How to Be Patient in a World of Instant Gratification

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How to be more patient blog post

Patience is the ability to wait and accept delays, to tolerate adversity without losing control, and to hold on when faced with long-term challenges.

Patience can be the hardest ability to maintain, yet the easiest to deplete. In a world accustomed to the fast and easy, it’s a skill that almost everyone can improve upon.

Your personality, personal history, and the situation at hand can all play a large role in your capacity for patience. People who are more conscientious and open to new experiences tend to have greater patience, while those who are lacking in these areas tend to be more impulsive.

How to Be More Patient

Like any skill, patience can be learned and refined. Just because you’re more of an impatient person now doesn’t mean you can’t train yourself to be more patient. The biggest problem that people encounter is identifying whether they are the impatient sort, as we tend to be blind to our own behaviors.

Taking a break to do some meditation can quickly show you whether you’re exhibiting signs of impatience. Think back on your behavior from the past few days. Did you snap at someone for no reason? Are you constantly restless, tapping your foot, and finding ways to occupy yourself? Do you often find yourself making on-the-spot decisions, only to regret them soon after? Knowing these signs mean you’ll be better prepared to counteract them when they next appear.

Here’s a few ways to become the patient person you thought you’d never be:

1. Practice.

Practice makes perfect, and this applies to patience too. After all, you improve your skills through repeated use. Take up activities that let you exercise your patience. Choose an activity that will force you to slow down; something you find mildly difficult, and can’t speed up. Repeating these activities also has a cathartic effect that lets out the emotional tension that you feel.

For example, when you start off solving a Rubik’s cube, it’ll probably take you a lot of time. As you familiarize yourself with the process and the patterns, that time will shorten until your goal is no longer just to solve the puzzle but to solve it in the shortest time possible. The activity forces you to focus and remove distractions that cause impatience. Seeing yourself improve through repetition also puts you in a positive mood.

2. Exercise empathy.

Snapping at someone for being slow or getting irritated after being put on hold for a long time when you call your bank will do you no good. Remind yourself that the cause of your impatience is only human and that they are probably doing their best. Always put yourself in their situation to better understand why the delay is happening. When you realize the real cause, you’ll feel better.

Nobody likes waiting in traffic, whether you’re facing gridlock in your car or enduring an extraordinarily long ride in a packed subway car.

It’s definitely frustrating when you’re running out of time, and things aren’t moving as quickly as you want them to. You project your frustrations and impatience on the people around you, but they might also be in the same situation as you. They’re not even the cause of the bottleneck. Keeping in mind that you’re not the only one affected gains you a better understanding of the situation.

3. Give yourself a break.

You rarely realize when you’re running on fumes. And when you’re running on fumes, goals are not met, and you start accumulating stress. When you see no progress with your task, you get more and more frustrated to the point that you can no longer function well.

When you’re overwhelmed, it’s best to stop what you’re doing and turn your attention to problems you can solve right now. Consider completing some of your minor tasks, like sending an email, or printing out a report. The sense of achievement you get from completing these tasks helps you get back into the right frame of mind to tackle more important ones.

A 10-minute walk around the block or doing other quick activities will also help you reset, letting you clear your mind and approach your goals with solid thinking, rather than emotionally-driven impulses.

4. Change your attitude.

Impatient people micromanage and develop tunnel vision. They fail to realize that a few simple mishaps in life will not likely prevent a goal from being achieved. If the project you’re working on can’t seem to progress, you tend to focus on the difficulties rather than finding a solution. When this happens, you often feel that things are hopeless and out of your control, leading to your impatience.

It’s normal for us to fail, take longer than usual, and not be able to follow our own plans. Sure, it took you a week more than you thought to complete a drawing. But the goal was achieved, and you had a week more to practice your craft. Identify the difficulties you encountered and think of ways to prevent them in the future. It’s a way of using your failures as a way to improve not only your patience, but also your skills in the long run.

