Eight Consequences of Being Impatient
A positive attitude makes it easier for you to enjoy your day-to-day life.
It allows you to enjoy restful sleep and gives you the possibility of establishing higher-quality social relationships. On the other hand, stress and anxiety can make you feel exhausted. These emotions arise when you’re impatient.
If you’ve ever needed a work report that didn’t arrive on time or made plans with a friend who arrived late, take a moment to evaluate the significance of these events. Are they worth becoming impatient over?
The psychological consequences of being impatient.
1. Impatience complicates everything.
Being impatient won’t benefit you in any way. The only thing it leads to is a sense of frustration and helplessness, seeing that you can’t do anything to improve the course of events. Additionally, these feelings will only put you in a bad mood. Impatience fuels impatience.
2. Impatience doesn’t allow you to enjoy the present.
It’s important to enjoy every moment to the fullest. In this sense, impatience doesn’t allow you to live in the present, as you can’t avoid focusing all your attention on what’s coming next.
3. Being impatient clouds your vision.
Most situations have both a positive and a negative side. For example, if you’re stuck in a traffic jam, you can use that time to listen to the radio, play music, or make a pending phone call. This will keep you distracted and help you avoid feeling as if you’re wasting time.
4. It reinforces negative emotions.
Impatience will turn you into an anxious and stressed person who tends to always see the negative side of each situation. You have to bear in mind that your personality depends on your emotions. Being impatient will lead to a negative attitude and constant complaining.
5. Being impatient affects your emotional state.
If you want to feel good about yourself, the best thing you can do is learn how to manage your emotions. Although you don’t have to eliminate impatience, you shouldn’t let it cloud your ability to think and make judgments.
How being impatient can affect your health
In addition to the consequences that being impatient has on your emotional well-being, it can also affect you physically.
6. Being impatient can lead to obesity.
Impatient people may be more prone to obesity because they’re used to spending less time eating. They tend to eat more compulsively and less orderly, consuming more food in less time.
7. High blood pressure.
Impatient people are at a higher risk of suffering from hypertension. This may be due to their high stress levels that are heightened by how overwhelmed and helpless they feel due to their impatient and anxious nature.
8. Premature aging.
Finally, impatience can also speed up the aging process. Similar to the risk of hypertension, impatience-related stress can cause premature aging.
Impatience affects the telomeres, which are structures that protect DNA from deterioration.
When the telomeres are weakened, the DNA breaks down quicker and the signs of aging appear. Impatient people tend to have shorter and weaker telomeres.
In short, patience allows you to enjoy your life to the fullest.
It also allows you to find new ways to deal with situations and enjoy those moments when it seems there’s nothing you can do but wait. In addition, being patient boosts your self-confidence and allows you to adopt a more positive and pleasant attitude. It might interest you…
The Power of Patience and Anxiety Management – Exploring your mind
Intransigence, the Problem of a Closed Mind – Exploring your mind.
The 7 Laws of Impatience
… and 10 questions to ask yourself when you’re ready to bolt.
Have you ever wanted to give up on a paper you were writing for school or had an interesting project turn frustrating when unexpected complications arose? Have you ever had to sit through plays and movies you lost interest in after the first scene? Have you ever had to wait too long to get through a line, for the computer to load, or for Christmas to roll around?
Who hasn’t? We’ve all been impatient—and we’ve all made rash decisions when impatience got the better of us. We’ve left lines that were barely moving, only to get into an even slower line. We took the pizza out of the oven two minutes early because we just couldn’t wait. Or we’ve blown up a perfectly good relationship because we weren’t sure where it was going, and couldn’t stand the uncertainty.
On the other hand, we’ve also been overly patient at times, sticking with projects, jobs, or relationships long after it made sense to do so.
Which has cost you more in your life: patience or impatience? Different people will have different answers. Ideally, we’d get it right every time. We’d let our impatience lead us when changing course made sense, and we’d stay the course when that made most sense.
Unfortunately, no one gets it right every time.
But here’s the thing: If we understand impatience better, it will give us more power to get it right more of the time. And so I present to you the seven laws of impatience:
1. Impatience is not a lack of patience.
The word impatience is “im” + “patience,” which, on its face, means “a lack of patience.” Patience seems like a substantial thing—a specific mental process. By contrast, impatience is thought to be nothing but a lack of patience. But this gets things backwards: Impatience, it turns out, is a very particular mental and physical process that gets triggered under specific circumstances, and which motivates specific kinds of decisive action.1 “Patience” is really the shadow term, signifying a lack of impatience. The patient person simply wasn’t triggered to impatience when others normally would have been, or she found a way to overcome the impatience that did arise.
