Manage emotions with a neuroscientist’s 90-second rule during a chaotic day

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It started with a new job, the kind that comes with fresh notebooks and a sharp edge of imposter syndrome. My first big event was coming up, and the pressure settled into my body before the calendar even turned. Then came the calls.

My father had been diagnosed with cancer. His surgery was scheduled. My uncle went in for one of his own. Days later, another uncle died suddenly of a heart attack.

At home, the monsoon made itself known. Humidity clung to the walls, mould bloomed across the bathroom ceiling, and our washing machine gave up entirely. My partner, newly freelancing, was travelling more, and I was alone more than I liked to admit.

None of this arrived dramatically. There was no collapse, no scream into a pillow. Just the slow, cumulative pressure of too much, too close together. The kind of pressure that makes your chest tighten before your brain catches up. Somewhere in the middle of this slow-motion unravelling, I came across a neuroscientist’s approach to manage emotions: the 90-second rule. No breathwork, no apps, just a small, timed pause.

I decided to try it.

What is the 90-second rule?

Developed by American neuroscientist (neuroanatomist, specifically) and author Dr Jill Bolte Taylor, the 90-second rule is a deceptively simple tool to help manage emotions. When we’re triggered by stress, grief, anger or panic, it sets off a cascade of stress hormones in the body. But unless we continue to feed the emotion with thought, the physiological response peaks and passes in about 90 seconds.

In My Stroke of Insight (2008), Dr Taylor writes: “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.”

She expands on the idea in her later book Whole Brain Living, explaining how emotions may initially hijack the body, but do not have to define what follows, that is, unless we keep replaying the story. Her interviews and talks, including one for WUSA9, frame it as the “90-second life cycle of an emotion.”

The rule isn’t about avoiding emotion. It’s about allowing space between sensation and story.