Feeling more impatient lately? It’s not entirely your fault.
Sarah Schnitker, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor University, explains how a culture of instant gratification — fueled by our use of smart phones and on-demand everything — has made patience feel unnecessary. But her research shows that patience helps people stay regulated, persist through challenges, and feel more satisfied with their progress.
SARAH SCHNITKER: In this era, we expect such instant gratification and speed.
You often see with young people, if their friend doesn't text them back immediately, they take it as a relational slight and are worried about what's wrong. So we just expect this instant responsiveness from the world.
And when something's not going well or something's difficult, that butts up against the reality that the world is not actually revolving around us.
When we have to suffer or wait, patience can actually be this superpower, and instead of suffering, we can wait calmly and appropriately when we face difficult circumstances.
Our technologies have changed our expectations about how the world should work. We start to expect that other people or our bodies can react just as quickly as our smartphones and all of our other devices that we have in our life.
This creates a mismatch. The problem is that when it comes to other people and when it comes to our bodies and our minds, those things don't work at the same speed. And so we need the virtue of patience to bridge the gap of what we want and what the reality is.
You know, even though we have the phrase "patience is a virtue," I think we often think of it as a weakness. We have a lot of misconceptions about patience that our data show are just false, and that actually patience helps facilitate goal pursuit.
What we've done in our lab is ask people to list the personal goals they're working on. And then for each of those goals, we ask, are they able to remain regulated as they pursue this goal, even when it takes longer than they'd hoped, or is more difficult than they’d expect?
And what we find is that when people are patient, when we follow up with them at a later point in time, they actually are exerting more effort on that goal, and they actually are more satisfied with their progress. So patience does actually pay off for individual well-being.
Even when the circumstances are not going your way, and you face obstacles, by cultivating patience, we can actually experience that gap a little bit differently.
Suffering and waiting are part of life, but with patience, people who are in the midst of suffering learn to wait well, and to suffer well, which will allow that person to flourish.
