Speaking of Psychology: How to become more patient, with Sarah Schnitker, PhD

Life is full of situations—and people—that try our patience, from a standstill traffic jam to an obstinate preschooler who won’t put on her shoes. Sarah Schnitker, PhD, talks about why patience can be so hard to come by; whether modern life and modern technology have made us less patient; the difference between patience and passivity and how to tell when a situation calls for patience and when it calls for action; and cognitive strategies to build up your ability to be patient.

Sarah Schnitker, PhD, is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor University. She studies virtue and character development in adolescents and emerging adults, including patience, self-control, gratitude, generosity, and thrift.

Kim Mills: Life is full of situations that try our patience. You’re late for work and the driver in front of you is going 15 miles below the speed limit. Your preschooler insists on putting on her own shoes and it’s taking 10 minutes per foot. You had an interview for your dream job weeks ago and you’re waiting, with increasing anxiety, to hear back from the company. In each of these situations, you try to remain calm, but you can feel your stress level rising.

Philosophers and religious leaders have long extolled the virtue of patience. And in more recent years, psychologists have found that patience is good for our mental and even our physical health. But it’s not easy to achieve. So why is patience so hard to come by? Has modern life and modern technology made us less patient? Is it possible to become a more patient person? And if you want to do so, what are the best strategies?

Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills.

My guest today is Dr. Sarah Schnitker, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor University, where she studies patience and other virtues, including self-control, gratitude, and generosity. She’s especially interested in the role of spirituality and religion in virtue formation. Dr. Schnitker has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles and her work has been covered in mainstream media outlets, including The New York Times, CNN, and Time magazine.

Dr. Schnitker, thank you for joining me today.

Sarah Schnitker, PhD: Thank you so much for having me. It’s wonderful to be here.

Mills: Most people know what the word patience means, but I’m curious how you define it in your work. Is it close to the way we think about it colloquially?

Schnitker: I think it is pretty similar. And I think it’s always interesting when we define the word to actually look at the Latin root. It actually means to suffer. And so for many of us, when we have to be patient, we feel like we are suffering. But the way we define it in psychology is that ability to remain calm and wait calmly in the face of frustration, adversity, or suffering. And so we all encounter people, events, hardships in our daily lives that require us to wait and to put on the brakes a little bit. And that can be really difficult, but people who are patient are able to do that and still remain calm and settled and not become overwhelmed with emotion as they engage in that waiting.

Mills: Why is patience such a hard thing for some of us to achieve? Are we hardwired to be impatient?

Schnitker: Well, that is a great question. I mean, I think patience, we are often employing patience in pursuit of our goals. And we want to achieve either small goals of getting to work on time or big goals of raising a child who is a kind and generous person. And we often feel impatient when we feel like something’s blocking our goal pursuit and we want to get there faster. And so in some ways, we could say that impatience might have evolved evolutionarily to push us forward and make us notice when we need to move forward in our goals. But oftentimes it’s useful to learn about what’s going on from our emotions, but then it’s often not very helpful to kind of stay in this state of impatience and be overwhelmed with emotion. And so having the capacity to regulate that impatience and be able to still pursue your goal, but in a more calm manner, is really going to be kind of adaptive for us, especially in the modern era where we aren’t necessarily—our goal for the day is not to find enough food, so I can eat tonight. Some people deal with that, but many people in Western industrialized contexts, that impatience that maybe evolved for really life and death scenarios is being transferred over to other things that are not as life and death, and maybe we don’t need as much of a strong impatient reaction to.

Mills: When do we first learn the concept of patience? Did we discover the answer through Walter Mischel’s famous marshmallow experiments?

Schnitker: Well, we first learned—I mean, in psychology, I would say it really became popularized then, but the idea of patience is really an ancient concept, and philosophers and theologians have been talking about patience for millennia and have recognized it as really a perennial human problem, that things do not go as fast as we want. We are not able to kind of get past our suffering. And so finding ways to wait and suffer with excellence is actually a thing a lot of philosophers talk about in virtue ethics. And so it’s been fun in psychology to come to this conversation a little bit later, but with our new methods of using scientific inquiry.

Mills: So just to reconstitute the question, is there an age in development that we learn, we begin to understand what patience is and how to exercise it?

