The 90 Seconds Between You and Freedom
Or: How not yelling about fruit helped me interrupt an inherited pattern
90 seconds.
According to neuroscientist Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor, that’s about how long an emotion lasts in the body.
We tend to think emotions live in our heads. But they’re actually physiological events.
Something happens, we get triggered, and a cascade of chemicals moves through our bodies, urging us to react.
That chemical wave breaks in less time than it takes to make a cup of coffee.
So, why can anger, shame, fear, or sadness seem to last for hours, days or even years?
It’s because the mind often keeps retriggering them through rumination, storytelling, resistance, and rehearsal. We replay the event, argue with it, justify it, and relive it. Each time, the body gets another emotional chemical injection.
Those 90 seconds, after the trigger and before the spiral, are a critical window. It’s the space where we can choose how to respond—instead of reacting habitually.
It’s a concept I knew intellectually for some time. But on a seven-day silent meditation retreat, I got to experience that space directly and know what it means to pause and create space for a different choice to emerge.
The Pattern I Inherited
It was the tail end of the pandemic, and the retreat happened online. The teachers instructed us that if we were attending from a location where silence wasn’t possible, we should practice mindful speech.
Since I was doing the retreat at home with two children under 10 around, true silence wasn’t possible. They’d never understand why Daddy suddenly stopped talking to them.
So I set an intention: I’d only speak if they spoke to me, or if I had something urgent to say. If I spoke, I would do so calmly and kindly.
At the time, I was deep in my work on shaking a longstanding pattern of yelling at my kids.
It’s something I inherited from my father, who often yelled at and intimidated me.
By this point, I’d learned that beneath the angry response was anxiety founded on a desperate need for control whenever things felt chaotic or unpredictable.
And what’s more unpredictable than a couple of wilful, free-spirited kids?
Most of my reactive parenting followed the same script: An event would happen, often something small; fear would surface unconsciously, and before I even realized what was happening, it would erupt in an angry reaction.
I carried so much shame about that pattern. Changing it was a main motivation behind my healing work.
Reacting to a Bag of Oranges
The retreat intention forced me to really consider every response before making it. Was a response necessary here? And if so, how could I respond mindfully?
One moment particularly stands out.
I was sitting at the kitchen table, watching my six-year-old walk out of the pantry holding a bag of oranges. He loves fruit and could demolish that bag of mandarins in one sitting.
I felt the tightening in my gut, the sense of urgency in my throat, the impulse to control the situation.
A big part of the retreat for me was practicing mindfulness of the body intensively for the first time. So when I saw him coming towards me, sack in hand, I immediately noticed my bodily reaction.
I felt the tightening in my gut, the sense of urgency in my throat, the impulse to control the situation before orange peels were littered all over the living room.
On another day, I would have reacted by raising my voice and maybe snatching the sack away if he ignored me.
But on this day, because of the commitment I’d made during the retreat, I managed to pause.
In that pause, I could see the reaction arising before it took over.
The Power to Choose
A popular idea inspired by the work of psychologist Dr. Viktor Frankl is this: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
As I see it, our freedom lies in the 90 seconds between the event that triggers the emotion and our reaction to it.
Can we pause long enough to notice what’s happening inside and respond constructively? Or will we react habitually?
Freedom lives in the former. And I imagine most people reading this would choose the pause.
But pausing isn’t always easy.
The physical sensations underlying emotions like fear, anger and sadness can feel unbearable: tightness in the chest, heat in the face, a racing heart, a knot in the stomach.
These are all signs of an agitated nervous system urging us to escape, suppress or react.
Awareness Creates the Space
This is where mindfulness comes in.
I don’t mean the app-based, productivity hack kind of mindfulness.
I mean the often difficult, deeply imperfect practice of sitting with things just as they are—especially when they are uncomfortable.
Mindfulness, at its core, involves bringing awareness to our present-moment experience with the intention not to judge, resist, cling to, or try to escape it.
When we notice that knot in the stomach, can we stick with it long enough to learn from it?
It’s about learning to notice what’s happening in the body and trying to stay with it long enough to understand it, even when our every instinct is pushing us to act out our habitual reactions.
When we notice that knot in the stomach, can we stick with it long enough to learn from it? Oh yes, that knot means fear is present.
Can we notice the heat in the chest or throat in response to the fear? Oh yes, anger is here. It wants to protect me from the source of the fear.
The noticing itself creates the space. And in the space, we can choose a different response.
A Different Response
As I sat there in the kitchen, watching my son with the oranges, I practiced mindfulness.
I noticed the fear present and the familiar impulse to respond with anger. I managed to pause long enough to respond differently.
Standing up from the table, I walked over to him and quietly told him he couldn’t have the whole bag of oranges.
I took out a couple and handed them to him, then gently took the rest and put them up on a high shelf where he couldn’t reach them.
That was it. No yelling. No intimidation. No escalation.
As I remember it, he just wandered off to play with his sister.
But for me, there was an inner shift.
I experienced the space between the stimulus and response clearly enough to choose something other than the pattern I inherited.
I got a glimpse of a different way of relating: both to my children and myself. One that’s kinder, gentler and freer.
It’s taken years of practice, and there’ve been a lot of mistakes made along the way. But over time, it’s become my new default.
When I’m stressed or otherwise poorly resourced, I still slip back into my old yelly ways.
But even when that does happen, it has less of an edge, and I’m able to return to a regulated state much more quickly.
Self-compassion helps with the latter. It lets me know that I’m a human working with a nervous system imprint that I didn’t choose, and I’m always doing the best I can at any given moment.