Emotion only lasts in our bodies for about 90 seconds. After that, the physical reaction dissipates, UNLESS our cognitive brain kicks in and starts connecting our anger with past events.
Interpretation
Emotions are temporary physical responses that can be prolonged by our thoughts and associations.
This quote by Jill Bolte Taylor highlights the transient nature of emotions, suggesting that they typically only last for approximately 90 seconds in our bodies unless we allow our minds to dwell on them by linking them to past experiences. This understanding emphasizes the importance of emotional awareness and the power of our cognitive processes in shaping how we feel over longer periods.
In practice
During a workshop on emotional intelligence, one could use this quote to illustrate how to effectively manage emotions.
Unfortunately, as a society, we do not teach our children that they need to tend carefully the garden of their minds. Without structure, censorship, or discipline, our thoughts run rampant on automatic. Because we have not learned how to more carefully manage what goes on inside our brains, we remain vulnerable to not only what other people think about us, but also to advertising and/or political manipulation.
We have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world.
The better we understand the choices we have been making, either consciously or unconsciously, the more say we will have in the world we create. Neurocircuitry may be neurocircuitry, but we don't have to run on automatic.
Just like children, emotions heal when they are heard and validated.
Our submission to general principles is necessary because we cannot be guided in our practical action by full knowledge and evaluation of the consequences. So long as men are not omniscient, the only way in which freedom can be given to the individual is by such general rules to delimit the sphere in which the decision is his. There can be no freedom if the government is not limited to particular kinds of action but can use its powers in any ways which serve particular ends.
Sometimes I wonder what it's gonna take to find dignity.
Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine.
I have never been one of those who cares about happiness. Happiness is a strange notion. I am just not made for it. It has never been a goal of mine; I do not think in those terms.
Yet when the blood of the sons of immigrants and the grandsons of slaves fell on foreign fields, it was American blood. In it you could not read the ethnic particulars of the soldier who died next to you. He was an American. And when I think of how we learned this lesson, I wonder how we could have unlearned it.
In every tyrant's heart there springs in the end this poison, that he cannot trust a friend.
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