I love Oprah’s interview with Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor on The Wisdom of Sundays.
Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Pay attention to how things feel in your body. Because you know what you feel like in your body when you get angry. And you have a choice when you get angry of either being angry or paying attention to what it feels like in your body when you are angry. And when you have that kind of physiological response when you get angry, it only takes ninety seconds. It takes ninety seconds from the moment you feel that trigger happen, and you feel yourself starting to get angry, for the chemicals to flush through your body and then flush completely out of you. Ninety second is all.
Oprah: So, start timing it?
Jill: Start timing it. Within ninety seconds, it will be gone, and you’ll go, “okay, I just dodged that one.”
Oprah: Okay, then why do people harbor the same feelings forty years?
Jill: Because they keep rethinking the same thought that resituates that emotional circuitry, and they rerun the loop.
Oprah: Got it.
Jill: And hook right back into that hostility. People can stay angry for days, and weeks, and years. It’s phenomenal. Just because they’re choosing, either consciously or unconsciously, they’re choosing to rerun the loops, the circuitry.