How do you exercise patience?

Almost every second of every day is a test in patience. It is morality. You have no right to harm others just because you am incredibly exasperated with them and all the people they may remind me of. Patience is a virtue when you don’t express your contempt for people who unwittingly arouse your ire. If they haven’t purposely and maliciously harmed you they probably don’t deserve your punishment.

However, patience is not a virtue when you are waiting for some unspecified opportunity to come, some great love to save you, some unexpected change to shake things up. This is just laziness and unwillingness to create your own fate. Some people label their inaction patience when it is really just fear of the new.

I have tons of patience for people who are seriously and legitimately impaired, and with children. But, people who I can reasonably expect to be able to keep up with me I am more quick to lose patience with. People closest to me, like my husband, I have been too short tempered with lately, and definitely have been in a mode of expecting him to read my mind and understand subtle cues. I want to be more patient in those situations but what is tricky is when you know someone is very smart, but on certain topics they just don’t think the same way, or don’t have the same perspective or knowledge, so they are slower on that one topic, when most of the time they can keep up.

There are always people with skills that you do not have. I have a contractor friend, who (usually when drunk) can carve a linked chain with a chain saw. It’s amazing to watch.

Here’s another guy who can do it

This is not patience but tolerance. If the guy who can ID all the trees on my property in the winter from the bark only is tolerant of me, why should I care whether he can read French or not?

What does this have to do with morality?

It helps not to cop an attitude about being better than others.

I don’t suffer fools gladly.

I’m quite impatient with those closer to me. It’s something I’m working to improve as it’s not nice for the other person and it takes a lot of energy on my end too. I try to breathe calmly and bring things back to the moment. I like things done quickly, hence the snap, snap attitude. The thing is, people are very patient with me when I’m learning something new so I’m trying to keep that in mind too with my new, patient self :-)

Patience is the ability to put yourself into anothers situation and to be able to get out of your own narrow little universe and contemplate others potential situations.
Car going really slow in front of you?
Maybe they are transporting a sick friend/relative/pet, to or from the doctor, not just driving like Ms. Daisy to piss you off.

Stuck in line?
Well, your turn will come, don’t be an ass.
Stuck in traffic, well…it is what it is, you have a choice. Bitch and complain or breathe and relax and accept the moment for what it is.

It’s all about choice and the awareness to contemplate what another might be experiencing.
I always try to contemplate the possible REASONS for others behaviors.
It’s called being present, and not letting your ego get pissed off because YOU have deemed YOURSELF and your needs as the most important.

I think every patience has a line.

But anyway… If you get the idea of many people being inferior to you overall, I think your patience will increase (since you don’t even consider yourself on the same level with most).

I don’t think you can receive patience. However I think you can naturally adopt it through your main ideas (what makes you who you are).

@gailcalled I am sure endurance, patience, and tolerance are all synonyms of each other and I exercise them every single time I read a post of yours because you are so condescending. I do not mean that in a mean way either. It isn’t that I don’t care about what you say, but it’s the fact that I do care because I sincerely care for others (including strangers) and would only wish that their demeanors (at least those with a sense of intelligence) were more sentient in nature. However, you tend to dissect every – single – word that any person posts and I actually asked this question regarding people similar to you in mind.

I see patience as allowing a process the time it needs for an optimal outcome. It’s a skill of self-restraint and an exercise in foresight.

I think of the famous Stanford Marshmallow Experiment. This measured the ability to balance the desire for immediate gratification against the desire for an optimal outcome. This pits a lower-order mental process—the gratification impulse—against a higher-order mental process—judgment and restraint.

I wouldn’t argue that patience is, in itself, a virtue. Exercising patience to get more marshmallows for yourself is smart, but not morally meritorious. But there are plenty of situations where patience serves moral ends. Those are the times when we see that attending to immediate gratification of our desires will make things unnecessarily harder on others. This requires that we have the welfare of others high on our priorities.

I saw my shrink yesterday. We were talking about weight, and obesity research. He’s a big time genetic researcher into bipolar, so I guess he knows a lot about other kinds of genetic research, as well.

As we all know, it’s hard to lose weight, but do you know how hard? He was telling me that the best treatment we have (diet and exercise) works a mere 7% of the time. That’s the best treatment. That shows you that we are going up against every defense that our bodies have—we are designed to protect against starvation, not overeating.

Some of you may remember Fen-Phen, a diet supplement used in the 80s. It was pretty effective, but there were 20 (count them—20) cases where people’s arteries thickened, perhaps as a result of the Fen-Phen use. I guess it was never proven.

So the FDA banned it. My shrink argues that Obesity kills far more people than Fen-Phen thickens the arteries of. The risk is worth the reward. Society would be much better off. However, the FDA is so cautious, and law-suit averse, I guess, that it will not consider the benefits if there are any risks that could result in bad law suits.

So we are left losing weight by exercising patience. A lot of it. Which people don’t have.

@thorninmud I don’t think of the Marshmellow expirement as being the same as having a quick temper or having patience with others. I can delay gratification for a later reward quite easily. Save money, not buy something I want right away, do necessary steps to acheive a goal. I am pretty sure I would have been one of the children who would have not eaten the marshmellow. But, I grew up in a hot tempered family, and I tend to be that way myself. I am much calmer than my family, except when with them the old routine comes back into play.

@JLeslie The marshmallow experiment was looking at the ability to delay gratification, true, but isn’t that just a particular form of impulse-control? It seems to me that anger management is also impulse-control, in another form.

What happens in the two instances is not all that different. A situation arises that triggers a desire to behave in a particular way (eat something tasty in the one case, lash out in the other). But, ideally, the case gets referred to your prefrontal cortex, the seat of your judgment, and it considers the consequences of yielding to that desire. If it sees that a better outcome will result from not yielding to the desire, it may exercise the option to override the impulse. In the marshmallow case, it may see that this will lead to more marshmallows in the future. In the anger case, it may see that damage will be done to a valued relationship and the outburst will be regretted.

Although it feels kind of good to get your marshmallow right now, and to lash out when you’re angry, wisdom dictates that this be measured against the benefit of restraint. There are two skills in play, then: the skill of understanding consequences (judgment), and the skill of restraining impulse (forbearance). I think that patience is the interplay of these two.

@thorninmud I do think they are similar. It’s just interesting how a person can have incredible control and patience in one area and not another. I think it has to do with how it hits the person emotionally, not as much to do with logic and reasoning maybe? Once emotion is fired up it is hard to reach the logical part of us. Some of it must have to do with hard wiring in the brain, but I bet the majority of it is environmental. My dad for instance had a pretty good temper, and when to try and justify himself as a reasonable human being he often brings out fabulous stories of him at work and how great he was at working with people, logical, reasonable. There is an instance where we are discussing dealing with people, people at work and people in our family, and yet he has every bit of control at work, almost effortless. I think it is because we are not as emotionally tied to our work collegues, so the two situations are very different. I think a lot of it goes back to childhood.

By exercising patience I specifically mean by learning to tolerate. If you do not learn to tolerate anything then you are surely to have a short temper. Ignorance isn’t as much a bliss inasmuch a convenience.

@wundayatta The obesity crisis calls for ⅓ of the US population, to include children. The contributors to the crisis are social implications, cultural implications, and economic implications. All of which I will not go into details sharing. However, we are looking at inactivity, sedentary lifestyles, and the expenses of becoming and maintaining the obese status. Moreover, the consequences are physiological and economical such as: heart disease (#1 Killer), diabetes, stroke, cancer, and hypertension to name a few; hence, lost hours at work, increased living expenses, and increased energy consumption for vehicles and home comfort. Not to mention, environmental issues, which too, I will not discuss.

www.cdc.gov

@JLeslie I partly agree, I know it is emotional, but it is also due to the lack of logic and reasoning that many emotions arise and overtake an action, or inaction. Everything you said has a lot of grammatical absolutes and that is where I cannot agree entirely, but mostly, I do agree with the childhood spectrum, the rearing, the psychological implications, and social ties such as work. Great post.

Patience is a virtue. After witnessing it in others and seeing the outcome, they become role models for how to better react in situations. On the flip side, those that do not practice patience can be role models for how not to react based upon the response.

My innate reaction is to respond immediately. What I’ve learned it that it isn’t effective in most cases. Stopping to assess the other person’s viewpoint, asking questions that generate additional information, and a good dose of empathy seem to work wonders.

This is one of the many reasons that I like Fluther. It helps me exercise the desire of self-control versus saying what is immediately on my mind. Questions are followed and then returned to after thinking about it from all angles. Often, there are perspectives that I hadn’t thought of that make even better sense. This also applies to life outside of this site.

@whiteliondreams Thanks. I am not really trying to push my hypothesis as an absolute; rather, an observation related to my own personal experiences.

By forming new habits and new routines, which can take years. As an example: learn to always take three long deep breaths when you notice that your are being impatient. This itself requires time, but it can become a learned reflex, so at some point your unconsciousness will do it.

I the time I spent incarcerated has made me much more patient about what gones in my life now that would have bothered me a lot more before being forced to be patient about every aspect of your life that happens in jail. Time will pass if you let it bother you you suffer. You got to learn to do your time no matter what your waiting on. If you can’t rush it or change it stressing won’t help. Find something to do. Read, draw, write, do some activity even if its not something that really appeals to you. Keep your thoughts elsewhere. Once you learn to sidestep impatience you will be happier and whatever you are waiting for will come along faster. Do your time. Don’t let your time do you. Don’t wait more something to jump up and bite you on the ass while you sit around either. Take action and do things to make whatever your waiting to happen come about.

@buster Exactly.