There's a word for the opposite of a trigger, and almost no one uses it. We all know what a trigger is by now — the term has fully escaped the therapy room. A trigger is a cue that drops your nervous system into threat: the tone in an email, a certain song, the smell of a hospital. Your body reacts before your mind has voted on the matter. The lesser-known truth is that the same system runs in the other direction. The polyvagal researcher Deb Dana gave that direction a name: