Impatience is a habit; so is patience. To change a habit, we need strong motivation, which comes from knowing the rewards that come from the new behavior.

The beauty of the decision for patience is that it doesn’t matter how impatient we consider ourselves to be. We will always have another opportunity to choose! In whatever circumstance we find ourselves right now, we are free to choose peaceableness. Each and every day, moment by moment, the decision is yours.

All this stimulation and outward attention has one effect: to make everything a blur and to create a sense of mental restlessness that is the antithesis of patience. David Shenk writes about this in The End of Patience: “As we go to higher info altitudes, where the information moves faster . . . our eyes, ears, and cerebral cortexes have more to ke

Better to get up late and be wide awake than to get up early and be asleep all day.

One reason for this is that a synonym for patience is self-possession. I love that word; it helps me remember that, with patience, we are in charge of our selves. We can choose how to respond to a given event, rather than being hijacked by our emotions.

When we are experiencing impatience, we tend to concretize current reality: it’s like this and it’s going to be this way forever. I’m going to be in this job forever; I’m going to be changing diapers forever; I’m going to be struggling financially forever; I’m going to be alone forever; I’m going to be in this bed sick forever. If we’re in an uncom

Most of us alive today think waiting represents a flaw in some system, rather than a natural condition of life. But human beings have always had to wait—for good weather to plant crops, for plagues to end, for their loved ones to return from years at sea, never knowing if they were alive or not. The only difference now is what we wait on, not that

Patience also gives us calmness of spirit. With patience, our inner experience is more like a still pond than a raging river. Rather than being thrown into anger, panic, or fear by every circumstance life throws at us—a canceled plane, a missed deadline by a workmate, our spouse forgetting to do an errand—we are able to put it into some kind of per

Or perhaps the other person represents an aspect of ourselves that we’ve disowned. In psychological terms, this phenomenon is called projection. We get impatient with others who represent aspects of ourselves that we have pushed away or are angry we don’t have.