Ninety Seconds

Prefer to Listen?

Mo Gawdat tells a story that I think about all the time. After a talk he gave on happiness, a woman came up to him and said, but you have no idea what happened to me. She was seventy-four. It had happened when she was seventeen. He hugged her, and he cried, and then he asked her a question I’ve thought about ever since.

Did it work?

All of that holding. Fifty-seven years of it. Did it do what she needed it to do?

I don’t think he was weighing her pain against anything. He was asking whether the replaying had accomplished what she hoped it would. When I ask it of my own much smaller grudges, the honest answer is no. The replay doesn’t deliver justice or an apology or a different ending. It just puts you back in the room.

Here’s what neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor noticed after her stroke. The chemical part of an emotion runs its course in about ninety seconds. The surge floods, peaks, and clears in under two minutes. After that, staying in it isn’t chemistry anymore. It’s retelling. We keep the storm going by playing the story again, and each replay orders up another ninety seconds.

That doesn’t mean the feeling isn’t real. It means the feeling has a lifespan, and the story we attach to it is what extends the lease.

So what interrupts it? The useful answers turn out to be physical. My daughter and her friends do one I love: they sweep their hands from the center of the collarbone out to the shoulders, then down the sides of the body and out through the fingers. They shake it off, literally. A nap. A walk. The cold air outside the front door.

Feel it fully. Give it the ninety seconds it’s actually asking for. Then pick your interrupter. Not to pretend it didn’t happen, but to stop paying rent on a room you don’t want to live in.

Thought for the Week: What’s a feeling you’ve been extending past its ninety seconds? And what’s your interrupter?