Do you get frustrated when things do not happen as planned? Employing a touch of patience and slowing down could be the answer to reducing your stress levels.
It can be hard to extinguish the fiery frustration that rises up inside when something doesn’t go according to plan. But you can learn to curb your impatience, improving your health and happiness.
Impatience belongs to the family of anxiety and stress, which can get out of control if we do not learn how to manage it. It can have a negative effect on our mood and energy, and if unchecked, can develop into other feelings such as anger and frustration. Just like stress and anxiety, this can cause you to feel sapped of energy and become unstable within yourself.
Learning to be more patient allows you to acknowledge the challenges that occur in life and helps you to overcome them, as well as become more accepting of the results and consequences.
How can we learn to check our impatience and become better at waiting for things to happen in their own time? We put together the tops 5 ways to be more patient:
1. Practice Positivity
Use positive thinking when approaching a situation that’s making you feel frustrated. You could try making a list of the positive outcomes that will happen if you do not get what you’re waiting for – this is a great way to look at your situation in a more optimistic way and reduce the stress of impatience.
2. Breathe
Using deep breathing exercises can not only help combat the feelings of impatience, but also help reduce other feelings of stress and anxiety. This will help you to have more energy for the rest of the day, as well as improve physical aspects of the body such as lung health and circulation. Learning to breathe properly takes practice and patience, but the benefits are worth it.
3. Remove Yourself from the Situation
If something is making you feel anxious or impatient, try to detach yourself from it if you can – either physically or emotionally. This allows us to desensitise our emotions from a situation where our feelings may escalate from impatience to frustration, anger or resentment. It also helps us to achieve a more balance view of what we want and allows us to develop better coping strategies for dealing with disappointment or not getting what we want easily.
4. Think Things Through
Remember, some things in life are worth waiting for and often it’s the big dreams that take the longest to achieve. If you get what you want quickly, you may not have necessarily thought of all the repercussions. Fast results usually carry a number of consequences and we may regret our hasty actions and wish we had taken a different course. Hurrying sometimes means the quality of what we achieve is reduced, too. Results do not always occur without challenges or obstacles, and both of these can help us to slow down and check all aspects of our decisions.
5. Distract Yourself
Sometimes distraction is the only way forward. This are called displacement activities and can be very useful. Distract yourself or focus on another activity to take your mind away from waiting for the situation to change or news to arrive.
You can read the full article in October’s Issue of Natural Health Magazine, with expert advice from Jacqueline Harvey – a qualified coach, NLP expert and founder of natural health CCH Live – as well as from Jo Howarth – founder of The Happiness Club.
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