The 90-second truth about emotions

A) The 90-second truth about emotions

B) Why you still carrying what should have passed

To push them down. To stay strong. To wait until we're alone, until it's convenient, until we have time to fall apart.

But here's what your body already knows: emotions aren't meant to stay.

By design, an emotion is a wave. It rises, it peaks, it falls. Neurologically, the chemical cascade of an emotion moves through your body in about 90 seconds. That's it. A minute and a half.

But most of us? We carry emotions for hours. Days. Sometimes years.

Not because the emotion itself lasts that long, but we resist it.

We clench against it. We story around it. We push it down, analyze it, judge it, fear it. And in doing so, we trap it in our body. We turn a 90-second wave into a chronic tension that lives in our shoulders, our jaw, our chest.

When you allow an emotion to move through you, really move through you, something remarkable happens.

You feel it fully. You breathe with it. You let your body shake, cry, sigh, and release. And then it passes.

Not because you fixed it or figured it out. But because that's what emotions do when we stop holding them hostage.

This is somatic healing. This is emotional release. Not as a concept, but as a lived experience in your body.

The next time you feel something uncomfortable rising:

Pause. Don't run. Don't distract. Don't reach for your phone.

Breathe. Let your breath be the anchor. Slow, steady, full.

Feel. Where is this emotion in your body? Your throat? Your chest? Your belly? Put your hand there if it helps.

Allow. Let it be exactly as intense as it is. Let it move. Let it shake you, break you open, soften you.

Witness. You are not the emotion. You are the space in which it's happening.

And then, in a matter of minutes, sometimes seconds, you'll notice the charge begins to shift. The tightness softens. The tears slow. The breath deepens.

The wave has moved through.

If you've been carrying emotions for longer than they needed to stay, you're not broken. You were never taught how to let them move.

But your body remembers. It's been waiting for permission.

So give it. Again and again. Each time you feel something difficult, choose to stay. Choose to breathe. Choose to let it pass through instead of holding it in.

Because emotions don't sit with us for hours by nature.

Only when we forget how to let them go.