'...a friend made the completely shocking suggestion that my feelings needn't always get the last word in my head; that I could tell a feeling - fear, anxiety, some sort of obsession - that for the next fifteeen minutes, I wasn't going to pay it any heed. After a quarter of an hour, I could go back to the feeling if I wanted to, or I could choose to ignore it for another fifteen minutes. I still live by quarter hours.
This distancing myself from a feeling for fifteen minutes is possibly the most sanity-making practice anyone has ever offered me. It has short-circuited my spirals of hideous emotion more times than I can count...no anxiety for the next nine hundred seconds; maybe I will check for my driver's licence or go online to see if my bank account has been hacked at 3:32, but not now.'
Lauren F Winner, Still, p.88.
