How to Starve Your Negative Emotions in 90 Seconds

I remember leaving home going to a meeting and without any notice, I had walked into a fog of anxiety, my mind already rehearsing an argument that had never happened but felt inevitable. As I woken up in a hospital later I could feel the tightness in my chest, the heavy weight of worry pressing down. But when I finally left my bed and I was sipping my coffee trying to remember what happened, something shifted.

I put the pieces together but from a different perspective. All those pieces where upside down. None of it ever happened. This is when I realized just how much of my life had been dictated by emotions I thought were beyond my control.

A study in the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom looked at the connections between a person’s circumstances and past experiences and development of depression and anxiety. Researchers, led by Peter Kinderman, Ph.D., found that the most important way that a person’s past experiences, such as traumatic life events, led to depression or anxiety was “by leading a person to ruminate and blame themselves for the problem.”  Kinderman noted in a statement.

Here are a few easy steps mental health professionals suggest you can take on your own to help break the cycle of rumination.

• Distract yourself with activities that will interrupt the negative thinking and focus on more positive facts.
• Try to deliberately recall times when things worked out even with challenges. Enlist the help of family or friends in remembering past positive experiences, times when things turned out well. This can help shift your thinking down a different path.
• Physical activity and change in environment, especially to a place that has positive associations for you, can help too.
• Try to separate out different problems or break down larger problems into smaller parts. Tackle one issue at a time. Make a step-by-step plan, be as specific as possible. Write it down. Then begin to move forward, taking action one step at a time.

I had read a piece of research by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard trained neuroscientist who had studied emotions in depth. She explained that an emotion, in its pure physiological form, lasts only about 90 seconds.

The surge of chemicals that creates fear, sadness, anger or joy moves through the body quickly. What makes an emotion linger isn’t the feeling itself—it’s the story we attach to it. We replay the conversation, anticipate rejection, relive an old wound. The emotion should have passed in a minute and a half, but we keep feeding it, keeping it alive for hours, days, sometimes even years.

That realization hit me like a shockwave. I had spent so much time believing that my emotions controlled me when, in reality, I was the one keeping them on repeat. I wasn’t just experiencing those feelings—I was nurturing them, growing them into something far bigger than they needed to be. And in doing so, I was blocking my own ability to feel good, to experience happiness in its raw and simple form.

Science backs this up. Neuroscientists at Stanford University found that rumination, a thought processing disorder, repeatedly dwelling on negative emotions—literally alters the brain’s structure. It strengthens neural pathways associated with stress and weakens those linked to problem-solving and emotional resilience. The more you indulge in certain thoughts, the more deeply ingrained they become, making it easier to feel anxious, angry or sad the next time something triggers you.

But here’s where it gets interesting. The brain also has neuroplasticity, meaning it can rewire itself. You can train your mind to let emotions pass without clinging on to them. Studies at Harvard Medical School show that practicing mindfulness reduces the brain’s amygdala activation—the part responsible for fear and anxiety. Just the simple act of noticing an emotion as it arises, without attaching a long-winded narrative to it, allows it to dissipate naturally.

Starving Negative Emotions

So why don’t we challenge negative emotions? Why do we hold on to pain, to anger, to guilt and feed them instead of starving them? Part of it is habit. Part of it is a survival mechanism, the brain is wired to focus on threats, even imagined ones. But part of it is that you confuse processing emotions with reliving them. You think if you let go of our sadness, it means you haven’t honoured it. If you stop feeling hurt, it means the event that caused it didn’t matter. But none of that is true.

Since that morning, sitting with my coffee, I decided to experiment. When the anxiety was there, but instead of engaging with it, I watched it. I called it. “Ah, here’s that old worry again.” I told myself that it was just a chemical response, a wave moving through me, nothing more. And then—I starved it. I didn’t add a story. I didn’t imagine worst-case scenarios. I didn’t replay old wounds. And in doing so, I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time: relief.