Schnitker: We don’t have for certain when patience itself develops, but we see immediately for an infant, they experience waiting, right? That caregivers are not instantly responsive. We try to be responsive when we’re a caregiver, but sometimes that baby has to wait for the bottle of milk to get warmed up. But you see when children start to get more of a theory of mind around the toddler years, they then start to maybe understand that they want something now, someone else doesn’t want them to have that thing now and they have to wait.

And so you see in young children pretty early that they have impatience, they don’t want to wait. And any parent of a toddler can say, This is something I’m talking to them about regularly. And we’re like, Okay, good. You get to practice your patience today. We see that start to emerge, but I think it’s really in adolescence where people have this capacity to really intentionally cultivate the virtue of patience and to think about kind of when is it wise to be patient, when is it not wise? When should I actually allow myself to be upset appropriately to this situation? And so what we see starting in early childhood kind of comes into full maturity in adolescence and young adulthood.

Mills: In your work, you talk about three different kinds of patience: interpersonal, life hardship and daily hassles. Tell us what each of those concepts means.

Schnitker: Interpersonal patience, as the name sounds, is about being patient with other people. And I think this might not be the first thing that comes to mind for many people in the United States, at least. We often think of patience, traffic, getting stuck in lines, things like that. But we actually find that interpersonal patience is quite important and predicts a lot of wellbeing outcomes. And I think this makes a lot of sense. If you’re able to be patient with your spouse, you’re going to have a better marriage and better health. If—as a parent, you have to be patient with your child. As a coworker, I have to be patient with the perhaps annoying person next to my office, right? There’s lots of people in our lives who are slower than we would like, who do things that we would prefer them not to do, when we have to practice our patience.

With daily hassles patience, this might be the more stereotypic scenarios of getting stuck at a red light, waiting on hold to change your airline ticket when it’s canceled, right? These things that are daily hassles that do test our patience as we wait, yet they’re kind of smaller and build up across a day. And then the last type of patience, life hardships patience is kind of how we are patient with these very long-term goals that may or may not be resolved. So for instance, if someone has a long-term chronic health condition, they may not actually think they’ll get better or that it will improve, but they still have to be patient as they deal with that chronic health condition across their life. And what does it mean to be able to wait well? As you know it’s going to be a very long time, you have to continue to engage this patience. And so that could also include things of like dealing with an unjust society, dealing with the effects of systemic racism in your life, that it requires patience, but it’s not something that you expect to have immediate end. And so that adds another layer to that waiting.

Mills: Can you be good at patience in one of these domains, but not the others? For example, maybe you get crazed in traffic, but you can handle life’s big challenges. Is that the norm or do the three types of patience generally correlate together?

Schnitker: Yeah. I mean, I think we’ve seen variability. So when we look at these three types of patience, on average, they tend to correlate with each other. So some of our research has shown too that there might be this kind of general patience that influences—kind of like you might have general intelligence, but then specific types of intelligence. We think that patience might be that way, that there’s this kind of general emotion regulatory capacity to wait, but there’s distinctions in those different contexts of waiting. And some people might really struggle with waiting with other people, but be okay with life hardships and things like that.

And what we actually show in some of our studies, we actually do go more fine grain and ask people about the goals they’re pursuing in life. And they might say things like, Be a good daughter, get straight A’s, work out at the gym so many times a week. And then we ask them for each of those individual goals, how much patience, items around how much patience they exert for that specific goal. And what we found is there is a lot of variability. So some people have a goal where they’re very patient and then they have a goal where they are not patient at all. And there’s a lot of contextual features that might make that patience more or less difficult depending on the situation.

I get—a lot of people, it’s kind of funny when I talk to people about patience, I can’t tell you how many times people have talked about their golf game and how they are pretty good at patience except when they’re playing golf and then they just cannot do it. Or like people have lots of things in their lives that might be a particularly difficult circumstance or a game that really tests their patience.

Mills: Well, let me ask you, we talk about patience as a virtue, but is it always a virtue or is it possible to be too patient? And how do you judge when a situation requires patience and when it requires action, just in a way that anybody would agree?