Somewhere along the way, we got these states backwards: Impatience should be seen as primary, and patience should be thought of as…well, “im-impatience.”
2. Impatience is triggered when we have a goal,
and realize it’s going to cost us more than we thought to reach it.
If you sit in your room with a blank mind, you will not be impatient. You’re just there. Now, if you decide that you want to go out and do something fun, you have adopted a goal. You are not yet impatient, but you might be setting yourself up for it. Suppose you call a friend to see if she is available to do something, and she is unavailable. Now you might start to grow a little impatient. And the longer it takes to find someone to go out with, the more impatient you will become.
When a child is waiting for Christmas, she might not be impatient at first, but when she begins to realize that she can’t stop thinking about Christmas, she grows impatient. Waiting for Christmas is costing her more than she thought it would in terms of her ability to pay attention to other things in the meantime.
You start writing a book, and you think it will take about six months. You’re on schedule, but you get an idea for an even better book. You realize that continuing to write the first book is costing you the opportunity to work on the second book. And you grow impatient.
You’re driving home and think it will take just 20 minutes to get there. But the two cars ahead of you are going 10 miles per hour below the speed limit, and they’re driving side by side in the only two lanes. You realize it’s going to take more time than you thought to get home—and you grow impatient.
3. Impatience motivates us to reduce
the costs of reaching our goal, or to switch goals.
When we realize it’s going to cost us more than we thought to get to our goal, our mental gears start spinning. We start looking for ways to avoid the additional costs in time, pain, distraction, credibility or opportunity.
Stuck in traffic, we start looking for strategic lane changing opportunities or alternate routes, or we start signaling to other drivers that we are growing impatient, so they might get out of our way.
When writing one book while dreaming of writing another, we might try to speed up work on the first, or just set it aside to work on the more interesting idea.
The child waiting for Christmas might start bargaining with her parents, asking them to let her open one of her presents early. Maybe that will calm her mind for a while.
4. Impatience and indignation are a potent combination.
Recently I was waiting at the register of a grocery store, but my line wasn’t moving while the other was speeding right along. I was impatient. But I wasn’t just impatient; I was also a little indignant. The clerk in my line wasn’t checking, but was talking with her manager, and they weren’t communicating anything to us.
So, instead of switching lines, or waiting, I made a minor show of leaving my non-purchased goods at the counter and hurried off to another store, as an immature part of my mind whispered, “This will show them.” In the end, it took longer to get my groceries than it would have in the first store, and I was late picking my daughter up from school.
We’re in special danger of making an irrational choice when we run into unexpected costs, and we think the extra costs are someone else’s fault. If, for example, the clerk had told us that the cash register was broken, I still would have become a little impatient, but I would have simply switched lines and gotten out of there just a little behind schedule. It was the combination of impatience and indignation that made me act like a fool.
5. We’re more likely to feel impatience when we have more options.
Any project will have its dips. There will be moments when we feel on top of things and optimistic, and others when we’re not sure the project will work at all. If we have no other project to work on, we can be fairly patient and just solve the problems as they come.
If, on the other hand, we have a dozen other projects we could be working on, we’re much more likely to abandon the current one when it gets hard. If we do this every time a project gets hard, we might find ourselves with a dozen half-finished projects lying around with nothing to show for all our effort.
That’s why Cortez burned his ships when he arrived in the New World. He wanted to take the “return to Europe” option away, so that, when things got difficult, his soldiers would not grow impatient, but would solve the problems and continue the mission. Cortez had a terrible goal, but he understood the value of limiting options in pursuit of that goal.
Options are good, but having too many can be bad. Alvin Toffler called it “Overchoice” in his 1970 social critique Futureshock. Barry Schwartz calls it the “Paradox of Choice”—having too many options can make it more difficult to choose in the first place.2 And it can lead to more regret and a greater tendency to reverse course after the choice has been made.
