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Modern culture has made us feel like there’s no time to be patient. Sarah Schnitker’s lab at Baylor University is researching how this often-forgotten virtue could improve our overall well-being.
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In this era, we expect such instant gratification and speed
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You often see with young people, if their friend doesn't text them back immediately
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they take it as a relational slight and are worried about what's wrong. So we just expect this instant responsiveness from the world
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And when something's not going well or something's difficult, that butts up against the reality that the world is not actually revolving around us
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When we have to suffer or wait, patients can actually be this superpower
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And instead of suffering, we can wait calmly and appropriately when we face difficult circumstances
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Our technologies have changed our expectations about how the world should work
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We start to expect that other people or our bodies can react just as quickly as our smartphones and all of our other devices that we have in our life
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This creates a mismatch. The problem is that when it comes to other people and when it comes to our bodies and our minds, those things don't work at the same speed
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And so we need the virtue of patience to bridge the gap of what we want and what the reality is Now even though we have the phrase patience is a virtue I think we often think of it
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as a weakness. We have a lot of misconceptions about patience that our data show are just false and that
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actually patience helps facilitate goal pursuit. What we've done in our lab is ask people to list the personal goals they're working on
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And then for each of those goals, we ask, are they able to remain regulated as they pursue this goal
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even when it takes longer than they'd hoped or is more difficult than they'd expect
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And what we find is that when people are patient, when we follow up with them at a later point in time
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they actually are exerting more effort on that goal and they actually are more satisfied with their progress
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So patience does actually pay off for individual well-being. even when the circumstances are not going your way and you face obstacles
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By cultivating patience, we can actually experience that gap a little bit differently
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Suffering and waiting are part of life, but with patience, people who were in the midst of suffering learn to wait well and to suffer well
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which will allow that person to flourish