Do you often feel impatient? What do you feel impatient about? Your work, your to-do lists or even your life? Impatience is a feeling that we learn to inflict on ourselves and others. It is supposed to motivate us to get more done but at the end of the day, it’s just a form of beating ourselves up.
Impatience is a feeling
Unlike emotions, which are automatic and trigger physical chain reactions, feelings are learned responses to certain events in our lives. These responses often consist of thoughts that trigger a cocktail of emotions.
Impatience is a feeling that starts the anger and fear reactions in our bodies. Some people even experience sadness. This emotions cocktail is often difficult to untangle and depending on the person one of the emotions usually dominates.
For me, for example, impatience is mostly anger with some fear. For you it might feel like a lot of sadness. What exactly the combination is can also change depending on the situation. Most people will not feel sadly impatient about a work deadline but might feel more so about perceived deadlines in their lives, which brings me to the next part.
Impatience is learned
Why do we even feel impatient? Why do we feel anger, fear or sadness about events that are often nowhere near as important as we make them out to be? It’s because of why we learn feelings in the first place. We are taught to feel in certain ways to keep us in line.
Society is a bunch of people. Every society has underlying beliefs and the people in the bunch are expected to beave in a specific manner. This might sound all really abstract but it’s how societies work.
You are expected to sit on the bus quietly, not hang out the window. Why? Because it is safer for everyone involved. That’s what you were taught and that’s why you might feel fear when you see other people hang from buses. However, this is entirely learned behaviour in some countries. In others, hanging from a bus because it’s full is how you get around.
So when you see those images, you have certain thoughts, like “Oh, my gosh, this person is going to be hit by oncoming traffic” or “if everyone would do it, there would be accidents and lots of people would die” and so on. These thoughts, which you learned to think, then trigger fear and anger.
The timeline
The only reason why we experience impatience at all is because we are taught to perceive life as a timeline. We also learn to cut this timeline into bits and pieces and set goals. Deadlines are just formalised ways of doing exactly this. You tell yourself action number 1 needs to be done by this date and that time. Or someone else tells you that this is so.
In fact, most deadlines are more or less random and not really important. But we learn to think of time this way and we learn to expect certain outcomes by a specific time which is chosen in advance.
Some people teach goal setting exactly like this. Decide on one clear detailed goal and then take steps towards it. Again, the image is linear. Some use the metaphor of climbing a mountain or climbing up the rungs of a ladder. Even if you never deliberately used this type of goal setting technique, you have been exposed to it from an early age.
Practice leads to expectations
We get deadlines at school for projects and we have tests on certain dates. The years we spend in school are clearly numbered and so on. At work, we have deadlines every day, some for the week, and others months or even years in advance.
All of these processes teach us to expect certain outcomes at a specific point in time. We practise expectations. Even if you do not use the goal setting methods I just described, you have been practising expectations for your days, weeks, months and even life linked to a time line you are either aware of or not.
So when you deviate from the time line, you become impatient. This is a reaction you also learned because in school teachers and parents would blast you with anger or give you fearful tirades if you weren’t “on track”, meaning at the stage in the imaginary timeline they expected you to be.
You learn to react exactly the same way when you are not at the point you expect yourself to be. If you are a boss, you become impatient with others. With yourself, you also feel anger and fear and even sadness when you do not live up to your expectations.
Healthy motivator?
Emotions are all valid and they are very important when they come naturally. What I mean by that is that emotions matter when they are genuine reactions to the events in our lives. Feelings are different. Feelings are triggered by thoughts we learn to think about the events in our lives.
Let’s say you are about to die and haven’t gotten the promotion you were waiting for. So you feel anger, fear and sadness. All those emotions are valid in the circumstances because the promotion is now no longer going to happen for you.
But what if it’s just a regular Monday in the middle of the year and you are healthy as a horse? If you feel impatience about your promotion, you are making yourself miserable for no reason whatsoever. Feeling impatience might feel good because anger and fear are energizing emotions so it might feel like you are motivating yourself into action.
But if you lean into impatience you are just reinforcing a vicious cycle. Impatience will give you a boost of energy you can channel into your to-do list, but it comes at a high price because it is very unhealthy to experience anger and fear on a regular basis. Worse still, everything we practise eventually becomes a habit, including emotions.
Planning and goals
Feeling impatient on a regular basis is unhealthy. When you unleash it on others, you teach them unhealthy habits and since emotions are contagious you blast them with anger, fear and sadness, for no reason.
This last part is very important because there is never a good reason for impatience. Either there is no more time, and then you will feel regret, or there still is time and then you beat yourself and others up for no reason. The timelines and plans we come up with, linking expectations to fixed outcomes on fixed timelines is a reaction to uncertainty. It’s not how life works.
Life is not linear. Progress is not linear. Goals can absolutely be achieved. But when you decide that a goal can only be achieved in a certain manner, than you are limiting yourself. Why would you do that? Because we are taught to make decisions out of a place of fear. The fear of the uncertain and the unknown.
Making a plan, trying to control not just outcomes but every step on the way, is a desperate attempt to avoid uncertainty. Impatience is a reaction to the unexpected. When things do not go our way, instead of focusing on what we have in front of us, we waste time and energy by trying to “get back on track”, meaning forcing ourselves back onto the imaginary timeline.
Change is not linear
Impatience is a symptom of a learned need for control. The key word here is learned. Our fear of uncertainty is learned. Our need to control circumstances is evolutionary on some level, but we’re talking about a very basic level. Societies in order to function need a much higher level of control.
That’s why you learned impatience. It is not a helpful feeling because every time you experience it, you practise reacting that way. You practise the same impatient thoughts, feeling fear, anger and sadness and taking the same actions.
Maybe you berate others or yourself, maybe you overwork yourself, maybe you practise some other form of self-punishment. It’s all unhealthy and unhelpful.
Replace impatience
So what can you do to let go of impatience? Remind yourself that the time line is only in your head. Everything always works out for the best. You are not failing just because the path does not look exactly like you planned it.
Focus on the next step. Be present as much as possible. The anti-dote to the fear of uncertainty is the joy of flexibility. Practise feeling good about surprises. Think of every moment as an opportunity to take new actions. Impatience is learned and everything you learned can be replaced. Replace impatience with curiosity.
Instead of beating yourself up when you step off “the path”, look around. Where are you right now and what is wonderful about this situation? What are the opportunities and possibilities? What can you do right now to make yourself feel good? And when you have the sudden urge to rush through your next task, take a deep breath and deliberately slow down.
You are always on the path because the fact that you are walking it, makes it your path. You are always living the perfect life for yourself because the fact that you are living right now in this moment makes it perfect. There is no time line. There is just this moment. And the next. And the next. Make the most of each one of them.