Here is your ONE drop:
Last week, I came across the 90 second rule for emotions. You know the one… neuroscientist has a stroke, discovers emotions only last 90 seconds unless you keep feeding them with your thoughts, everyone copies it into their therapy notes and LinkedIn captions.
I have written about this before. Nodded along. Shared it. Recommended it. Felt very smart and science backed while doing so.
Then I actually looked it up and turns out it is bullshit. Well, not complete bullshit. But close enough that we should probably stop calling it science.
The 90-second rule comes from Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's book My Stroke of Insight. She had a stroke at 37, observed her own brain rebooting, and concluded that the "chemical component" of emotions flushes out of your system in about 90 seconds.
Sounds legit. She is a Harvard trained neuroscientist. The number is specific. Therapists love it. I loved it.
But she never cited a single study. Never identified which chemicals. Never explained how she landed on 90 seconds and not 30 or 300.
And when you actually look at the science, the timeline doesn't even remotely check out.
Neurotransmitters like serotonin get cleared from the synapse in seconds, not minutes. The spike of adrenaline clears fast but the effects can linger for up to an hour. Cortisol can stay elevated for hours. Definitely not 90 seconds.
And emotional states do not map cleanly to single chemicals anyway. They last because of appraisals, loops, attention, and rumination, not because of one chemical clock.
So why does everyone, including licensed therapists, keep repeating the 90 second thing? Because it is useful. Not true. Useful.
It gives people a framework. A number to count to. A sense of control in a moment when control feels impossible. And for a lot of people, that's enough. It works. If that's you, use it. I'm not here to take away your coping tools.
But let’s stop pretending it is neuroscience.
And let's stop beating ourselves up when it doesn't work. You're not bad at it. The rule is just fake.
Your brain isn't malfunctioning. It's doing exactly what brains do... running complex, overlapping chemical processes that don't give a shit about self-help techniques.
//Ann
Want to know how I figured out this was BS? Read the full backstory here.
