A lot can happen in 90 seconds even though it can feel like no time at all. 90 seconds can be all it takes to shift your breathing pattern to settle your nervous system, shift your awareness from your head to heart and allow yourself the opportunity to connect rather than criticize, and it is generally considered the amount of time to feel emotions, meaning time for the physiological reaction of an emotion to move through you.
Emotional Overwhelm
Most people have had some version of this happen to them.
You are sitting there, getting through your inbox, when you open an email from someone lashing out. They’ve got a bone to pick, and you’re on the receiving end.
You feel the heat rising in your face, you feel steam beginning to plume out of your ears, you’re mad.
You hammer out a response that’s only the tip of the iceberg. If only you’d been paying attention in typing class; you could get it out faster! Some part of you knows that’s a big mistake. You know to wait a beat before you hit “send”.
How to Feel Emotions
Emotions can feel big and scary, especially if you’ve spent a lot of time ignoring them, pretending they aren’t there. Maybe you told yourself that you’d let yourself feel your emotions when you’re not so busy, because who has the time for wallowing in grief, disappointment, or fear? It seems so much easier to just suppress them.
The problem is that life happens and your emotions are a big part of how you respond to life. Unfortunately, there is not a lot of patience for emotions in this culture. There’s also not a lot of education in emotional intelligence, which leads to a kind of stunting of emotional capacity and growth.
It can be really helpful to be able to recognize emotions and name them. Non-violent communication teaches about recognizing your emtions and uncovering the need that is behind those emotions.
Ride the Wave of Emtions
You can use this idea anytime you feel yourself getting lost in an intense emotion and feeling the need to lash out in response. The beautiful thing is, emotions take 90 seconds to move through you.
That’s it, 90 seconds.
The next time you feel a big emotion that you’d rather not feel, let yourself go into the sensation of your emotion. Notice where in your body you feel it. Describe the sensation to yourself, getting granular and feeling the texture, temperature, density, and anything else you notice. Discover the nuance of sensation that is in your body as a result of this emotion.
The trick is to not add your story to the emotion. If you’ve spent time turning up the volume on your inner critic, then you know the pace at which it rolls. When anythign happens, it’s off to the races, weighing in on every situation, and usually not in the nicest light. It’s your stories and judgements from the inner critic that make those emotions turn into vicious waves of spun out emotion. It’s the stories that turn a misunderstanding into hurt feelings, and a bit of sadness into full-blown anger.
If you you let the emotion come, watch it, and feel it, as it washes through you, letting it be a meditation on sensation, you can then choose from a mindful place, what you want to do.
So before you hit send on that fiery text or bury your grief under another glass of wine, bowl of ice cream or netflix binge, take a breath, and find your glide on the wave of emotion. You can even check your watch, and time it. Watch your physiology as the emotion rises, crests, and washes away.
Just give yourself 90 seconds, story-free.
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