90 Seconds
Quick little backstory for this:
About a year ago, I switched lanes while driving and the car behind me had to slow down a bit (barely).
The car was far away, but the driver got really angry.
He drove past me, lowered his window, and screamed an obscene insult at me at the top of his lungs as he drove away.
My initial reaction was this: heat flushing through my head and chest and anger at the disproportionately rude reaction he had (a quiet honk of "hey I had to slow down for one second because of you and I didn't like that" would have been totally fair, I admit. But his insult was way out of place).
Then, I remembered the idea I'm about to share below. I let the emotion live through its lifespan.
And then it was gone. Completely out of my system.
90 seconds.
1 minute and a half.
That's how long an emotion lives before it passes through you and fades away.
At least theoretically.
But they don't usually go away that fast do they?
So what happens?
Before we get into this there's something obvious but really important to emphasize: Emotions are not a bad thing.
They’re actually a great thing, and a powerful ally once we learn to work with them.
But sometimes, we give them a little more power over us than we need to, and this is where this concept comes in handy.
A neuroscientist called Jill Bolte Taylor discovered that when an emotion is triggered within us, the resulting physiological changes and sensations last for a maximum of 90 seconds.
The reason we usually continue to feel the emotion is that we choose to think thoughts that continue to feed the emotion and keep it alive.
It often doesn't feel like a choice because we rarely realize we're doing it (meditation is a really powerful way to become more aware of the thoughts that feed into our emotions and behavior).
It happens subconscoiusly and reactively, until we learn to become aware of it and eventually respond to that automatic conditioned reaction.
So if we feed the emotion with thoughts, it stays.
If we don't, *poof* (insert sound effect here) it disappears.
Which gives us some degree of control over how we want to feel. We obviously aren't in control of every single thing about our circumstances. But we do have the power to choose how we're shaped by those circumstances.
We choose how to react.
Now going back to the "emotions aren't bad idea," I'm by no means suggesting that we muscle our way out of feeling things.
Or that we need to always let just the sunshine and rainbows in and then push away any looming gray cloud or unknown visitor.
Feeling ALL of our feelings is very important and very healthy.
But when our emotional reactions aren't worth the weight we've given them (like what I initially felt with the guy who swore at me), or when we're feeling overwhelmed and need some empowerment over our own situation, it can be very helpful to come back to the 90-second rule.
The emotion is only there for 90 seconds.
Then, you decide.
If you consider it necessary, continue to feed the emotion.
If you decide it's not what you want, you can choose to let it go.
More often than not, it’s the fact that we don’t feel entirely comfortable feeling our feelings (because we don’t trust that we’re equipped to feel them fully and emerge completely okay on the other side) that keeps us stuck in thought and behavior loops that feed even more into the feeling. More on that some other time.
I'm going to leave you with a quote from this neuroscientist:
"We have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world. Right here, right now"
It's a big biiig conversation that I'll leave unfinished for today. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
If you're familiar with the 90-second rule, can you think of specific situations where it was helpful?
If you've just learned about it, in what ways do you think it can change things for you?