Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
“You can clean it up!”
Most people who know me will tell you that I’m a calm, easygoing person who is courteous and respectful of others. I usually don’t react right away if someone says or does something that does not sit well. The other evening, however, a busboy in a restaurant pushed all my hot buttons at once. As he leaned across my seat to refill my friend’s water glass, he pushed my drink, spilling it across the table. I looked up and he just stood there, looking back at me, with no hint of apology in his demeanor; nor did he make any movement to attend to the spill (which, I must say, was accidental). I then asked if he could mop up the spill, and he pointed to the paper-napkin holder on the table and said, quite casually, “You can clean it up.”
He may not have meant to respond in the way that came across; however, in that instant, I lost my cool and reacted angrily.
React or respond?
The author of the best-selling book My Stroke of Insight, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard-trained neuroanatomist, describes what happens to us in such situations. A chemical process is initiated in the brain during that emotional reaction. When something in our environment triggers an emotion like anger, anxiety, or fear, the brain releases a cascade of neurochemicals such as adrenaline or norepinephrine into the bloodstream. This creates one or more physiological experiences in the body; our muscles tense, our heart begins to beat faster, the chest tightens, we feel hot, blood rushes to the face, our stomach tightens, or we begin to feel uneasy.
All of us have experienced this kind of visceral reaction at one time or another – instinctive, gut-level feelings and physical sensations that arise from deep within our bodies, stimulated by the situations in which we find ourselves. In that instant, we react instinctively, uncontrollably. When you see a ball flying towards your head, you duck involuntarily. I yelled at the busboy in the restaurant.
The 90-second rule
Dr. Taylor introduced the 90-second rule to describe how such situations play out. She explains that when an emotional reaction is triggered, it takes the brain around 90 seconds to process and then release the emotions. The physical sensations and visceral reactions also slowly fade away during this time. Any emotions or emotional reactions following that 90-second period occur because we choose to stay in that emotional loop, generating thoughts or reactions to keep the emotional cycle going.
A 90-second pause, therefore, makes the difference between a reaction and a response. Dr. Taylor’s 90-second rule empowers us to pause, breathe, and gain control over how we respond. It provides a clear explanation for the common, idiomatic advice we’ve all heard: “count to ten,” suggesting that we should take a moment to pause, breathe, and gather our thoughts before acting, instead of reacting impulsively. (As a historical aside, this advice is attributed to President Thomas Jefferson, who is reported to have said, “When angry, count to ten before you speak; if very angry, count to one hundred.”)
What does this mean for you and me?
Look back in time. Think about an event or interaction that triggered a reactionary response in you; a situation that made you mad, and you just reacted. In retrospect, how important was that event in the overall scheme of things? I went through this exercise and asked a couple of friends to do so as well. Our consensus agreement was that most such situations, which seemed important at that instant in time, now seem trivial. There are probably situations that we can no longer even remember. Of course, some events are not trivial; they will have triggered a host of emotions such as grief or sadness that do last much longer.
A good lesson to draw from the 90-second rule is to train ourselves to calm down when we feel that emotion surging in our bodies. Learn to bring our focus back to the moment, effectively reducing the intensity of our emotional reaction. This pause allows us to avoid making hasty decisions or saying things that we might later regret. It enables us to consider different perspectives, potential consequences of actions, and pick an alternate, more reasoned response. As with developing other good habits, this takes practice, and multiple failures are likely before we succeed in gradually gaining control over our emotional triggers. Practitioners and teachers of this process call it resetting the mind.
If we continue to feel the emotion after the initial (roughly) 90-second period, it’s because we choose to dwell on the triggering event, and re-stimulate our emotional circuitry, reinforcing related thoughts. Susanne Daily says it well: “There are only two things you can control in your life: how you prepare, and how you respond.”
Solve for ‘happy‘
Mo Gawdat provides one example of leveraging these lessons. Formerly an engineer and chief business officer for Google X, he applies the 90-second rule by asking three questions: (a) Is it true? (b) Can I do something about it? (c) Can I accept it and do something despite its presence? Now a happiness researcher and speaker, Mo says that the rule can almost instantly help find joy and fulfillment. In his book Solve for Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy, he argues that your happiness is controlled by two factors: your perception of the events in your life, and your expectations of how your life should be. In our life equation, he argues, the balance between these two factors sets our state of happiness. Note that both perception and expectation are within your control!
How will you respond?
A quote that is attributed to Viktor E. Frankl, an Austrian neurologist, psychologist, philosopher, and Holocaust survivor, sums this up very well: “Between stimulus and response lies a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose a response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.”
Will you solve your life equation for your happiness?