How to Learn Patience and Master It for a Long Time
How to Master Patience and Be Patient for a Long Time
The word “Patience” certainly has a positive vibe associated with it. Try asking anyone and they’d tell you that it’s a great virtue. And yet it is remarkably difficult for a lot of us to be patient when things start to get out of our hands. You can literally find someone who would continue to preach patience to his colleagues, friends, and family when things are normal, but loses his mind as soon as a minor inconvenience comes up. Why is it that we are all willing to believe in patience being a virtue but not practice it quite as often as we should?
Perhaps, it has something to do with patience being a silent virtue. As human beings, we are accustomed to practicing the ideas which bring us applaud and appreciation from our folks. For the most part, the louder people, the impatient ones are more likely to get everybody’s attention. Say, for example, you are stuck in traffic and there’s this one driver who keeps honking the horn at you when there clearly isn’t anything that you can do about the traffic jam. And yet, just because he is being loud and impatient, he is likely to get the attention. On the other hand, someone who’s sitting in his car with patience and keeping his cool is never even going to be noticed.
Regardless of patience being a quiet virtue that doesn’t witness a huge audience or is highlighted on the public forum, there is a wide range of benefits that you get to relish provided that you start to practice patience more often. Rest assured, the benefits are more genuine and meaningful than a timely appreciation and credit that may receive from people. In all honesty, patience is not an option but a necessity of life, at least if you are in search of living a happy one.
Looking for reasons to put any effort into making yourself a more patient individual? Then read along and find out the amazing benefits that this silent virtue has to offer.
An Opportunity To Enjoy The Best Of Mental Health
As per the World Health Organization (WHO), there is no health without mental health. Mental health has been made an indispensable component of your overall health. You may look like the strongest man on the planet in terms of your physical appearance, but as long as your mental health is not in perfect harmony with the rest of your body, you are not to be labeled as healthy as per the WHO. Truth is, the overall quality of your life is entirely dependent on your mental health. You could have all the money in the world, have friends and family to socialize with, have a world tour planned in a few weeks, but none of it would even matter if you are fighting a battle against clinically diagnosed depression.
Practicing patience is the simplest yet most effective strategy to direct your efforts towards optimizing your mental health. Once you make it a part of your personality, you would begin to see how difficult does it get for a situation to make you panic, frustrated, stressed, worried, or depressed. Remember that all of such emotions are linked with each other and lead straight to mental illnesses. You may not take it as a big deal if you are always frustrated when you are stuck in a traffic on a day to day basis, but such a constant exposure to stress and frustration can ultimately lead to anxiety and depression; a state of mind where gloominess and lack of interest would no longer be episodic but a consistent hammering on the walls of your mind.
With patience, however, you can easily keep such negative emotions at bay for most if not all of the times which help a great deal in optimizing the mental health.
An Opportunity To Be A Better Person For Everyone
Patience has a lot to do with the kind of relationships you would get to live with the people around you. Patience is directly linked with[restrict] a wide range of other virtues that promote your social skills and enable you to make genuine and lasting bonds with your friends and family. Let’s face it, no one is perfect and as human beings, people are bound to make some mistakes, a few of which would involve you as well. Someone might have hurt you unintentionally. They may have left a snide remark that might have hurt your feelings. Out of the goodness of their nature, however, they may realize their mistakes and end up apologizing to you. What do you think it takes to accept the apology and let go of it to reconcile with them? It’s entirely a matter of patience.
No one likes to be friends with someone who are the first one to get hurt, complain about not being treated right, and yet don’t have it in them to accept the apology when they are offered one. What’s more, is that patience enables you to be more sympathetic towards other people. It makes you more cooperative and gives you a wider perspective to understand where the other person is coming from.
An Opportunity To Be Financially Secure
Here’s a different one but perhaps the one that would have immediately grabbed your attention. Financial security is a goal for all of us. We spend years of our lives in academia and then the rest of it working hard on a day to day basis to make a living. All of it directed at what? At being financially secure and providing for our loved ones. What if you were told that patience is a virtue that can help a great deal in securing your financial future as well? This would perhaps get you highly interested in learning to practice patience more often.
