Do You Have the Patience to Learn Patience?

Who among us has not succumbed to an eroding of our patience? The too-long traffic light when we are late, the person in the supermarket checkout line whose credit card is not working, the 45-minute wait on hold time when we need to speak with someone from the airline or cable company, a pot of water that takes forever to boil, a dog who won’t poop even after a very long walk. These things frustrate us, annoy us, and anger us.

Many of the situations that test our patience are almost predictable, and sometimes we are able to deal with them by anticipating the wait and avoiding or circumventing them.

Can we take a different route to avoid the long light? Might self-checkout in the supermarket eliminate the wait in a checkout lane? Start heating the water long before you need it to be hot. Have a long talk with the dog?

However, these situations are minor annoyances when compared with personal interactions, often with family members, that make us lose patience, often over and over again. Our children are often the cause of situations that make us feel as if our patience is slipping out of our grasp. Often, the repetitive nature of an event makes us give up on holding onto any semblance of endurance. The first time the food is thrown from the high chair may be amusing, but not every day and at every meal. Persistent whining like the buzz of a mosquito despite attempts to amuse, distract, and soothe can make us feel like whining ourselves. And of course, as our children grow, the triggers that cause us to lose patience change but are still there.

But those who take care of elderly family members may have even more difficulty than young parents in keeping themselves from becoming angrily impatient.

“I find myself wanting to scream several times a day,” a friend told me when describing her elderly husband’s complete dependence on her. “It never ends! It is bad enough that he won’t even get himself a glass of water, but his memory is worsening, and he is constantly losing stuff. Yesterday, he couldn’t find his cell phone; it was his wallet the day before. He misplaced his credit card in the house three times this year.”

The assault on our patience can have significant effects on our well-being. We find ourselves breathing rapidly, and with shallow breaths, our muscles feel tense, and we may clench our fists or grind our teeth. Anger, irritability, anxiety, and impulsiveness can accompany these physical changes. Snap decisions ( making a U-turn in the middle of rush hour traffic to avoid the long light) or making a nasty, angry comment at someone who has no control over the situation (an airline representative) can follow.

It is hardest to maintain even a modicum of patience when beset by constant challenges. And yet some of us are able to do it. I watched as a vendor at a farmer’s market patiently answered questions about her homemade smoked fish dips over and over again by the gentleman standing next to me.

A line was forming behind me, and she must have realized that she might lose customers because they did not want to wait. But she never hurried him to make a decision which he ( finally) did. I marveled at her patience because his dithering over a small purchase made others in line restless and not happy about waiting.

Perhaps some people are born with more patience, and perhaps some of us with low levels of patience can learn how to increase our reserves. Advice on how to build up our patience quota includes confronting how unpleasant or uncomfortable we feel when our patience is tested. This may be particularly true of those who tend to micromanage our lives (and perhaps those of others).

We feel ourselves losing control over the situation, be it a delayed or canceled flight or the inability to stop playing the board game with our five-year-old for the 20th time. This is particularly difficult when we are so over-committed that any delays can have a cascading effect: the school bus is late, which means getting your son to the orthodontist appointment will be late, which means dinner will be late, which means the talk you are giving at the book club that night may be late.

Dealing with the discomfort and frustration is often helped by leaping ahead to the worst possible scenario and realizing that your world will not implode because you didn’t get to the book club or even the wedding because the flights were canceled.

Distraction helps. Waiting too long in the doctor’s office? Make sure you have something to read, music to listen to, or a game on your cell phone to play. My friend reads a book on her Kindle only when she has to wait for something; she thinks of her reading time as a reward for her patience.

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Find something to do to release the built-up energy and frustration from confronting multiple instances of "patience eroding" situations. Exercise helps, especially when your need to be patient requires bouts of physical inactivity. A fast walk compensates for your patience in walking very (too) slowly with someone else. Swimming may relax those clenched and tight muscles when you want to control your frustration and anger. Yoga and Pilates will make you take the deep breaths you need to compensate for the shallow breathing you were doing to avoid showing your impatience earlier in the day.

Finally, if you can, try to step back from the situation that makes you impatient and see what you can redeem from it. I used to be impatient and, yes, bored when my puppy wanted to play an endless game of tug. But I realized at some point that she will, as my former dog did, grow old and no longer want to play.

Standing in line at a supermarket and waiting seemed like an unavoidable part of life until the pandemic made it disappear. So too with travel to the office, or on a plane to visit family or even travel for a vacation. Life’s frustrations make us impatient, but perhaps we should be grateful that they exist instead of becoming stressed.