How Can Patience Help You Deal With Life’s Frustrations?

Patience can be defined as a capacity to endure difficulties, frustrations, and suffering with some sense of calm. Evidence suggests that patience is an important factor for mediating life’s challenges while also contributing to a sense of personal well-being and meaning in life (Schnitker & McAnnally-Linz, 2021).

Patience has not been widely studied by psychologists. Recently, research findings published in 2024 by Kate Sweeny, PhD, and Sarah Schnitker, PhD, “show that patient people worry less and feel less negative and more positive emotions when waiting for personally relevant news…” Sweeny (2025) says that impatience is an emotion sparked by various types of frustrations, suggesting further research to examine new approaches to strengthen patience as a coping strategy to help us manage our frustrations as they arise.

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Schnitker has described three types of patience (2010; Bulbul & Izgar, 2017):

• Everyday life patience, such as waiting for an appointment, sitting in the car during high traffic, and waiting for customer service at a store or on the phone.
• Patience during life challenges, such as illness, childcare, eldercare, or financial difficulties.
• Patience in interpersonal situations, such as difficult conversations or challenging relationships.

While positive psychologists don’t specifically name patience as one of the top 24 character strengths, it is seen as an important element of human behavior. Strengths researchers propose that patience is an amalgam of several recognized character strengths, including perseverance, self-regulation, and judgment (Niemiec, 2018; Peterson and Seligman, 2004).

There are many reasons to consider cultivating greater patience to help you deal with everyday frustrations. Patience can help you manage your emotions during stressful situations and persevere toward achieving your goals, whether individually or as part of a team. As a contributor toward kindness and compassion, patience can help build relationships and cooperation among people, including family, friends, at work, and in the community.

These four strategies may be helpful tools to strengthen patience:

1. Cultivate greater awareness of when you are not being or feeling patient. Notice what types of experiences tend to provoke greater impatience for you and how you tend to respond in those situations.
2. Aim for less judgmental interactions with others. Practice listening to others’ ideas and noticing new ideas and information with an intention to be present with less judgment of good or bad, like or dislike, etc. Instead, you might try calmly paying attention and attempting to understand things from an alternate perspective. Patience does not require agreement; rather, it can be about intentionally cultivating perspective, openness to other options, and managing or self-regulating your emotions and reactions.
3. Develop a practice to augment your patience—for example, taking a mindful moment to quiet down and offering yourself space to navigate frustration or perceived challenge. You might notice your reaction. Then, offer yourself a moment to focus on your breath or another anchor for your attention, along with setting an intention to let go of whatever is causing your sense of unrest, discomfort, anger, etc. As you notice your thoughts and bodily sensations, you might choose to acknowledge them and turn your attention toward your anchor. Each time your thoughts wander back to your impatience, you might simply invite yourself to return to the focus you have chosen. You might say something to yourself acknowledging your experience, such as: “This is my experience, and that’s OK”, or “May I be calm and go with the flow.”
4. You might experiment with thinking about patience as a growing edge, a developing skill, that you can strengthen with intention and practice.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only. No content is a substitute for consulting with a qualified mental health or healthcare professional.

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