A zebra is grazing in a small cove. Suddenly, she hears the almost imperceptible rustle of a leaf, sniffs the faintest whiff of danger and goes on high alert. Her finely tuned fight or flight instinct kicks in, and she starts running as a lion slinks out of the bushes and begins the pursuit.

Thankfully, our zebra escapes, and minutes later, she is back in stasis, heart rate lowered, grazing in a new field. The zebra doesn’t consciously have to “let go” of her stressful experience. She just does.

We, on the other hand, will continue to spend countless hours in a conversation with ourselves about what happened. We return to the scene of the stressor, as if we could affect another outcome or go back and this time, say the clever line we thought of afterward.

Had I been that zebra, my internal conversation wouldn’t have subsided when the lion stopped the chase. It would have escalated: “I knew I shouldn’t have been eating in that area – my mother warned me about that neighborhood. Boy, that lion got real close. I need to work out more. I almost didn’t make it. What if I had died? Is there a zebra heaven? Maybe I need a bucket list. What if I see another lion tomorrow? OMG these horizontal stripes make my butt look fat. I need to go on a diet. Is that something in the bush? I think I maybe should just find a cave and stay there where I’m safe.”

The Buddhists have a term for this incessant internal chatter: Monkey mind. And there are moments when my mind feels like it has flying monkeys in it, those frightening beasts who did the Wicked Witch of the West’s bidding.

The key I’m learning is not to fight the “flying monkeys,” but to try to just become aware and observe – watch my thoughts swirl, watch my mind reach into the past and fumble into the future. If I don’t fight or latch onto the thoughts or emotions, they pass of their own accord.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, who wrote My Stroke of Insight, explains the process this way: “When a person has a reaction to something in their environment, there’s a 90 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. Something happens in the external world and chemicals are flushed through your body which puts it on full alert. For those chemicals to totally flush out of the body it takes less than 90 seconds.

“This means that for 90 seconds you can watch the process happening, you can feel it happening, and then you can watch it go away. After that, if you continue to feel fear, anger, and so on, you need to look at the thoughts that you’re thinking – that are re-stimulating the circuitry – that is resulting in you having this physiological response over and over again.”

We don’t like to hear that our anger, or frustration, envy, resentment and distress are within our control. It’s much easier (and less upsetting for the ego) to blame someone else. But in the end, as Bolte Taylor says, after 90 seconds, it’s a good bet we’re the ones stoking the stress fires.

So the old adage about counting to 10 was useful, but neuroscience shows us that counting to 90 is a whole lot better.