By Kate Henry

Homer Independent Press

I received some difficult news tonight on my way out the door to an open knitting event at Kindred Spirits Weaving Studio. As much as I didn’t want to be upset in that moment, I couldn’t stop the tears from welling up under my eyes. I watched the swift transition as my shoulders stiffened and my body braced with a sense of resistance. Tugging at my heart was a familiar heavy ache that struck the chord of an old emotional wound that momentarily took me away from a state of wellness.

 While researching for this article I found a multitude of definitions for the concept of wellness. According to UMD in Your Guide To Living Well, “Wellness is a holistic integration of physical, mental, and spiritual well-being, fueling the body, engaging the mind, and nurturing the spirit” — in simple terms, that which creates a sense of safety, ease and joy in the body produces wellness. 

As my brain chewed on the details of burdening information that night in my car, my emotional body spontaneously began separating me from a sense of peace and connection within.

I was planning to meet a friend there and I didn’t want bad news to ruin my night, so I pulled myself together and made my way to the studio. Over the course of the hour while listening to the chatter of voices around me, I was distracted by the sounds, colors and textures of my surroundings, and I naturally began to disconnect from my triggering thoughts. Very quickly, I felt my body settle back into balance, coaxed by the combination of soft warm light, the rhythm of my fingers running through wool fibers and the soothing sound of light-hearted conversation.

In years past, I wasn’t able to bounce back so quickly from emotional triggers. I would often get “stuck” for long periods of time, sometimes days, ruminating over conversations or experiences that didn’t go as I had hoped, but I have worked on this intensively and have had incredible success.


According to Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist known for her research on the brain’s structure and her personal experience healing from a severe stroke, the biochemical lifespan of an emotion is roughly 90 seconds.


In her book “My Stroke of Insight,” Taylor states, “When a person has a reaction to something in their environment, there is a ninety second chemical process that happens in the body; after that, any remaining emotional response is just the person choosing to stay in that emotional loop.”


My experience matches this claim. Her research indicates it is the continued investment in thoughts and mental narratives that prolong the emotion beyond those initial 90 seconds. As long as we continue to dwell on the triggering event, the emotional experience will be sustained. This loop can reoccur at any point in the future when a negative thought about a person or event slips back into the mind.

Ideally, people are able to maintain a healthy nervous system response and bounce back quickly from a given stressor like I was able to do on knitting night. However, repeated short-term stress leads to long-term stress, and that will disrupt homeostasis. In his book “Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself,” Dr. Joe Dispenza writes, “When each cell divides at the end of its life and makes a daughter cell, the receptor sites on the outside of the new cell will require a higher level and a more intense version of that emotion to turn the cell ‘on.’”


Basically, thoughts signal emotions to produce specific peptides (chemical signals) that bind to receptor sites on cells throughout the body. When you repeatedly experience stress (e.g. via worry, sadness, and anger), the body floods with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. Over time, cells adapt by increasing the number of receptor sites that shuttle these depleting emotions, and decreasing the receptor sites for renewing emotions like love and joy. What you don’t use, you lose. The good news is it’s absolutely possible to reverse these effects using the same process.

Here’s how it works: First, you think the thought, then you experience an associated emotion, which leads to a physiological response to what you’re thinking and feeling. The next time you feel yourself starting to engage with a trigger, Dr. Taylor says, “Literally look at your watch. Focusing on your watch (for ninety seconds) preoccupies your language center and disrupts you from engaging the cycle of rethinking. That is the moment of power.”


I personally find that doing movement meditation like yoga or walking helps me best. The more you practice redirecting your brain, the easier and more natural this process becomes. This is not to suggest that you should look for ways to bypass feelings that come up. Learning to be OK with emotional pain is an important step for sustaining deep healing.


It’s more about being able to actively decide what things you want to invest your energy in after you’ve processed painful events and are ready to put them to bed. Building skills to disrupt your body from running away on a fear train can help you stay in the driver’s seat and better able to navigate life with your feet firmly on the ground.

By Kate Henry Homer Independent Press