The Five-Minute Fix
People love telling you that time heals all wounds. It takes time. You’ll look back on this and laugh someday. And yet, if you ask around a bit more, plenty of people will also tell you honestly that some of the hurt never fully leaves; it just gets quieter and comes back at odd moments for the rest of your life.
I know my own hurt from my divorce hasn’t fully disappeared, though I feel like myself again most days now. But that’s not actually what I want to write about here.
I want to write about short-term time, because I’ve realized that even ten minutes can be enough to genuinely shift how I feel, and just knowing that fact has gotten me through some seriously painful moments.
My divorce coach was the first person to show me this. I’d just found out my soon-to-be ex had filed for divorce without telling me first, and then refused to find anywhere else to stay. I’m not saying I had no part in how things got there, but I was in shock at the time. Almost anything could trip me into anxiety or a low spiral in those early days. Every other day, I packed an overnight bag to stay with a friend just to avoid sharing space with him. Walking away from my life and my kids, who I’d never spent a night away from before, left me emotional in a way that basically became constant, with sharper spikes hitting every hour or so.
Any time I tried to explain what was going on, even to my own coach, I’d relive it and start crying all over again. So she taught me a technique to calm myself down enough to actually function: tapping, also known as EFT. There’s a whole body of theory behind how and why it works, but all I really knew was that it interrupted whatever thought was making me cry and bought me five or ten minutes back. After tapping for even that short a stretch, I was always calmer. More than once I ended up laughing at myself while someone nearby clearly wondered what on earth I was doing.
Over time I picked up other techniques too: meditation, which I still genuinely struggle with, switching tasks entirely, writing, or just sitting still and letting whatever I was feeling move through me without fighting it. All four of those, in their own way, are just different methods of injecting time, and over the past couple of years I’ve noticed I always feel better once I’ve taken some.
What’s actually made the biggest difference is recognizing that time itself is doing the work. That’s been a hard lesson for someone as type-A as me, someone who’s always measured efficiency by output. Sitting on the couch staring at a wall never used to register as productive.
Now, instead of trying to muscle through emotional pain to stay efficient, I let time do what it does. If I’m having a bad moment, I reach for one of my usual strategies to buy some space.
If I’m in conflict with someone, sitting through a mediation session with my ex, say, and we’ve hit a wall, I get up and take a five- or ten-minute break.
If a conflict is turning into a back-and-forth email fight, I stop myself from replying for a full day.
If I’m just sad, I let myself cry for twenty minutes, or however long it actually takes until I feel like doing something else. Almost without fail, after twenty minutes, I do.
If I’m angry, I sit down and write the email to the person I’m angry at, then send it to myself instead.
I remind myself of what I now know to be true: I might feel sad, or angry, or like everything’s hopeless right now, but in a day, sometimes even less, I won’t be able to summon this exact feeling anymore, because I’ll already be feeling like myself again.
