Can you change your life in five seconds? Perhaps not, but it can be a first step toward making a big difference in your life. Rather than saying or doing the first thing that comes to mind when faced with an angering or upsetting situation, give yourself five or 10 seconds to pause and reflect before you respond. The ability to delay your response is a form of emotional self-regulation.

Many people have pointed to the power of delaying a response.

The psychologist Victor Frankl observed: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Or we can take counsel from Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, who said: “When angry, count 10 before you speak; if very angry, 100.”

Rather than react reflexively or impulsively, following Jefferson’s advice gives us time to reflect and prepare a thoughtful response, especially in difficult, confrontative situations. To exercise personal freedom, we need time to make a reasoned choice and wrest control away from our reflexive brain.

The Pause that Reflects

How many times:

• Have you blurted out something in the heat of the moment that you later regretted?
• Did your first reaction to a situation prove unfounded or exaggerated?
• Have you blown things out of proportion, expect the worst, or jump to conclusions that later proved wrong?
• Did you go with your gut and wind up misinterpreting the situation?

Taking five before responding allows you to reflect and engage your thinking brain to prepare a thoughtful response rather than responding from your gut. Consider some common situations:

• Someone says something that ticks you off, and you suddenly feel a surge of anger in your chest and words coming out of your mouth that might shock a salty sailor.
• You get a less-than-sterling review from a customer, client, or patient, and it cuts deeply, uncovering feelings of inadequacy, incompetence, or failure.
• Your spouse interrupts you while you are trying to complete work to meet an impending deadline, and you respond with anger, “Can’t you see that I’m working?”
• Your boss dumps a load of work on your desk, minutes before a holiday weekend, and you think, “I’ll never get this done. How am I going to deal with this?”

In these and countless other examples, many of which I see in my therapy practice, an event triggers an emotional response, often in seconds. But an emotional response is not controlled by an event itself. What gets overlooked are the thoughts silently muttered under our breath that fall between a triggering event and an emotional reaction that determine how we feel and how we respond.

Research supports the value of delay in emotional regulation. Investigators found that low-anger people pause when responding to a negative evaluation, but high-anger people do not (Robinson and colleagues, 2012). In a lab study of couples in conflict, enforcing a short break, five to 15 seconds, before partners responded to a provocation reduced aggressive responding (McCurry and colleagues, 2024). This suggests that pausing may disrupt the tendency for defensive or aggressive responses that fuel a back-and-forth cycle of arguing that quickly escalates conflict, even to a point at which couples forget what they were originally fighting about.

Fast Thinking, Slow Thinking

In his influential 2011 book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, the late Nobel laureate psychologist Daniel Kahneman distinguished between two types of thinking processes in the brain, slow and fast thinking, which he called System 1 and System 2, respectively.

System 1 generates impressions, feelings, intuitions, and handles automatic, knee-jerk, or reflexive responses needed in emergencies that require quick response, such as when we blow a tire while driving. System 1 operates automatically with little, if any, conscious thought or direction.

System 1 also takes scraps of evidence and jumps to conclusions without scrutiny of the facts. It reasons based on impressions and feelings, leading us to assume that “If it feels this way, it must really be this way.”

By contrast, System 2, or slow thinking, is deliberate, evaluative, and effortful. It engages critical thinking processes in the brain that enable us to make reasoned judgments and frame responses to situations based on evidence, not gut instinct.

First reactions are controlled by System 1, which is helpful if we suddenly lose our balance and need to reach out for support. But it’s not so good when it comes to conflict situations, which require a more thoughtful response. That’s where the five-second hack can make a difference. We need the added time to constrain our initial (fast) response and give System 2, which invokes the thinking brain, time to size up the situation. You can bridge the pause by silently counting to five or 10. Even a brief pause gives System 2 system time to engage:

Situation: Your partner says, “You’re not listening.”

Fast response: “I heard you. What’s the problem?”

Counting to five interrupts the automatic response, giving you time to prepare a more thoughtful response:

Slow response: “Okay, let me see if I understood what you said.”

The key to switching from slow (intuitive) to fast (evaluative) thinking is to pause and take stock of the situation before responding.

Your First Reaction Is Not Necessarily the Best

Engaging slow thinking processes in the brain requires time to reflect and prepare a response. The next time your partner interrupts your workflow, don’t shoot them a nasty look or say something dismissive. Pause and frame a response that validates the other person’s needs while expressing your own, ”Yes, I can see that’s important, but can it wait until I finish what I’m doing? I really need to get this done.” Set a time later in the day when you can turn your attention to your partner’s request and then follow through at the designated time.

Hack Away

The bottom line: The next time someone says something that rubs you the wrong way, or something happens that taps into deeper fears and anxieties, pause to reflect by taking a moment for yourself before responding—perhaps by counting to five or 10. Should you need more time, you can always say, “Give me a moment.” Reflect before you respond by asking yourself, “What’s the most appropriate thing I can say (or do) here?”

General Disclaimer: The content here and in other blog posts on the Minute Therapist is intended for informational purposes only and not for diagnosis, evaluation, or treatment of mental health disorders. If you are concerned about your emotional well-being or are experiencing any significant mental health problems, I encourage you to consult a licensed mental health professional in your area for a thorough evaluation.

© 2026 Jeffrey S. Nevid. All rights reserved.