A shared universe › Blog › Patience can be learned too · Español
Patience can be learned: in a study by the psychologist Sarah Schnitker, a training programme made people more patient and lifted their mood. Start by naming the hurry, looking at the situation from another side and remembering what you are waiting for. We tend to think of patience as a way of putting up with things. Schnitker describes it differently: the tendency to wait calmly in the face of frustration or adversity.
In a paper published in 2012, Schnitker distinguishes three: patience with people, patience with life’s great hardships (an illness, a long spell of unemployment) and patience with everyday annoyances, like a traffic jam or a queue. They don’t always go together: you can have a great deal with your children and very little with the traffic.
To measure them she created a scale with those three parts, and found that each relates differently to well-being and to each person’s character. With people, patience shows in not interrupting or in repeating something without irritation. With great hardships, in carrying on day by day without knowing when they will end. With annoyances, in not letting a small setback spoil the afternoon. Knowing which of the three you find hardest already helps you see where to start.
In the same paper, Schnitker asked participants to rate ten personal goals on many aspects: how much effort they put in, how much progress they made, how much satisfaction they got. More patient people made better progress with their goals and were more satisfied when they reached them, especially when there were obstacles along the way.
Patience is not passivity: it is what lets you carry on when the result is slow to come. The goals that matter rarely move forward in a straight line, and someone who isn’t discouraged by the first difficulty keeps taking steps when it would be easy to give up.
In a third study, one group followed a programme designed to increase patience and another did not. Compared with the group that did not, the group that took part became more patient, had fewer symptoms of low mood and more positive emotions. Schnitker concludes that patience is something that can change.
It is worth taking with caution: it is a single study and its abstract does not say how many people took part. But it matches something we have all seen: patience grows when it is practised in small things.
Schnitker and Robert Emmons pointed out in a 2007 paper that the Christian, Jewish, Islamic and Hindu traditions all regard it as a virtue. People from very different cultures have seen in it a way of living the wait better, long before psychology began to measure it.
Today almost everything asks for an instant response. Cultivating patience helps to recover something that can get lost in all that hurry: the ability to let things take their time, and to be well in the meantime.
If what tests your patience is not knowing how something will turn out, it may help to read about fear of uncertainty.
Some waits are measured not in minutes but in months: a diagnosis, a treatment, an answer that doesn’t come. There, patience is not about no longer feeling hurry or fear, but about not running out of strength. It helps to break the time into pieces (this week, this day), to look after your sleep and meals, and not to wait without company.
For waiting for a particular piece of news, there are ideas in how to cope with waiting for important news.
If you are waiting for something that is slow to come, you can light a star in A shared universe with “What I hope for”. Other people will keep it company with you.
Each star shines for seven days. If the wait goes on, you can light it again and keep it shining for another seven, and say how things are going.