Impatience is the absence of tolerance, a need or urge to have something happen immediately. Having an impatience mindset can lead to thoughts which impact the way you feel such as ‘why is it taking so long?’, ‘What more do I need to do?’, ‘Why isn’t this happening?’, making you feel frustration, despair, annoyed, sadness, fear and in some cases anger. Now you may be wondering what is driving these thoughts and behaviours, so let’s explore these below:
Pressure and stress
When you’re accustomed to regularly feeling pressurised and stressed, your level of tolerance of dealing with things reduces, the more the stress the less the tolerance. This means that your ability to handle more things going wrong or you realising you have more situations to deal with, results in you feels frustrated and angry. As with anyone, everybody needs a break including you however you either don’t give yourself a break or you feel you don’t have the ability (time or space) to be able to do so, basically this cycle continues each day and your impatience grows.
Self-reliance
When you feel that you have minimal or no level of support, you’re concept of things getting done is down to you. You start to think that if you don’t get the things done then they won’t get done, there’s no other choice, it has to be you. As per above the stress levels you’re constantly experiencing means you won’t be able to handle more things as you’re already full up with stress. This self-reliance leads to more pressure on top of everything else you’re dealing with, not only will you feel stress, frustrated, you may start to feel resentful and lonely because you don’t have the support you need. The lack of support could be drive by a few things, one is self-isolation, are you trying to do everything yourself because you feel you have to? Secondly it could be that although you feel others won’t support you, it may be that you’re not communicating how much pressure you’re in and others don’t realise the impact it’s having on you. Thirdly, it’s important to establish whether if the things you need to do, don’t get done in the timeline you’ve established, would it really be that bad? It could be you’re doing things which could be spread over a period of time.
Instant gratification
When you lack patience for things or people, you’ll find ways to achieve the goals you want quickly because you’ll be driven by an urge within your body. This urge is extremely intense and powerful, leads to focus solely on the goal you want, because of this you’ll find ways to get what you want and therefore you receive instant gratification, and the urge disappears, and your needs are met. It is important to recognize what your needs are and how to meet them in a healthy way where you’re making choices you are in control of rather than being driven by urges you can’t control.
Hard life
Unfortunately, some people do experience a lot of hardships in life, whether it’s experiences, relationship or you’ve struggled throughout life with various aspects. You’ll find that your tolerance levels for dealing with things reduces the more you feel like you’re struggling and leads to impatience because you constantly feel like you’re up against a wall when trying to do things. This can create resentment and a lack of tolerance for people which is driven by some level of impatience towards life and other people because it feels like you’re constantly up against things and you’re not really getting much back from people. Take some time out and show yourself some compassion for the things you’ve experienced, this can help you feel like someone is caring for you…who could be better at that than you. Meet your needs in the way they need to be met, whereby you’re comforting yourself, given yourself the time out when you need it, focus on your needs as much as you do other’s needs. Care for yourself.
