A YOUNG public sector worker of my acquaintance tells me that he and his colleagues had attended a seminar on dealing with trauma. 

They were asked to identify and contemplate “trigger factors” that might lead to them experiencing trauma in themselves. The trauma specialist explained that these “triggers” were waiting to ambush them around every corner. 

The trick, according to the specialist, was to create your own “wellness plan”. Thus, you can identify those sly, diurnal stress points which can wreck your brain. Previously, as a hardworking professional, you’d meet life’s vicissitudes head on and take them in your stride, believing them to be the normal drama of everyday life. 

But you’d be wrong to do this. For, you could be storing up repressed rage which will inevitably find an outlet and explode at any moment with potentially catastrophic consequences in relationships, your working life, and the way in which you engage with your dog or cat. 

Instead, you should whip out your personal wellness plan and analyse what’s happening in real time, take a “me break” or maybe slip on your headphones and listen to one of Classic FM’s collections of calming music, such as Moonlight Sonata. 

I think it’s a great idea and have begun making my own wellness plan to help me negotiate life’s little challenges before they reduce me to a state of psychotic self-loathing. 

Pedal nonsense
MY wellness plan starts with a list of those triggers that, if left untended, can wreck my head. 
Cyclists. To the unwary, these gentle and unassuming road snails are merely well-meaning types with too much time on their hands who are seeking fresh air and exercise amid the grandeur of Scotland’s wild open spaces. 

Then you begin to realise that you’re about to be late for making the working contribution to society that they seem to be dodging.

Worse, your carbon footprint is going from a manageable size six to a dangerous size 10 as you slow to a crawl and your engine begins to consume more petrol, along with the long line of cars behind you. 

In my personal wellness plan I’ve now pledged to take a deep breath before gently edging out and around the cyclists and taking up a position directly in front of them. And then slowing right down to about two miles an hour. 

Thus, you transfer your pulsing rage directly on to them. You need only do this for about three minutes. But it will lead to better mental health outcomes, knowing that you’ve given these insidious and sanctimonious weapons a taste of their own medicine.

Positively infuriating
ALSO high on the trigger list of my personal wellness plan are left-wing politicians who identify as socially enlightened while harbouring a deep loathing of the punters. The trigger usually occurs when they utter the phrase “delivering positive outcomes”. 

This fatuous sophistry was being chucked about all around Scotland’s political and media elites last week with the Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain stating that it wouldn’t be in the public interest to prosecute drug users for simple possession offences committed within a pilot “safer drugs consumption facility”.

This is an ideal outcome for our civic elites. It keeps those whom they consider to be worthless bams doped up (but not too zonked out their nuts) in a controlled environment. 

And it saves them the expense of actually curing them and turning their lives around by providing proper rehab beds. 

Those making and celebrating the zombification legislation are usually affluent, middle-class political and media types who couldn’t find the streets where Scotland’s problem addicts live with a satnav. 

And besides, by keeping them in a controlled, state-assisted stupor they’re much less likely to ask troubling questions about the callous refusal by our governments and law officers to help cure people of drug addiction.

Win-win, as they say over artisan lattes in their G12 salons. 

Passion killers
ANOTHER trigger in my personal unhappiness plan is politicians who try to show they’re all double wide and filthy by getting passionate about the punters’ couthy pastimes.  

The Herald:
Personally, I don’t really give a flying one about whether or not you choose to boo the UK’s national anthem at football matches. I’m also for jeering Flower Of Scotland – or anything else that channels “patriotism”. 

What gets on my nerves is when politicians get asked their opinions on it and then seize the opportunity to tell us that if they weren’t legislating and debating they’d be on the terraces, wrapped in saltires, drinking the wreck-the-hoose juice and giving it to the English.

The rest of the time they’re bowing and scraping to the lumpen House of Windsor or drinking whisky at the Palace of Westminster with English aristos. 

They’re about as convincing as a ghost hunter.