Mo Gawdat is reframing our relationship with emotions.
We've all been there: it's 90 degrees outside, absolutely sweltering, and you're walking home from a new smoothie shop less than a mile away from your apartment, and everything is melting. The smoothie in your right hand. The açaí bowl in your left. Your old, broken headphones slowly slip off your head as a song you've never heard before blares through the speakers. Your willpower is diminishing by the second, and no one is around to help you.
Okay, that might be a bit specific (and precisely what happened to me about an hour ago). Still, you've likely had a similar experience: an encounter that left you annoyed, frustrated, or feeling hopeless.
But what if I told you that, according to Mo Gawat—a former Google executive who has spent the last 20 years researching the mechanics of happiness—you only need to endure that emotional roller coaster for precisely 90 seconds?
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It's time to meet the man who is revolutionizing our understanding of our emotions—and giving us all a science-backed way to hit the reset button on our worst days.
The unlikely happiness guru who changed everything
Mo Gawat isn't your typical wellness guru peddling crystals and manifestation journals. This is a guy who spent decades crunching numbers at Google X, the company's "Moonshot Factory," where he pursued ambitious, high-risk but potentially world-changing projects that tackled large-scale global problems like climate change, healthcare, and communications. But his most profound discovery about human happiness stemmed from his darkest hour.
When Gawdat's 21-year-old son Ali died from preventable medical negligence during what should have been a routine surgery in 2014, he faced a darkness that would define the rest of his career. A clear choice emerged: he could either let this grief consume him, or honor his son by dedicating his analytical mind to a path Ali had always encouraged him to pursue—spreading happiness to as many people as possible.
Solve for Happy by Mo GawdatCredit: Amazon
Seventeen days after losing his son, Gawdat sat down and began writing Solve for Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy. Through this book, he uncovered a revolutionary truth: our emotions aren't permanent. They have expiration dates.
The fascinating brain science behind your emotional meltdowns
Here's where things get fascinating. When developing what would later be known as the "90-second rule," Gawdat stumbled upon the findings of Harvard-trained neuroscientist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. Similarly, her research was also formed in the pressure cooker of an unexpected, dramatic life experience: the moment when she underwent a massive stroke.
As Dr. Taylor's left brain hemisphere shut down, she gained unprecedented real-time insight into how emotions function in the body.
What she discovered is that when something triggers you—be it a spilled smoothie or a coworker's passive-aggressive "per my last email" message—your amygdala (think of it as your brain's overly cautious security guard) floods your system with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. Your heart starts to race as if you've just spotted a bear and begun to run, your muscles tense up, and that instinctual fight-or-flight response surges through your body.
The brain's amydala. Photo credit: Canva
However, this chemical cascade has a built-in timer. As Dr. Taylor discovered, it takes approximately 90 seconds for these stress hormones to be flushed from your bloodstream. Meaning that, after that initial surge, the physical component of your emotional reaction is over.
But why doesn't it feel like that? Why do we marinate in our emotions—anger, sadness, confusion, delusion—for hours, days, or more? That's because, after those 90 seconds, we make a choice, usually without realizing it, to keep those emotions going by mentally rewinding and replaying the triggering event.
Why do we keep choosing emotional suffering (without knowing it)?
"What happens is, you run the thought in your head again, and you renew your 90 seconds," Gawdat explains. It's like poking a bruise that's formed on your knee, or hitting refresh on your personal stress response button. Every time you mentally revisit a stressful event—analyzing what you should have said, reimagining confrontations, and crafting the perfect comeback—you're essentially retriggering that same potent chemical reaction that occurred in the first place.
Woman feeling hopeless. Photo credit: Canva
So, while that 90-second episode of emotions ends quickly, we end up ruminating about what happened: over and over and over and over again.
This is more than a mere annoyance—it's rewiring our brains in a bad way. Research shows that rumination doesn't just prolong our bad moods, it intensifies them and can lead to anxiety and depression. We're thinking ourselves into extended mental states simply by focusing too much on the past.
The three-question framework that can change everything
What happens when you've successfully coasted through those initial 90 seconds but still feel like the world is out to get you? Gawdat developed a handy three-question reality check that serves as an emotional fact-checker for your brain:
Question 1: Is it true?
Gawdat claims that "90% of the things that make us unhappy are not even true." Think about it: your partner seems distracted during dinner, and suddenly your brain spins an entire narrative about how they've fallen out of love with you. But how much of that is real? And what percentage of your little daydream can be chalked up to your brain being its usual dramatic self?
At best, our brains are excellent storytellers. The problem is that they're prone to writing fiction and presenting it as truth.
So, the next time you find yourself spinning up a stressful "what if?" situation in your head, take a beat, and ask yourself a different question: "Is it true?"
Question 2: Can I take action?
If the answer to question one is "Yes, it is true," then move on to Gawdat's second question. Are there steps you can take?
If you have a real problem on your hands, then perfect! Channel that energy into solving it rather than drowning in it.
Question 3: Can I accept it and still create a better life despite it?
Here's where things get tricky. If you can't do anything about the situation, the final question before you becomes about "committed acceptance." No, not passive resignation, but actively choosing to move forward and build something better despite the circumstances.
This can be difficult—remember, this process began with Gawdat searching for a way to make sense of his son's death—but these questions aren't about forcing toxic positivity or pretending like problems don't exist. They help your brain make sense of what's happened, distinguishing between productive and unproductive emotional energy.
Your brain: the overprotective parent
To understand how this works, it helps to think of your brain as an overprotective, hovering parent who sees danger everywhere. "Your brain isn't your source of truth," Gawdat explains. "It's just a survival machine. A search party. It throws thoughts at you, hoping something will protect you. But that doesn't mean any of them are true".
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Your mammalian brain evolved to keep you alive, not happy. When modern life presents you with stressful situations—traffic jams, work pressures, particularly hot and evil temperatures—your ancient survival systems register these "threats" with the same emotional urgency as a saber-toothed tiger attack.
Putting the 90-second rule into practice
So, what does this really look like in real life knowing the science is only half the battle?
Step 1: Notice the surge. When you feel that familiar rush of anger, frustration, or anxiety, create a mental note. "Okay, this is a chemically induced wave of emotion," you might say to yourself without judgment.
Step 2: Set a timer, literally. For the first 90 seconds, your job is to observe. Feel every emotion to its fullest: your heart racing, your muscles tensing, your breath shortening. Acknowledge these physical sensations without trying to fix or stop them.
Step 3: Breathe and wait. Deep breathing can help calm your nervous system after an onslaught of chemical reactions and prevent your brain from fueling the emotional fire mentally.
Step 4: Choose your response. When those 90 seconds pass, you have what Gawdat calls a "buffer," a moment of clarity when you can decide what to do next.
Step 5: Apply the three questions. If you're still upset after the initial wave, run through Gawdat's reality-check framework.
The 90-second rule offers a unique perspective on relating to your vitally essential emotions. Emotions provide information about the environment and motivate us to take action. The 90-second rule helps us experience our emotions fully without letting them hijack our entire day—or life.
The happiness equation connection
This framework connects to Gawdat's broader "happiness equation," which posits that happiness equals life events minus expectations. Much of our suffering comes not from what happens to us, but from the gap between the triggering event and what we think should happen.
As Gawdat puts it, "Life doesn't give a damn about you. It's your choice how you react to every one of [life's challenges]". Which may sound harsh, but when put into practice, can prove quite liberating.
The next time you feel yourself crashing out, remember: you have 90 seconds to feel as irrational as humanly possible. After that? You get to decide how to spend the rest of your day.
