I want patience, but I want it Right Now!
Anxiety is not a disorder to take lightly. The “word” anxiety seems to be a household word, and it fells like everyone has it, in one form or another.
Maybe it is social anxiety, or sexual anxiety, or even food anxiety, but the disorder is not uncommon. Social Media, TECHNOLOGY, and all of the other “instant gratification” factors in our world FEED anxiety, like paper through an automatic shredder. The world we live in, everything comes to us immediately.
One of the challenges of having an anxious mind, is when things DON’T happen fast enough. Impatience plays a huge part in the day-to-day struggles of anxiety. Waiting, in general, can drive an anxious mind into insanity, specially if you are waiting for something big to happen in your life.
How is Anxiety Linked to Impatience? Anxiety and impatience are linked because being anxious makes it hard to wait for something to happen. Impatience is not only caused by anxiety, but it also creates more anxiety.
Impatience by itself is normal. We all want something to happen right away. But when impatience starts to affect our actions, it can take over our lives. Impatience is a very particular mental and physical process that gets triggered under specific circumstances, and which motivates specific kinds of decisive action like, IMPATIENCE and INDIGNATION are a potent combination that could lead to make a bad decision.
We may feel impatient when something doesn’t go according to our habits. Also, we are more likely to feel impatience when we have more options. When we’re partly done with one project, and get an idea for a better one, we grow impatient, and, in general, the more options we have, the more prone we will be to impatience. Options are good but having too many can be bad.
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 problem as they come. If, on the other hand, we have a dozen other projects we could be working on, we’re more likely to abandon the current one when it gets hard.
Ask yourself the following questions when you feel impatient:
1- Why am I impatient?
You might realize that what you are waiting for or annoyed about is not a matter of life-or-death. You can begin to think rationally about your desires and what you can do in the process of waiting. Slow down and stop doing things that are not important. –Take deep, slow breaths, and count to 10 and BE MINDFUL OF YOUR THOUGHTS.
2- How did I get through being impatient in the past?
By remembering a time when you felt impatient because of anxiety in the past, you can remember how you coped with it. Remember no one can make the world spin faster. -Practice to make yourself wait and change your thoughts around the source of your impatience.
3- What did I learn after surviving impatience?
Getting through impatience might teach you the value in delayed gratification. Perhaps you will learn that not everything is as bad as it seems. Thinking about what you learned might inspire you to look at waiting as a chance to learn new lessons. Practicing patience is the key to not giving up when your objectives seem unachievable, especially for those with grand visions. –Accept imperfections and use statements or mantras that promote patience and a sense of calm.
Slowing down and practicing a little patience will make you a happier person.
Patience is the ability to be calm in the face of adversity, frustration or suffering, and in any given situation you’ll respond with some amount of patience (or lack of it).
It is about trusting that the right thing will happen in its own timeframe, and making peace with that.