Schnitker: No, I think that’s a great question and actually really important because I think over the years, sometimes patience is weaponized and when someone wants someone else to be passive, they might say, Well, you need to be patient. And in that case, it probably is not a virtue. And so I would argue that the capacity to wait calmly in the face of frustration and suffering, that capacity, the ability to do it as an individual, is a virtue always. But whether or not exercising patience in a particular moment—part of the virtue is having the wisdom to know whether this is the right moment for patience or for another capacity or virtue, like courage, for instance, which helps you act in the face of fear. And so we’re using our patience in pursuit of goals. Sometimes what’s needed is to wait and having the capacity to wait helps you be able to do that if that is the wise thing to do, but sometimes we also need to act and take bold moves and move forward.

And I think the thing that patience as a virtue, this trait, this disposition that we have, is it gives you just enough space to remain calm so you can decide if you’re going to act or to wait. Whereas if you don’t have that disposition and that capacity, that skill of patience, then you might just be buffeted around by your emotions. And so an example I love to give is, let’s say, working against sexism in the workplace, for instance, right? As a woman, sometimes I encounter a situation that involves sexism and sometimes the wise thing to do is to speak up, to pull upon my courage as a virtue in that capacity and to do something. Other times, it’s not the right moment and actually being quiet and just remaining calm in this moment is the right thing to do. And I need my patience to help me do that and understanding—like if my goal is to create an equitable, inclusive workplace, then I need to have both patience and courage to get me there, and that way I can navigate situations well and not just be driven by my anger or by my fear or by my—that I have the capacity to regulate my emotions in a productive manner for the good of myself and others.

Mills: What do patience and impatience do to our bodies over the long term?

Schnitker: There’s a little bit of discussion out there of whether it’s a discreet negative emotion different from other negative emotions. My colleague Kate Sweeny, she argues that it is, and I think in a pretty convincing way. And impatience, we don’t have research on it long term yet because no one studied it discreetly, but we do know other negative emotions like anger, irritability, these tax our system if we are feeling them consistently in daily life. And so it can lead to cardiovascular problems, lead to a lot of chronic health conditions, rooted in persistent negative emotions in reaction to stress. And so what we’ve found is that when people are more patient, that might buffer against that, that they’re able to regulate and be able to maintain their pursuit of the important goals in their life, but not have the same cost physiologically, as they don’t have as many negative emotions that are taxing them.

Mills: So for people who want to become more patient, which is probably many of our listeners, what advice do you have? What can you do to become more patient?

Schnitker: It’s interesting. I think people do want to become more patient, but they also don’t want to become more patient, because they’re afraid that to become more patient, I’ll have to practice patience, which means I’ll have to wait and suffer and all these things. I grew up in a religious community and people would joke, but actually say seriously, like, don’t pray for patience. God will send you waiting and suffering. You don’t want to pray for that. It will mess up your life. It’s kind of interesting because we’re told to be patient, but there’s this real fear. And so I think first understanding why it is you care about keeping patient is really important to motivate you. So understanding if you’re thinking about your life in general, a particular situation, so maybe I’m struggling to be patient with my tween daughter and connecting to my big picture why—like, I view it as part of my job as a human being to raise her to be a person of character in the world who contributes to society. And I view this even as a sacred activity that has immense meaning, that when I think about that big picture purpose, then I can be motivated to say, Okay, what are practices that will help me be more patient in my interactions with her?

And that’s when you get into the how. So how do I learn to regulate my emotions with her? And we have a lot of strategies for emotion regulation that are evidence based and all of these are really useful and can be applied to patience. So one of the best strategies is cognitive reappraisal, right? So thinking about the situation in a new way. There’s lots of ways to do cognitive reappraisal. It could be a perspective taking of like, Okay, how would I feel if I were nine and didn’t have control and had just been told this mean thing? Kind of entering the other person’s perspective can really help with interpersonal patience.

We also find, I think with reappraising how long things take, taking a slight historical perspective can be very quick way to be patient. So, Oh, why is this Wi-Fi so slow? You’re like, Well, actually, just think about back to the ‘90s and you had dial up and it had... Just recalibrating our expectations through cognitive reappraisal. There’s lots of ways we can change what we’re thinking, but what we also, some research has found recently is that a variety of emotion regulation strategies can be helpful. So even distraction, even momentarily, sometimes suppression is the adaptive emotion regulation strategy in a particular moment. And recent work that’s come out has shown that it’s actually having a variety of strategies in your tool belt for regulating your emotions that’s really important and matching your strategy for patience to the situation.

