The 90-Second Cycle of an Emotion
One of the first things that any therapist or research psychologist will tell you is that feelings are wise. They will also they tell you that denying them, stuffing them down, or trying to change them, will backfire. Every time. And then they will remind you that the key to mental health is learning how to feel those emotions fully, pleasant or unpleasant, because feelings or emotions (often described as energy-in-motion) move.
One of the first things that any mom will tell you (if she is being honest) is that motherhood brings up emotions of every kind all of the time. Moms will tell you that they feel angry, anxious, worried, guilty, and envious often. Many moms will tell you that subtle frustration, sadness, anxiety, guilt, and envy kind often live in the background. Always. Many moms will tell you that these emotions keep them up at night. Some will tell you that they wake up with them, almost every day. Many moms will assume that this is just part of motherhood, and that feeling these things for long periods of time comes with the territory. But the thing is that for many of these moms, they aren’t really feeling the feelings. They are, in actuality, trying to push these feelings away or talk themselves out of them.
When I tell moms that it is important to allow themselves to feel all of the emotions that they have, they often look at me like I am telling them to drink arsenic. Like I am suggesting that they walk down a plank high above the earth and jump. In other words, the suggestion to “just feel” their feelings can feel like torture. Or worse. Like, “yeah, but if I let myself feel that emotion I will never come back out of it.”
Again, often though, these moms haven’t really tried a practice of feeling. They have been thinking about how they feel, but not really letting the emotions be felt.
Here is what I want you all to know:
When we allow our bodies to experience an emotion fully- to allow it to run through us without interruption or exaggeration, it will be done with its cycle within 90-seconds.
Harvard brain scientist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor explains that “When a person has a reaction to something in their environment, there’s a 90-second chemical process that happens in the body; after that, any remaining emotional response is just the person choosing to stay in that emotional loop.”
What the heck does that even mean?
What it means is that if you really, truly, allow yourself to feel that emotion (be it anger, sadness, anxiety, guilt, envy or anything else) you will experience physiological sensations (or feelings) in your body such as tightening, shortness of breath, increased heart rate and other uncomfortable sensations. As long as you allow that full expression of feeling to move through you, that physiological experience will come and go within 90-seconds. 90-seconds. That’s not very long. Most of us don’t experience emotions this way though, and we end up suffering through the discomfort for much longer- sometimes hours and days. And this is why:
Typically and especially if we weren’t taught as children that feelings are useful, we will quickly push an experience of negative emotion away. Some experience will occur and we will have an emotional reaction to it. “Don’t feel angry/sad/anxious about that thing,” we will say. And so we stop the 90-second process of that emotion. But the catch is, emotions actually need to move. So they will take up space in our bodies anyway. They will fight their way to the surface. Even if we try to deny them.
Oftentimes, when we begin to feel an emotion in our body, we will jump quickly to a larger narrative about the event that has occurred. “I am feeling angry” becomes “I can’t believe she did that again. She never listens. And of course not, because nobody ever listens to me.” And soon enough our thoughts have taken us to the past or the future, and the experience that initially caused the emotion is long gone. One experience that brings up a feeling leads to the next.
When Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor says “there’s a 90-second chemical process that happens in the body; after that, any remaining emotional response is just the person choosing to stay in that emotional loop,” what she means is that it’s our thoughts that keep that physiological cycle of discomfort running on a loop. And that we can all choose whether to stay in that thought loop or not.
So, this week, I’d like you to try something different. As with everything, this will take practice. But if you pay attention, you may find a different way of experiencing feelings when they arise. The practice looks like this:
When something happens in your world (your baby won’t sleep, your partner says something unkind, a friend doesn’t call you back, your kiddo screams about something, you have a bad day at work), start by noticing how you feel. In your body. Describe it. “I feel tightness in my chest. My stomach is in knots. My shoulders are tight…”
See if you can identify an emotion that might go along with those sensations: “I feel angry/sad/worried…”
Feel your feet on the floor (yes, even if your kid is still screaming) and breathe. Get curious about the sensations in your body. Curious is the key word here, not judgmental. Where in my body do I feel that? What does that actually feel like?
MOVE. Yes, MOVE. Shake your body, jump up and down, run around the block, do a crazy dance move, and make some noise. I’m serious. Have you ever noticed that a baby or toddler can cry and scream and wiggle and then sometimes moments later seem fine? All animals do this when left to their own devices without a big old ego to keep them in check. When we have an emotion that leads to a physiological experience and we let our bodies move that shit out we feel better. Pretty quickly (in 90 seconds, actually).
Somehow many of us have been taught that uncomfortable emotions are to be avoided. Good luck with that. Especially if you are a parent. But 90-seconds? All of us can tolerate 90-seconds. The choice is yours.