How long does the average emotion last?
Photo by Greg Raines on Unsplash
Feelings last — on average — 90 seconds.
In healthy, well-adjusted, emotionally intelligent, relatively healed adults, this is generally true.
It’s also true for the narrow range of feelings we never repressed, blocked, numbed, or didn’t feel safe to feel. Whether we’re well-adjusted and have done inner work, or not.
But there are other feelings we first must befriend, before they transition into the 90 second come and go fleeting feelings.
These are the feelings we never felt safe to feel. They’re the ones related to our wounding and our trauma and our conditioning away from certain sensations and ways of being.
They tend to be the messier feelings like grief and sadness and anger and fury, but they can also be things like enthusiasm and pleasure, delight, and joy.
This kind of feeling-befriending is a process of building intimacy with ourselves. It’s the best kind of "get-to-know-me-myself-and-I" process there is. These feelings stick around until we become one with them. Sometimes this takes hours, sometimes weeks, sometime months, sometimes years.
There is no feeling to completion or resolve or resonance in the right-now moment in this case. Because the exercise is to befriend the feeling and what arises in us as a result of feeling it; to find equanimity with it, no matter how painful, uncomfortable, socially unacceptable it may be.
This is the deepest work there is.