Why does trigger sensitivity calibration fail?

The most common reason trigger sensitivity calibration fails: Treating sensitivity as a fixed setting rather than an ongoing calibration process. You pick a threshold once, it works for a week, then your context changes — new job, new schedule, new stressors — and the old threshold is suddenly wrong. The second failure mode is binary thinking: assuming the trigger is either 'good' or 'bad' instead of recognizing that most triggers are correctly designed but incorrectly calibrated.

The fix: Pick one trigger you currently use (or want to use) for a behavior change. Write down the last five times it fired. For each, mark whether the firing was a true positive (the situation genuinely warranted the behavior) or a false positive (the trigger fired but the behavior wasn't needed). If more than half are false positives, your threshold is too low — add a qualifying condition. If you can't remember five firings, your threshold may be too high — broaden the trigger condition and test for a week.

The underlying principle is straightforward: Too sensitive and the agent fires too often — too insensitive and it never fires.