MySQL - Trigger for updating same table after insert

This is how I update a row in the same table on insert

activationCode and email are rows in the table USER. On insert I don't specify a value for activationCode, it will be created on the fly by MySQL.

Change username with your MySQL username and db_name with your db name.

CREATE DEFINER=`username`@`localhost` 
       TRIGGER `db_name`.`user_BEFORE_INSERT` 
       BEFORE INSERT ON `user` 
       FOR EACH ROW
         BEGIN
            SET new.activationCode = MD5(new.email);
         END

It seems that you can't do all this in a trigger. According to the documentation:

Within a stored function or trigger, it is not permitted to modify a table that is already being used (for reading or writing) by the statement that invoked the function or trigger.

According to this answer, it seems that you should:

create a stored procedure, that inserts into/Updates the target table, then updates the other row(s), all in a transaction.

With a stored proc you'll manually commit the changes (insert and update). I haven't done this in MySQL, but this post looks like a good example.