So sometimes it’s like, You know what? I’m waiting on this thing. I’m just going to distract myself with a TV show. But other times, especially perhaps with scenarios that have kind of existential import, like a chronic health condition or dealing with injustice or things that are more those life hardships or with other people, we might need more of that reappraisal to happen alongside. It can’t be the suppression or distraction—can’t be the only strategy to work long term for being patient with those scenarios.

Mills: Sounds like some of this is to prevent yourself from ruminating on something that you have no control over.

Schnitker: Exactly, exactly. And that’s, I think, part of the reason patience is so hard for us in our cultural moment is, I mean, all humans like to have control and certainty, but I think in the modern era, because of our technology, we have more illusions of control and have expectations of control that are just unrealistic for a human to have, with our bodies or our minds and that we have to often just wait on things even though we think we shouldn’t have to anymore.

Mills: What if you have a spouse or a partner or even a kid whose patience meter is different from yours? Well, how do you deal with those situations where someone’s losing it because they have to wait?

Schnitker: That’s tough. I mean, let’s say it’s hard enough to be patient for yourself, but for someone else. But I think with other people, and especially you see this with children and adolescents, oftentimes you are coregulating with them. And even with a partner, spouse or coworker, you can start to verbally do some of that reappraisal and think about things differently or help kind of start that regulation. So for example, amusement parks I think are like an experiment in patience. I want to do a study at one someday of—

Mills: Waiting in line and for 10 seconds of fear.

Schnitker: Exactly. What are we doing to ourselves? But it’s interesting to see what people do with their children or with their partners as they do that. And do you get to talk about other things? Do you distract them? Do you say, Okay, at least it’s better than that other ride that had the 2-hour wait. You can really start to see how strategies are used socially.

And I think we can do that in our own lives. And you have to be careful when you’re helping someone else because what might be a strategy that works for you or what feels like the wise thing to do for you might not be the same for them. So for example, I mentioned Kate Sweeny earlier, she’s done studies in the past on women waiting for breast biopsy results to find out if they have cancer or these other kind of really uncertain waiting scenarios. And you want to make sure that the support a partner provides is actually supportive and not kind of out of step with what the individual needs. And so I think it’s always wise to also be checking in, especially if it’s another adult you’re waiting alongside, to see what they need and would it be helpful to go distract ourselves right now? Do you want to talk it through? Do you want to engage in problem solving? We always often forget we can just ask other people how we can help them. And I think that’s a really wise step and lets the person get the kind of support they need.

Mills: Now, I’m originally from New York and I can attest to the fact that New Yorkers are notoriously impatient. Tourists walk too slowly, out-of-towners don’t know how to drive. And whenever I go back to New York, I get into that mindset. So I need to ask, is impatience contagious? Is it cultural?

Schnitker: I don’t have actual hard data on this yet, but I mean, we know there’s emotion contagion for other emotions and we’ve clearly seen that. I would hypothesize that it is contagious and that when we see other people around us, especially if we’re experiencing some arousal, but haven’t quite decided what we’re feeling yet, if we see someone else there tapping their fingers, fidgeting, showing all those signs of impatience, we can catch it. And that’s concerning, right, because we can create whole communities of impatience. I think culture specifically comes into play in the fact that culture sets our expectations of how life should go. And I think—when I think of comparing New York to say Texas where I live currently, when I moved to Texas—I lived in LA before that. It was one of the things that most struck me was this culture shift, was things were slower in Texas and that everyone wanted to chat more.

And part of it, I think is the crowds. The crowds make you want to get through faster. But there’s just a different culture of taking time and expectation of how long it should take to go through the checkout line is just different because of what that culture values. And in the South, you have more relational cultures, Southern hospitality, right? You see that those values show up in our approach to time and what is time. And I think maybe a place like New York City, our metaphor is time is that time is money, right? It’s all around the stock market and Wall Street and that this is how we think about time, but our views of time definitely differ across culture significantly, not just in the US, but around the world. Really different views of time. Is it linear? Is it circular? Do we go by clock time or event time—that the time something’s supposed to start is once everyone arrives.

These are just fundamentally different views of time that are going to shape when we think too much time has passed and triggers that impatience.

Mills: I’ve seen meditation or mindfulness mentioned as strategies to increase patience. Do those work?

