I'm Maura Aronsmeli, and this is The Anxious Achiever.

We look at stories from business leaders who've dealt with anxiety, depression, or other mental health challenges, how they fell down, how they pick themselves up, and how they hope workplaces can change in the future.

Perhaps my favorite moment in today's interview is when our guest, Mark Brackett,

admits that people with entitled attitudes really, really set him off. I'm triggered easily, he says.

He just puts it out there. Mark has a lot of triggers based on his upbringing. And here's a newsflash.

Your boss gets triggered too. It happens to most of us. We're triggered consciously and unconsciously all the time at work. And although we use the

term colloquially, in psychological terms, a trigger is something intense. It's a stimulus. It could be a

smell, a sound, a sight, another person's actions that triggers feelings of trauma. You may recall my interview with Afghan war veteran Jason

Kander, who talked about his inability to sit down with anyone in back of him at a restaurant,

for example, until he got treatment for his PTSD. But in smaller ways, many of us are being set off all day long and reenacting bad habits

or old defense mechanisms with our teams and at work.

You know, triggers can be small.

You might notice that your stomach flips or you feel a feeling of dread when you see a certain word or someone's name pop up in your inbox.

They might be bigger.

When unemployment numbers skyrocket, you might feel nauseous and unable to focus,

even though you still have a job and nothing in your life has changed.

So here's a challenge.

When an interaction or a situation sets you off, examine why. The unresolved

business from your past, as we'll hear from Mark Brackett today, is present in and relevant to

how we all work and lead. Mark Brackett, Ph.D., is the founder and director of the Yale

Center for Emotional Intelligence and a professor in the Child Study Center of Yale University.

He is the lead developer of Ruler,

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