5. Release stress regularly.

Maintain a peaceful mind and body by regularly letting out steam. There are things that you need to tolerate, but the more you absorb, the more negative energy will stay pent up within you.

This causes stress, which directly contributes to your impatience. Exercise, meditation, and setting aside some “me” time can help you tone down your impatience. Having an activity where you can regularly exhaust your emotional burdens is a good way to loosen up so you’re better prepared to handle challenges.

Benefits of Being Patient

Patience is a virtue, which, when utilized properly, yields excellent rewards. Here are some of the most important benefits of patience:

Less Stress

Frustration is often the root of impatience. In this age where instant communication and immediate access to information is the norm, a slight delay might make you feel as though your needs and wants are being ignored, causing you to lash out.

Knowing how to process these feelings can help decrease your tendencies to be impatient. The more you understand that there are things you can’t control, the less stress you’ll feel, and the better you’ll function.

Better Relationships

Impatient people can be unpleasant and hard to deal with. The frustrations they feel bleed into their manners, expressions, and interactions with others. They become rigid and apathetic to any mistakes they see, however small. This causes friction between people, and rarely works out.

Having the patience to deal with any setbacks or frustrations instantly make you more likeable to others. They see you as friendly and understanding, allowing them to feel better around you. This helps in creating a more intimate and dynamic connection that could lead to stronger and longer-lasting relationships.

Better Decision Making

Impatience makes you restless and reckless, making you rush things and make snap decisions. Inevitably, you’ll make more mistakes, which in turn causes you to rush more. You make mistakes, get stressed, and have nothing to show for it.

Exercising patience gives you time to properly consider options, see the bigger picture, and make appropriate and intelligent decisions.

Better Health

Short bursts of stress caused by impatience are normally harmless, but prolonged stimulation of your stress response can damage your physical and psychological health. Physical damage includes added strain on the heart and lungs, decreased white blood cell production, sudden weight gain, and migraines. Psychological damage may include cognitive problems, memory impairment, anxiety, and depression.

Patience in all things balances out the effects of everyday mishaps, giving you time to breathe and appreciate the good things. This, in turn, lets you better understand yourself and why certain things happen, preventing future frustrations.

Types of Patience

According to psychologist Sara Schnitker, patience comes in three veins:

Interpersonal Patience

This refers to how you handle and interact with other people, their demands, and their failings. Some people may be harder to put up with than others, perhaps because they are slow learners, unreasonable, or hard to understand. But losing patience in these kinds of matters has no benefit, and may just make things worse.

Life Hardship Patience

Life hardship patience refers to your ability to deal with setbacks or maintain focus on a long-term goal throughout life’s journey and any challenges that arise. For example, you might need to be patient as experience an illness or disability that you’ll be dealing with long-term, or work through five years of grunt work to finally get that promotion.

Daily Hassles Patience

There are circumstances that you can’t control, and sometimes this may frustrate you. Traffic jams, delayed flights, and slow-loading webpages are all great examples. These are all insignificant, but they’re the common, everyday hassles of life, and sometimes you’ll need the patience to deal with any that you experience.

The depth of your patience tank may vary for each of these three types. Your response will always depend on your emotions, thoughts, and the situation that’s testing your patience.

Patience is a vital skill for success. And if you want to be more successful, it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with some of the benefits of being patient.

Give Yourself Some Time

We have become so accustomed to getting what we want immediately. We expect instant results from the gym or new diets. We frequently choose “express” options when it comes to deliveries. Food is delivered to us cooked, or already prepared. Time has become such a valuable currency that we sacrifice our mental well-being and relationships, living life in a hurry.

This has led to a general belief that the faster things happen, the better; but life isn’t about the rush, it’s the journey. Experiencing a lot of things won’t matter in the end, if they weren’t worthwhile. Maybe it’s time to slow down, take a deep breath, and practice a bit of patience.

What are your best practices for curbing impatience? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

 

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