What is internal vs external triggers?

Internal vs external triggers is a concept in personal epistemology: Internal triggers are thoughts and feelings — external triggers are events and cues.

Example: You sit down at your desk Monday morning and open Twitter before doing anything else. No notification pulled you there. No calendar event said 'browse Twitter.' A vague feeling — restlessness, avoidance of the first hard task, low-grade anxiety about the week ahead — fired the behavior automatically. That's an internal trigger. Now compare: your phone buzzes with a Slack message and you switch apps immediately. That's an external trigger. Same behavior (context-switching), completely different origin. Until you can tell the difference, you can't design for either one.

This concept is part of Phase 22 (Trigger Design) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for trigger design.