What Is a Glimmer? The Opposite of a Trigger, From a Therapist

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: glimmers. A glimmer is a micro-moment of safety, calm, or quiet delight — small enough that you'd miss it if you weren't looking — that cues your body toward ease instead of alarm. The first sip of coffee in my Ginori mug while everyone else is still asleep. Sparkling afternoon light. My five-year-old son asking me to marry him.

Kidding, not kidding!

A glimmer isn't a peak experience or a milestone. It's a flicker. And your nervous system, it turns out, is keeping score of them.

The way I feel when I see all my friends aglow at a dimly lit table.

None of these will change your life — but I believe they are part of what makes you alive. A glimmer isn't a peak experience or a milestone. It's a flicker. And your nervous system, it turns out, is keeping score of them.

I think about this constantly, because I am a person who has spent years being made to feel — by our culture, mostly — that the way I live is frivolous. That caring about a beautiful tablescape or the right light in a photo or a green gemstone-encrusted collar on a white blazer is reduced to vanity, a distraction from the serious business of being alive. I want to gently argue the opposite.

Tending to beauty in the world is not decoration. For a lot of women, it is regulation. A constant way in which we metabolize a day.

This is what I actually mean when I talk about romanticizing your life — a phrase that has been flattened into a marketing slogan. It is not about performing for an audience. It is glimmer-collection. It is the deliberate practice of noticing the small, good, safe and beautiful things, because what you attend to is what grows. The brain has a well-documented bias toward the negative — threats kept our ancestors alive, so we are built to scan for them. Glimmers are the gentle correction. They don't deny that hard things are happening. They simply refuse to let the hard things be the only things. They act as a buffer to the heaviness of life.

You don't manufacture glimmers. You just pay attention to them — and maybe even name one or two each day. Like the cookie you managed to keep for the next day's coffee. The five extra minutes you spent in the steamy shower. Over time the noticing becomes the disposition. You become a person whose body has learned that the world is, in small and frequent ways, safe — all of it depending on how you choose to look.

So this week, I challenge you to catch three glimmers. Whether you photograph them or not—just noticing that they happened is how this all starts.

That's the practice I live by. One I can't imagine my life without.