Are 90 Seconds Enough to Overcome Emotional Unpleasantness?
Miracles of a little conscious choice.
“Big things are often just small things that are noticed.” — Markus Zusak
We all have our quirks and we all have our own ways to deal with them. When some of us keep on thinking about the tainted pictures just shown through life; others continue to feel emotional pain until it seems numbness is washing one of his/her bones.
When life hardly goes as planned, a conscious or unconscious reaction is unavoidable. However, sometimes we have to pay for the little unconscious mistakes. I, for example, once chained another person in trouble just because of my hasty reaction. The point is, life is the sum of our every little and big choice. The more deliberate we are towards our life, the easier it would be to grow and blossom through life.
Emotional unpleasantness gets in our way in one or another. Be it a decision or fatigue after a challenging situation, the energy associated with emotions has its own ways to chain us for a good while. The question, then, is how we can grow through what we have been through despite the whirlpool of emotions?
Being the first and foremost emotional creatures, our emotions do not go on their own.
But all it takes to let them go is a little conscious choice of allowing the ripples to flow into and through you.
In her book, My Stroke of Insight, the Harvard brain scientist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor noted,
“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.”
So it all takes ninety seconds to identify and be done with a particular emotion and its energy. MRI studies of the brain show that this “emotion identification” calms the brain region involved in outbursts and helps one regain control.
Mindfulness, as I’m sure you know, is light in this tattered, disoriented world. However, when things go just in opposite direction to our forecasts, mindfulness may be the last thing on our minds. But if we deliberately spare just 90 seconds to identify what we have been going through, it helps, as researchers suggest, to calm the wars waging inside of us.
In this time we push aside all the judgments about our emotions and just go through whatever happens inside of us. Slowly, calmly we find a way to consciousness, we recognize where we are going as Maya Angelou has said,
“You can’t really know where you are going until you know where you have been.”
I believe life never goes as we anticipate it but whatever our lives are, wherever they are headed there are always things that we can control. If we identify those things, our lives change and we swim through emotional cascades with dignity. The ninety seconds rule, for that matter, is just a way to feel and heal our inner selves for the goodness that’s all around us. One of the purposes of being a human, as we all believe, is to heal other souls and the only road to this passes through ourselves.
So, whenever things deviate from the pictures of what might have been, don’t rush towards life, rush towards yourself instead. Name whatever you are feeling by consciously choosing ninety seconds and your inner world and the world around you will belong to you. As the quote goes,
“You cannot heal what you cannot feel.” — John Bradshaw
Thank YOU very much for your time!
