The 90-Second Rule, and the science of meeting ourselves with Kindness
Most of us were never taught how to meet ourselves with compassion—the essential foundation for being with difficult emotions. Compassion is one of the conditions needed to regulate our nervous system, interrupt habitual reactions, and expand our behavioral options, empowering us to choose our response.
This is what the practice of Pausing is all about. We use the first LAR (Land, Arrive, Relax) to create a sense of safety and groundedness, a container to begin to get closer to our feelings and be with them. To pay attention to them—to Listen. So we can then Attend to ourselves as we experience it all.
The way we meet ourselves in these moments will leave us feeling either like we have to harden, tense, and protect ourselves more or that we are supported, safe, and can soften and open.
The 90-Second Rule: What Science Says About Being Kind to Ourselves
Our emotions are more fluid than we think. Just like clouds moving through the sky, emotions will rise and fall in a rhythm of their own. What makes them seem so solid and fixed is our relationship to them, our “fixation” on them.
Brain scientist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, author of My Stroke of Insight, gave a wildly popular TED Talk where she explained that if we do not get into a “conversation” with our thoughts or emotions—if we don’t try to avoid or exaggerate them, if we don’t “add on” to them—they will rise and fall on their own, in a 90 second wave.
And we can see this illustrated through brain imaging, EEG, and blood chemistry.
Dr. Bolte Taylor shares, “When a person reacts to something in their environment, there’s a 90-second chemical process that takes place in the body. After those 90 seconds, any lingering emotional response is the result of thoughts re-triggering the emotional circuit.”
She explains that the moment we perceive a threat, it stimulates the corresponding emotional circuitry and triggers a physiological dump of stress hormones.
She shares that unless the actual danger continues, either in real life or by engaging with a “story” about the danger, this hormone dump will flush through you in less than 90 seconds.
Bolte Taylor makes clear that the physiological reaction does not just apply when faced with external threats———but it also occurs in reaction to our memories, as well as to our feelings about our memories.
She says, “There’s probably a thought somewhere in your brain of somebody who did you wrong twenty years ago. Every time you think of that person it still starts that circuit.”
But the circuit is fluid. Our emotions come and go. They don’t stay the same for long. Not even for 91 seconds.
Attending to Ourselves with Compassion
What this all means is that rather than avoiding or adding more tension on top of our feelings—criticizing, judging, qualifying, or telling stories about them—our job is simply practicing being with what we feel as we are feeling it and being with our shaky, queasy, uncomfortable, excitable sensations—with as much kindness and care as possible.
In our Pause practice, it means Attending to ourselves as we experience it all.
Practice Attending
I’d love for you to experience a 90-second downloadable audio practice to support us in learning to attend: to stay with the feelings that are here and present with us—being with our experience, whatever it is, softly, steadily, and without turning away.
