you are. I didn't ask your permission to mention your name so I'm not going to but I hope you know who you are because you've been so helpful to me already and thank you. But I want you to look at your own life and I want you

to say, like how much margin do you have? And how do you know if you have enough margin or not? If you're snapping at your kids, if you are bracing every time someone approaches you with a question, if you are having a hard time sleeping, you do not have a lot of margin. Those are all signs that your nervous system is screaming for you to release things so you can have more peace and ease inside your body.

You know when that margin goes down because you're gonna find yourself getting more more irritable. You're gonna have much less patience. You're gonna have much less space to deal with all.

So we have the inner margin that's going to give us more space to deal with. But as we have ongoing things that are taking a toll on us, we want to continue to process as we go. And we also want to look at what else can we do here to give ourselves more margin. In that case, it's taking stuff off of my to-do list so that I have lots of space to spend time however

I want to spend time.

No holds barred, no rules, just what is going to feel good to do in this moment. And I gave myself that last Sunday and I wound up getting so much done all day and I felt so good going to bed that night. And this weekend, it's Mother's Day, I want to hang out with my parents and I have one thing planned tomorrow but the rest of the weekend is mine. And the weekend after that I do have a couple plans.

but they're all really cool stuff. But as little as possible, and again, life's gonna keep happening, I have as few plans, as few commitments outside of that as I possibly can, because that is what my nervous system needs right now. That is what I need in order to continue to show up full energy. And as a side note, I have been killing it in my sessions and been able to do major shifts.

people so much faster, so much deeper than I had before because I am so focused on them and I have really recalibrated life and how I'm doing things around this so that I have this extra margin. That rest is so friggin important I can't even tell you. Anyway, thank you for listening and I trust that this episode was helpful. And if you notice that any of these things are happening with you, snap that the kids, easily irritated.

finding yourself very easily triggered, bracing, I want you to reach out. Let's have a chat. I always put my link to book a complimentary consult with me. It is a free 45 minute call. We're gonna talk about what's happening with your margin. Where are you noticing this lack of margin? Where do you feel like you're bracing? Where do you feel like you're struggling?

We're gonna look at how that's impacting different areas of your life, your personal life, your work life, all of the things. And then I'm gonna give you a little demo of Cognitive Movement so you can see how fast it can change. So grab that link, let's have a talk. I wanna help you create more margin so that you're showing up fully for the people who matter the most and you're giving yourself that space.

Thank you so much for joining me today, and I will see you again on the next one. And until next time, please be well.