Has anyone from your family ever said to you, “You lack patience horribly.”? If yes, you are on the right page. Okay now, you must be pondering, why anyone from family? Well, it’s because if there is anyone who knows you best after yourself, it’s your family. They are the people who have seen you in your best and worst, in your best days and worst days, in your best behavior and worst as well. Patience is an integrity and is quite tough to master. When a person loses patience, the dark clouds of frustration, rage and perplexity compounds over to engulf the person’s conscience. We all likely lose our patience every once in a while, and that’s what makes us human. We are no God, so losing patience occasionally is normal. But doing so repeatedly and infelicitously can damage and hurt our reputation, relationships, people around us by elevating stress, anxiety and demanding situations. Patience is like a panacea that can solve all problems of your life at once. When you hold patience, you keep yourself calm, composed to take time to think and act. This practice helps you to respond thoughtfully and wisely to every arduous situation in your life or around you. Hence, patience plays a crucial role in leading a stress-free life. Let’s have a brief look on how patience and stress-free life are interconnected.
Relationship between patience and stress-free life
A frequent impatient person is usually considered as arrogant, impulsive and insensitive by people around him/her. People around that person might think that he/she is a poor decision maker due to making snap judgments. Those people who have a repo for having poor social skills with zero patience and more bad temper, they are deliberately avoided by people to work along. Experts have to say that initiating with mindfulness practices help you become more apprised of what you’re doing and where you are for that instant. To improve mindfulness and patience it takes a whole lot of effort, but one will reap the rewards if commits to the hard work, because it leads to lower blood pressure, less anxiety, stress, rage and frustration. Working positively on mindfulness and patience improves one’s self-esteem, self-confidence and self-efficacy to lead a stress-free and relaxed life.
Ways to be patient to lead stress-free life
Being patient or mastering the skill of patience is way too difficult but worth trying, because when you ultimately gain patience, you tend to solve almost all problems of your life with mere patience along with a smile. Patience is truly a virtue that helps you go on a right path in every different and demanding situation. Let’s have a look how to be more patient to lead a stress-free life:
- Take a pause and breathe
Whenever you feel like, you’re being pressurized within a situation where your innermost urge is to outburst with frustration and anger, take a pause and breathe. Let yourself calm down and try holding on to your cool. It’s normal to feel bewildered and exasperated in a demanding situation, but taking a pause to think wisely and then to act is what we call patience.
- Be mindful on the triggers
Understand and recognize your prime triggers that enervate your patience and cool most of the time. Try to work on those factors, try not to resist it, rather confront it to fix it, where and why it bothers you. For an example, if there emerges a situation, where you did a mistake but unwittingly, and you are deliberately criticized for it with negative convictions, the first thing to do is take your time, breathe, relax and answer the situation with your highest cool to let the person know it could be a misinterpretation to judge someone on the basis of it. And recognize that trigger to work on it later, why it bothered you, it might be because you cannot easily absorb criticism or you find it hard to deal with negative people. Whatever the reason you find, work on it to easily comprehend the similar situations in future.
- Stop resisting
Resisting a demanding situation make things worse. When you resist an unplanned inconvenience, your mood gets vexed easily, on the other hand when you deal with the same situation with ultimate coolness and calming mind you actually reach to its finale with steady mind. In short, minimize or try to curb your resisting experiences that cross your path where you’re unable to affect the change. Hence, it is important to practice acceptance, allowing the inconvenience to be there without your resistance, which actually helps you to be patient for leading a stress-free life.
- Learn to wait
Working on patience is a whole new level of challenge. It challenges all your shortcomings in a most clamorous way. This practice helps you gain patience over time, but you need to initiate it from smaller tasks. According to a study published by Psychological Science, waiting for things actually makes people happier in the long run. Start from waiting in a cafeteria for someone, or an ice cream parlor where you have to wait for few extra minutes to get your special ordered Blueberry Cheesecake Ice cream. And gradually increase your waiting capacity to challenge your patience and work on it to increase the elasticity of your patience limits.
- Let go off things that are not important
You can’t make everything right or fix everything on your watch. You are no God, but human. There would be some stuff that couldn’t be fixed or comprehended. Hence, to work on your patience you need to let go off few things, especially those, that are not important. Holding on to every problem, every situation and less important tasks can create unnecessary stress on your mental health which ultimately hits your patience. Why bothering your patience every time when it’s not that important? Isn’t it? Learn to stop doing things and pining over stuff that are inessential.
- Remind yourself importance of patience
One of the effective practices to be more patient to lead a stress-free life is to remind yourself the importance of patience, more often. When you realize, you’re on the verge of losing patience, pause, breathe, relax and remind yourself why we all need patience? Why patience is called a virtue? Create a positive challenge for yourself, try to overcome the urge of exploding and rise as a new improved version of yourself.
- Practice gratitude and forgiving
Positive emotions, thoughts, feelings, gestures and practices are the prime components to draw the positive energy from the universe towards you. Positive energy helps in keeping negative emotions in control and one can ace in curbing negative energy as well as emotions by simply practicing positive gestures and habits. When you practice being more grateful in your life towards God, universe, nature, people and yourself you start believing in positivity. You forgive people to move on in your life because, holding on to grudge only toxifies your mind and emotions. When you practice positive habits such as gratitude and forgiveness you actually work on your conscience that helps you expand your comprehension for patience.
- Stop controlling things
One of the essential methods to gain more patience, is to stop being a “control freak”. You cannot control everything and everyone. Trying to get control over things, create disorientation and exasperation. You easily get your emotions out of control while trying hard to get control over other stuff. It might not be within your potential to get command over things. Hence, it better to release the control every once in a while, to stay away from stress and losing patience.
- Visualize the worst of losing patience
Getting the bigger picture of the consequences of losing patience can help you scrutinize your uncontrolled and unstable emotions which is a powerful way to be patient to lead a stress-free life. It helps to remind you the possible consequences that might be more harmful than just losing your cool. Because we all know, life is unpredictable and so the people. You cannot expect people to understand your situation, but you can surely manage the situation by not losing your cool and holding on to patience.
- Change your attitude
For an example, you work in a firm where your job is to direct and scrutinize the team and team work, but occasionally things can go out of control. People with no or less patience try to resist the situation by looking for the reasons behind the chaos and end up in judging and criticizing the team and their behavior which might seem right for an instance, but it actually damages their self-esteem. However, a person with utmost patience manages the situation in a real different way which is letting the team to analyze the problems and chaos on their own and reach to a conclusion. And later, in a cool discussion making them realize what would have been much better for maximum productivity with zero intolerance, so that next time they won’t create any mayhem. It may cause some moderate depletion in the productivity but you actually solve it for once and all.