Schnitker: Yes. Yep. Those are effective for increasing patience. And I think part of the reason we know that meditation helps you calm your own physiological system, calm your mind. And so just having the capacity to calm yourself even through a very brief meditative practice is really a great tool for regulation. Meditation also, and its focus on especially mindfulness with non-judgment, it might allow us to sit in these moments where we are waiting with less judgment of it and more of a sense of, this is just something that is and something—instead of waiting being seen as something I have to like endure and suffer, see as this is just the experience of waiting and this is part of being human. That can kind of shift, it’s a minor shift, but can really help as we deal with that component of life.

Mills: What got you interested in studying patience?

Schnitker: I started studying as a first-year grad student and positive psychology in the study of character strengths and virtues was just kind of blossoming in 2004. And as I was looking at the literature, it just struck me that all of the virtues that were being studied had a very push through, goal directed, power through it, happy flavor. And I noticed that patience was completely neglected and it was excluded, for instance, from Seligman and Peterson’s 24 virtues they had in their values and action inventory.

And I read this book. It was actually an interdisciplinary reading. I do a lot of collaboration with philosophers and theologians. And I read a book by a moral philosopher, David Bailey Harned, argued that since the industrial revolution, patience has gone out of fashion, that we have abandoned it as a capacity we want to cultivate in ourselves, because we think the solution to waiting is technological instead of human, that we think anytime we have to wait or suffer, there’s a quick fix, right? We should fix it through our technology instead of recognizing that this is a deeply human concern.

And that really was very compelling to me because if you think about the things that give meaning to life or that are most important, they always do take time and there’s not a technological solution to learning to wait for my spouse to grow in the way he’s going to grow and not the way I want him to be. Our human problems require patience. And so I just thought, oh my goodness, this is a real problem that we’re not talking about this and we’re going to be unprepared when it comes to moments where we really have to wait. And I think people often do feel unprepared in those moments of deep waiting, of waiting for breast biopsy result or waiting for these things. We have to practice it in the small things so that we can be ready to do it in the larger things.

Mills: It’s interesting to tie it to the Industrial Revolution because if you think about before that, what people were doing was farming, which requires a lot of patience and waiting and plant a seed, it’s going to be months and months before you see a crop. So that makes a whole lot of sense.

Schnitker: Some of our modern societies, we’ve lost a sense of these rhythms of life of, right, there’s a planting season, those rhythms that you have if you’re more connected to the natural environment. And so I think we maybe suffer a bit more as humans when we get disconnected from the natural world. And we have a lot of research showing that. So I think that’s one of the reasons is the wisdom of timing and waiting that we need to maintain.

Mills: So just to wrap up, what are you working on now? What are your big questions that you’re trying to answer?

Schnitker: Yeah. So actually next month we start data collection looking at patience and parents of adolescence. It’s going to be a 4-year longitudinal study where we look at not just their self-reports, but also how other people in their lives think they are or are not patient. We’ll also do psychophysiomeasurement in the lab and do experience sampling, so ping them multiple times. It’s going to be a really holistic view of these parents. And we chose to look at parents of adolescents because they are a very stressed group. When you look at parenting, I mean, everyone, when they think of patience, think of parenting, anyone who’s been a parent, but parents of adolescents actually show the lowest parental satisfaction and very, very high rates of stress. Because part of what you’re doing there is you have less and less control, more risks to your child as well as you give out that control and have to wait for them to grow.

We’re looking at patience and adversity in particular. So looking at parents of adolescents who face particular challenges or adversities in their lives that might make patience particularly important. So for example, we’re studying parents of adolescents with developmental disabilities to see how not only their patient with their child, but with all the healthcare systems they have to navigate and the school systems and ensuring that their child is taken care of. We’re also examining patience among Muslim American parents and the unique stressors they face around maintaining their culture and their faith tradition in the context in the U.S. that is not always friendly to their culture or faith or tradition and how they negotiate parenting in that context and being patient, but yet acting with courage when necessary. We’re also looking at a sample of parents in Southern California who are really ethnically, socioeconomically diverse and looking at how those different components of their societal location affect their patience across time and their wellbeing.

So I’m really excited to dig into this particular population.

Mills: All right. Well, that sounds like great stuff. Well, Dr. Schnitker, I want to thank you for joining me today.

Schnitker: Well, thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed our conversation.

Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology  on our website at speakingofpsychology.org  or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please subscribe and leave a review. If you have comments or ideas for future episodes, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman.

Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I’m Kim Mills.