OPINION: The 90-second rule that has kept me from crying for over 20 years

The rule kept me from grieving.

I learned about the 90-Second Rule in my 20s, when I was a young gay man at the peak of dating, partying and getting my heart broken. On weekends, I could be drinking at Bed Bar in Malate or Embassy in BGC, meet someone, like him too much, exchange numbers, and then spend the following days staring at my phone, wondering why he wasn’t calling.

Rejection devastated me then. Breakups made me cry. Ghosting could become an entire story in my head about being unwanted.

Then I encountered neuroanatomist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor and an idea she popularized in her memoir “My Stroke of Insight.” Taylor suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke in 1996 that affected her left hemisphere, disrupting language and the internal chatter through which we constantly narrate our lives.

Taylor proposed that when something triggers us emotionally, the brain initiates an automatic physiological response. Neural circuits activate, stress chemicals enter the bloodstream, and our heart rate, breathing and muscle tension can change. She argued that this initial response can run its course in roughly 90 seconds unless our thoughts keep reactivating the circuitry.

The exact 90 seconds is not a scientifically established stopwatch for every human emotion. But the larger idea changed my life: what happens to me and what I repeatedly tell myself about what happened are two different things.

A guy I dated stopped replying. It hurt. Then my brain would begin: Maybe I’m unattractive. Maybe he met somebody better. Maybe nobody will love me. Maybe I’ll end up alone.

Then I would catch myself. The guy stopped replying once. I was rejecting myself a hundred times afterward.

The rule followed me into my career as a public relations entrepreneur. A prestigious client could suddenly terminate an account. A pitch I spent nights preparing could go to another agency. A campaign I believed would be huge could fail. I could watch someone my age announce another achievement while I quietly wondered why my own career seemed stuck.

The disappointment was real. But I learned not to build a home inside it.

In my 30s, however, the rule faced its greatest test.

I lost practically everything. The money I had spent years saving disappeared. I found myself under a mountain of debt, with bills and obligations piling up and the possibility of legal cases hanging over me. I remember looking at the numbers and wondering how I could possibly recover. The business I had built, my reputation and the future I imagined for myself suddenly felt as though they could collapse together.

For a moment, I wanted to end my life.

Then something I had practiced since my 20s returned to me: This feeling will pass.

The debts would not disappear in 90 seconds. Neither would the problems or possible cases. But the terror, shame and hopelessness flooding my body at that moment were not permanent. I did not have to make a permanent decision while trapped in a temporary state of despair.

That thought brought me back to reality. If emotions could change, tomorrow could feel different. If tomorrow could feel different, circumstances could change, too.

I rebuilt.

Now I am in my 40s, and sometimes I wonder whether I learned the lesson too well.

People around me are dying—older friends, colleagues, mentors, family members. I attend wakes and funerals. I look at photographs of people I once laughed, worked, argued, ate and drank with. I feel the loss, but crying has become difficult.

Almost automatically, my brain does what I trained it to do for decades: observe the sadness, interrogate the thoughts and stop feeding the emotion.

The mechanism that once helped save my life now sometimes prevents me from surrendering to grief.

Perhaps somewhere along the way, I confused emotional regulation with emotional avoidance. I became so skilled at surviving heartbreak, debt, fear and professional disappointment that I began treating every painful emotion as another problem to manage.

But death is not a failed pitch. Grief is not a breakup. An empty chair cannot be fixed by reframing my thoughts.

Sometimes I wonder if I was never meant to know the 90-Second Rule. Perhaps ignorance would have allowed me to cry longer, grieve messier and embrace more fully this inconvenient thing called humanity.

Or perhaps, after more than 20 years, I am only beginning to understand the rule correctly.

Ninety seconds does not tell me when I must stop feeling. It tells me that emotions move.

Sometimes I should let them pass.

And sometimes, I should let them stay.

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