How To Be More Patient.

Two things make you feel impatient. Here’s how to stop doing one of them.

The first step towards being more patient is recognising that impatience is perfectly understandable.

I mean yes, impatience is an irrational response to our over-inflated expectations of instant gratification. But it’s also a perfectly reasonable reaction to the fact that you’re going to die at some undisclosed point in the future, and you have no idea when.

Impatience is motivated by the same fear that motivates us to run from mountain lions and put on our seatbelts when we drive a car. It’s a reflection of two important facts.

One, that we’re going to die.

And two, that we don’t want to die being stuck behind this person with 11 items in the “10 items or less” queue.

There’s not much we can do about the first fact. Sure, we can exercise every day and make ourselves eat kale and chia seed salads for lunch, but in a cruel twist of fate, these things end up taking even more of our time. We try to optimise the process of getting these life-extending tasks done which feeds further into our expectation that everything should happen right now. Then the new guy at the organic cold-pressed smoothie place gives us a spinach and broccoli instead of celery and bok…