How many times have you felt like you cannot wait for your turn at the doctor’s? How many times have you felt like you cannot wait for your food? We all experienced the feeling of impatience in our lives. Impatience is being easily annoyed or provoked by something or something. It is not wanting to wait or to put up with someone or something.

What is patience?

To grasp the idea of impatience and why it happens when we need to know the meaning of patience first. Patience is the ability to tolerate and endure waiting for something to be done. Sometimes we do actually wait until someone arrives or until something is done and sometimes we cannot wait at all and we get frustrated.

Understanding Impatience

The idea of impatience describes a combination of negative feelings of frustration and anger that arises when something is not done the way we want. For example, you and a friend of yours are going to the movies. The movie starts at 10:00 am and you agreed on meeting at 09:30 am. You woke up early and got dressed and went to the waiting spot at 09:00. It’s now almost 10 o’clock and your friend didn’t come yet.

You start to feel very angry because the movie is about to start. Your friend finally comes. What will you do? In a situation like this, someone may burst into anger and ruin the whole day for himself and his friend. Someone else may blame the friend for what he did and then the day goes on. This is the difference between a person who is patient and tolerant and someone impatient and intolerant.

Impatience Triggers

To understand and solve any issue or problem we have to dive down to the bottom and see what caused it in the first place. People may get impatient for various reasons.

Hunger: Do not underestimate the power of hunger in making people very impatient. You may find yourself very angry for any apparent reason on your busy day. Then when you eat you feel better! This makes you realize that hunger was the reason behind your impatience.

Dehydration: This is another factor that we may not notice during the day. Sometimes people forget to drink the water due to being busy with other things. This leads them to be very impatient.

Fatigue: Being tired is another significant factor in making people impatient. When you’re tired and trying to function properly throughout your day then someone criticizes your work or your cooking or cleaning or what you did whatever it was, you get impatient and burst into anger and sadness. This happens because you’ve done your best yet you don’t feel appreciated at all.

The weather: whether it’s hot or cold, the weather always affects our mood. Extreme heat or extremely cold weather makes people very uncomfortable and sometimes changes their temper to the worst. Those who cannot endure extreme weather changes are most likely to be very impatient when it happens.

Deadlines: meeting deadlines is sometimes stressful. We do our best to deliver the work in time. So when someone or something stands in the way, that’s when impatience takes over. Especially if your work depends on their work. For example, you are doing a presentation with 3 of your friends and you are the one responsible for the PowerPoint presentation. To complete the presentation you need your friends to send you their ideas and what they’re going to talk about. Instead, they procrastinate and delay their work. This absolutely will make you lose your temper and you may even scold them for it.

Schedules: Some people are very strict when it comes to being on time. Sometimes things beyond their abilities happen that prevent people from being somewhere on time. For example, going to work on time is something we should all do, but most of the time, traffic becomes the reason for the delay. It’s very annoying and once you’re stuck in traffic, you cannot do anything about it. This makes it even more frustrating.

There are other examples of appointments and obligations where you have to be there on time otherwise there will be consequences. For instance, flights, doctor appointments, school, and work. Any unplanned and uncontrolled delay makes people impatient.

How to stop being impatient?

We cannot get rid of impatience completely, but we can tame it and make it less harmful to us and others. ‏you have to prevent impatience from taking control of you. You are the one in control. Here are some things to do to cope with impatience:

1. Accept imperfection.
2. Meditate daily.
3. Do something beneficial or fun while waiting to feel less uncomfortable.
4. Be aware of the things that make you impatient.
5. Think about the consequences of your words before you speak.

Impatience may negatively impact your relationships with others. It is never a good idea. That’s why if you think you are impatient, you should seek solutions to improve yourself. You cannot always prevent yourself from encountering the triggers of impatience, but you can always manage to deal with them calmly. You are strong and you can definitely do it.