How To Deal With Impatience In Our Daily Lives?

Many do not know how to deal with impatience, a hallmark of our society today. There is an ambiguous stance on the subject.

While in certain articles and documents the idea of ​​a calmer attitude towards life is promoted, at the same time society values ​​everything that allows it to do anything with greater speed. We got to the absurd point of worrying for a five-second delay to connect to the internet, not to mention the degree of intolerance we have when someone takes a long time to leave after the traffic lights are green.

It is important to emphasize that impatience is a learned behavior. Although physiologically there are organisms that react with greater dynamism to circumstances, this does not lead to a lack of patience. Culture and education are the factors that inoculate this inability to expect or tolerate something to happen slowly.

Impatience is associated with the inability to tolerate frustration. Not getting the desired result quickly, at first, would not have to create anxiety. However, we see that on the one hand there is a social demand for speed in everything we do. On the other hand, education tends to dissociate efforts and results. It encourages the idea that we need to get what we want, as quickly as possible, anyway.

The immediacy and impatience

The emotional perception of time has undergone great changes in recent times. There is a real overvaluation of the present. The idea of ​​the here and now is highly emphasized. For this reason, the lack of immediate results tends to become a source of anguish  and most people find it difficult to deal with impatience. This flood of the present as something that goes faster than what we expect only fills us with anxiety.

The medium and long term concepts have become diffused to many people. Not much value is placed on processes, but on results. There is an urgency in everything, as the idea that time runs out and cannot be “lost” has become popular. So, time took on a new meaning, as an indicator of competitiveness.

Not too long ago, delay did not have a negative connotation. It was accepted as a matter of course, especially for some performances related to creativity. It was understood that there are processes that require more time than others and that is why they were allowed to flow without accelerating them. Today this is almost impossible. That’s why many people are looking for a technique, method or shortcut that will quickly take them to the destination they’ve set.

The irritation and impulsiveness of the impatient

Impatience is the drawer where tension builds up drop by drop. What is tense is the rope that has the effort invested at one end and the expected result at the other. Between the two, what exists is a gap that many want to make as short as possible.

For all these reasons, it is common that those who cannot deal with impatience also remain in a constant state of irritation. They suffer from a kind of avarice of time. They want everything to happen quickly, but that speed is never enough for them. If it takes two minutes, they want to take one. And so on. As it is not possible for everything to happen immediately, a state of anger and tension is created.

It is also common for the impatient to act impulsively. Your obsession with speed turns into a need to act urgently on everything. It is common for them not to stop to think of what to do or what to say. They just react, even if later they have to recant. And on top of that, the background irritation only helps.

How to deal with impatience to overcome it

Impatience is not in your genes, nor in your makeup as a human being. As we said earlier, this is a learned pattern of behavior. From this point of view, it is also possible to re-educate emotions so that they correspond to a more constructive way of acting. There are different ways to achieve this, but one of the most effective is simply to practice patience.

First of all, it is a question of incorporating a slower and more relaxed subjective rhythm, without falling into despair. It’s good to start with breathing exercises. Five minutes a day to breathe deeply and slowly. Such a simple gesture generates different times in the heartbeat, in the activity of the brain. This way you will eliminate that feeling of wasting time.

It pays to cultivate patience because the more serene you are, the more likely you are to get a good result. In addition, you will be able to schedule your time better and be less rude in your emotional reactions. It will even increase the valuable sense of control over yourself, avoid doing to undo, telling you to recant, saying to repent. Look for situations that make you wait a while. If your case is not pathological, this is enough to re-educate the wait.