Riding the Wave of Emotions

​In the Netflix show, “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” the title character, Kimmy, has to turn a crank. It’s an endless and meaningless activity that she is forced to do. To get through the activity, she counts to 10. And when she gets to 10, she starts again. Kimmy states that she can do anything for 10 seconds.
 
There’s research that supports this! Researchers estimate that our feelings only last approximately 90 seconds. It’s a bit longer than 10 seconds, but 90 seconds is astonishingly short.

Practicing Riding the Wave
Riding the Wave of Emotion is a distress tolerance skill. Imagine your feeling as if it were a wave. It starts small, barely noticeable. It grows, until it reaches its peak. The peak of that wave lasts approximately 90 seconds. And then, our feeling naturally starts to decrease in intensity, until it subsides completely. While the entire wave of emotion might last longer than 90 seconds, the emotion at its most intense point will be short lived. In order to practice this skill, you simply have to be mindful of how you are feeling, and where you are on that emotional wave.
 
This skill allows you to track your emotion as it hits the peak and declines. This skill is helpful when you are feeling overwhelmed by emotion, but aren’t necessarily sure how to respond to it. By simply being present to the wave, you are responding to your emotion!  This is also a helpful skill for navigating urges. Our urges, just like our emotions, will subside. Urges can include self-harm, overeating, using substances when you don't want to, or any other habits you are hoping to break. 
 
Considerations
This skill is also helpful because there are times when we want to remain upset, anxious, angry, or whatever big feeling we are experiencing. And yet, as with all things in our lives, our emotions have a natural start and end point. They come and go. And when it is time for them to subside, this skill can help us do that. If you start to feel yourself trying to climb back up to the peak of the emotional wave, remind yourself that emotions are meant to crash on the shores, just like waves.