"I work for an organization called Six Seconds. We’re called “Six Seconds” because of the way emotions work in our bodies. Suppose you’re playing and you break something you like. Here’s what happens in your brain:
The first ¼ second: You begin to pay attention and notice something happened.
Second ¼ second: Your brain begins to decide this is a problem, and produces a bunch of new chemicals.
Next ½ second: The chemicals go flowing into your brain and start going into your blood. These chemicals are messengers causing a whole bunch of different reactions in you (such as, tightening certain muscles, focusing your attention, making you tear up, changing the way you’re breathing).
Next 5 seconds: The chemicals continue to flow through your blood and go everywhere in your body. The emotion messenger chemicals cause different cells in your body to produce new chemicals — so they ripple through you expanding their effect.
After six seconds, the original chemicals are almost all gone. They’ve delivered their messages and you are now reacting to the mistake of breaking that item. Maybe you’re crying and sad, maybe your mad and wanting to blame, maybe you’re shocked and still, maybe you’re wanting to run away. Your reaction depends on how you’ve learned to deal with this flood of chemicals.
But here’s something amazing: Those original feeling chemicals are now gone. If you continue to feel sad/mad/afraid/hurt — whatever — you are actually choosing to re-create more and more of the feeling chemicals. You don’t HAVE to keep reacting. You’re reacting because that’s what you’ve learned to do. You can learn a different way of reacting."
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