6. Impatience can cost us.
On the one hand, impatience can cost us. If a child has no bargaining leverage, she’s going to have to just stew in her juices waiting for Christmas. An impatient highway lane change can cause a deadly accident. Blurting out your feelings before you’ve thought things through can bring a premature end to a good relationship. And switching away from projects every time they get difficult can leave you with nothing accomplished. 3
7. Impatience can benefit us.
On the other hand, impatience can serve us well at times. Impatience is in our emotional-behavioral repertoire for a reason: When hunter-gatherers spent two days pursuing game and found nothing, it was good to grow impatient.
It was good to consider the possibility that another food-acquisition strategy (gathering) might be better at that point.
Sometimes we are working on a project that’s going nowhere, and we need to accept that and start working on something else. Sometimes we are behind a slow car and there’s smooth sailing in the other lane. Sometimes we’re in a dead-end relationship and need to get out so both parties can be happier.
* Knowledge gives you power.
Here’s the exciting thing: when we understand how impatience works, we can manage it better. We can put our impatient energy to use when it’s time to speed things up or change course. And we can learn to calm our impatient energy when it makes more sense to stay the course.
The seven laws of impatience empower us to ask the right questions when we find ourselves growing impatient:
What is my goal?
1. What did I think it was going to cost to reach this goal?
2. What are the additional costs I’m now aware of?
3. Am I blaming others for these extra costs?
4. Is it truly their fault?
5. Is it worth taking on even more costs just to teach them a lesson?
6. Do I have too many options?
7. Should I find a way to limit my exposure to new options?
8. Are there ways to reduce the costs of reaching this goal?
9. Is it time to abandon this goal?
10. Is Impatience A Mood
Knowledge is power. And knowing how impatience works gives us the power to better strike the balance, so we can stay the course when it makes sense, and change course when that makes sense.
For a slightly more in-depth treatment of impatience as an evolutionary adaptation, read “Understanding Impatience.”
Because it lacks patience, the ego is easily lured by quick fixes, magic bullets, shortcuts, and get-rich-quick schemes. And because the ego is forever unwilling to delay gratification, it’s compulsive, impulsive, indulgent, and anxious.
Patience is the answer to anxiety.
When things get tough, when times are trying, when a challenge feels overwhelming, when it feels like you’re not making progress fast enough, just know — impatience is the culprit and patience is the answer. When anxiety strikes, remind yourself that patience is Mother Nature’s secret.
Patience is what outlasts every obstacle. Patience is the essential ingredient in genius. Don’t be anxious; be patient… and all that is good will find you. Patience wins every battle.
There are those in denial who voted by Biden and are controlled by their ego. And there are those who are still very brainwashed. 🙁
The only thing the government can do about inflation is something it never wants to do about it. That is, to do a lot less about everything. The economy is driven by consumers, which require goods to consume, which require healthy workers to produce them, who if in addition have gravely sick kids cannot produce the goods which in demand drive inflation up. Macroeconomics 101.
Biden can’t get the ports unclogged, bring down inflation or stop the pandemic. But he can change the weather with money. BS! What about all this migrant kids? EXEMPT! WTH are they doing to the American people? Something is VERY wrong!! This isn’t about Covid!
Answer for this madness 
pass on https://youtu.be/hSB9iNL8Vr8
A week ago, I would think it’s crazy, but now I totally believe everything is leading to that way. It’s all about CONTROL. We will lose everything and be forced to be slave Until we all stand up now before it’s too late.
Monopoly – a Fascinating Documentary on How the World Works – YouTube
The longer covid hysteria goes on, the more his numbers go down. I said in May that this exact thing would happen if we didn’t go back to 2019 normal in the summer. He’d be advised to use the pediatric shots to declare victory and move on. The Biden Bubble is About to Pop (Preview) | (masculineepic.com)
Yeah prices on everything are going through the roof but I’m concerned
that we are shooting questionable “vaccines” into out kids 
More likely “provide a lot of lawsuits”!
Amazing how, for democrats, the “solution” to all that ails the country is the vaccination. Inflation? Vax | Border? Vax High fuel costs? Vax | High food costs? Vax I think the solution to all that ails this country is to get rid of all the socialists & communists.
Omg, these people are disgusting! A year ago kids had very little to do with Covid, passing or spreading it, getting sick from it, now they want to jab your kids too! Do NOT COMPLY! DO NOT LET YOUR KIDS BE THEIR PIN CUSHION OR LAB RATS!! THERE ARE NO STUDIES SHOWING THE SHORT OR LONG TERM AFFECTS!!