Your Inner Dialogue Rewrites the Narrative

There’s a moment in every downward emotional spiral when we have the choice to rewrite the narrative, though most of us don’t realize it. It happens just after the initial wave of emotion passes, after the surge of anger, sadness, or anxiety fades from our nervous system. In that 90 seconds space, before you begin the mental replay, you have the power to rewrite the narrative. But most of the time, you don’t. You fall into well-worn patterns, telling yourself the same old story, reinforcing the same emotions and keeping yourself stuck.

Letting go doesn’t mean forgetting. It doesn’t mean denying what you feel. It means acknowledging that the moment of pain has already passed and that the only thing keeping it here now is your own mind. It means challenging the thoughts that fan the flames of an emotion that, in its natural state, would have already faded.

Happiness isn’t something you need to chase but something you need to stop blocking. When you stop recycling old emotions, when you stop feeding every fear, when you allow your feelings to come and go as they’re meant to, you create space for joy. For inner peace. For the wave of happiness that isn’t dependent on circumstances but simply exists, always available, beneath the noise of your own mind.

The human brain is wired for patterns and predictability. Neuroscientists have found that the default mode network (DMN)—the part of the brain responsible for self-referential thinking activates when you’re not engaged in a task, meaning your brain naturally drift toward stories about self, your past and your worries. If you’re not careful, this becomes a loop of negativity. You take one moment of fear or sadness and turn it into a narrative of failure, rejection, or hopelessness.

But here’s the truth: your emotions don’t have a plotline—you do.

If emotions are fleeting after 90 seconds then why do you stay trapped in certain emotional states for years? Why does one person experience a setback and move on, while another spirals into self-doubt and depression? It comes down to the way we choose to frame our experiences.

Studies in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) show that your thoughts, not your emotions, determine your long-term well-being. In fact, research from the University of Pennsylvania found that people who learned to challenge their negative thoughts significantly reduced their risk of depression, anxiety and chronic stress. Their circumstances didn’t change—but their inner dialogue did.

So how do you rewrite the narrative?

It starts with self- awareness. The moment you feel an emotion rising, take a pause. Instead of immediately believing the thought that follows, question it. If your mind says, “I’m a failure,” ask yourself: Is this true? Or is this just a familiar script playing in my mind? Most of the time, our negative thoughts are not facts—they’re interpretations. And interpretations can be rewritten.

The “What Else Could Be True?” Method

One of the most powerful ways to challenge emotional narratives is to ask, “What else could be true?”

Imagine you’re feeling rejected after a friend cancels plans. Your immediate thought might be: They don’t value me. But what else could be true? Maybe they’re exhausted. Maybe they’re struggling with something personal. Maybe it has nothing to do with you at all.

By shifting the story, you stop reinforcing negative emotions and instead open space for neutrality, compassion, or even relief.

Getting Unstuck: The Role of Action

Rewriting your narrative isn’t just about changing your thoughts—it’s also about what you do next.

Staying in your heads reinforce emotions with repetition. But when you engage in new behaviors, you signal to your brain that the old story is no longer valid. This is why movement, social interaction and creative expression are so powerful—they disrupt the emotional loop and help you shift out of mental paralysis.

A study published in JAMA Psychiatry found that people who engaged in small, intentional actions, even something as simple as taking a short walk or calling a friend had significantly lower rates of depressive rumination. The reason? Action breaks the cycle of overthinking.

So the next time you catch yourself stuck in a narrative of negativity, ask yourself: What’s one small action I can take right now? It doesn’t have to be life-changing. It just has to be enough to remind your brain that you’re not trapped in the past and you’re moving forward.

Most of us carry emotional baggage far longer than we need to, not because the original experience was so powerful, but because we keep retelling the same painful story. But if a thought is keeping you stuck, you have permission to let it go. You are not your past. You are not your mistakes. You are not the sum of your worst days. You are the narrator of your own life. And at any moment, you can choose a different story.

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