Let’s think of it from the perspective of the investment first. Say, for example, you invested your money in the stock market. You purchased a few shares of this promising business. In a few days, the market turned bearish and you started to see yourself in the loss. You decided to close your positions before the loss gets out of hand. Truth is, this would have been an abrupt decision for you. If only you were patient, you would have made a thorough analysis of the market to make a prediction about its future movement. In an event that it was a market correction before it rallied back up, you would stick to your position and have ended up making a reasonable profit on it.
Similarly, being patient enables you to quit being extravagant and improve the strength of your savings account. For instance, if you are really looking forward to buying a new car, an impatient version of you would want you to spend all of your savings into getting one and risking your financial stability and budget. On the other hand, being patient would compel you to continue saving a little more on a monthly basis and wait for a few months before you can finally get yourself the new car, in which case your budget or financial future would not be threatened in any way.
An Opportunity To Realize Your Goals
Just like financial security, the virtue of being patient enables us to realize the rest of our life goals as well. There is no argument over the fact that patience and persistence are the two primary components of being successful at anything and everything. You might have heard that nothing ever grows out of the comfort zone and that those big things always take time to happen. Let’s take a look at another example.
Imagine that you have joined the gym and are working out to tone your body and shape it to perfection. You can imagine the kind of effort and persistence you would need to achieve this goal. What’s challenging, however, is that different people take a different amount of time to realize their fitness goals. Just because your friend was able to get the body that he desired in 4 months of consistent workout doesn’t imply in any way that you are going to be able to experience the same.
After four months, however, the test of your patience will begin. Since your friend told you that it is the amount of time it takes to realize your goal and yet you don’t see yourself anywhere close to your destination, you would naturally feel like giving up and quitting as you think it isn’t working for you or not meant for you in the first place. If only you train yourself to be patient under such apparently unfavorable circumstances, you would eventually be able to realize your goal with a few more months of hard work. Giving up because you are too impatient to continue will leave a lot of your life goals scattered through the journey hardly any of them finding its destination.
An Opportunity To Promote Your Overall Health
Last but not least, recent research has also been linking the virtue of patience with improved health. Several studies have shown that people who practice patience more often are less likely to put themselves at the risk of headaches, diarrhea, acne, pneumonia, etc. The evidence is not yet substantial since it is a fairly new niche of healthcare research, but the initial results indicate that it is only a matter of time that patience will be directly linked with optimizing your health. What’s more, is that impatient people are also known to be more cranky and are usually the chronic overthinkers, a feature that has the potential to make it difficult to get a good night’s sleep. With a disturbed sleep-wake cycle, you are prone to be more grumpy, experience dramatic mood swings, and lose interest in even the most important domains of your life such as that of your work. The minds start to lose its ability to be creative and the overall productivity on a day to day basis takes a huge blow. All of such ramifications of being impatient can have a devastating impact on your personal and professional life.
Finale Note
As evident from the information mentioned above, patience is not a standalone virtue. It is directly linked with promoting and supporting a wide range of positive attitudes that can direct your personal and professional life towards success, prosperity, and happiness while keeping the negative behaviors in check, in the meantime. It can essentially start a chain of actions that transform you into the best version of yourself not only for your own good but also for the sake of other people. From your physical health to mental health, your financial security to your social life, everything is being impacted by the single virtue of being patient. As such, it won’t be wrong to state that patience is an imperative component if you would like to keep the quality of your life.
Now that you are familiar with the prominent reasons why it’s a great idea to practice patience more often, you are in a much better position to transform your life into a happier and more successful one. If it doesn’t come to you naturally, you will be required to put the effort into making it a part of your personality. But once you are there, you would surely be a lot more charming and interesting personality, to say the least. Start the process today and see the difference that it casts on your life for yourself.[/restrict]
