Impatience
Restless, agitated wanting for something to happen faster.
Impatience is restless, agitated wanting for something to happen faster. The chest is restless with pressure and the body cannot settle. The present pace feels intolerable. You want things to move faster than they are willing to move.
Impatience is data about pace, not about the destination
Impatience tells you that the speed of arrival is slower than the speed of your wanting. This is useful information about the wanting, not about the situation. Often the situation cannot be sped up. The bread will rise when it rises. The healing will happen when it happens. The reply will come when it comes. The impatience is asking you to do something with your own energy in the meantime. Walk. Breathe. Pick another task. Try not to make decisions from impatience. Impatient decisions are almost always poorly judged. The pace you are objecting to is often the correct pace. Your relationship with time is the thing that needs adjusting.
"All human errors are impatience, a premature breaking off of methodical procedure."
— Franz Kafka
Impatience has a distinctive body signature of restless agitated pressure. The chest is restless with pressure. The breath becomes shallower and faster. The body cannot settle, often with fidgeting, foot tapping, or repeated checking. The face shows particular agitated impatient quality. The voice may carry sharp impatient tone. The body holds itself in a way that suggests pressure for movement: posture may be tense or fidgety, gestures often quick and abrupt, attention shifts repeatedly between awaited outcome and present circumstances. The state is typically brief at peak but can be sustained pattern in particular contexts including waiting for significant outcomes or in particular relationships.
Impatience has been studied within research on delay discounting, frustration tolerance, and various aspects of waiting. Research has shown that capacity to tolerate delay varies substantially across individuals and across contexts. Various cultural and personality factors affect how readily impatience develops. The capacity for impatience appears widely shared though substantial individual variation exists in how readily it develops and how intensely it is experienced.
Impatience arises through specific conditions involving wanting and pace. Common patterns include:
Impatience often produces difficulty for both the impatient person and others. The following help.
Recognise impatience when it is operating
Impatience often operates without explicit recognition, framed as appropriate response to slow pace. Recognising impatience for what it is, including the specific agitated wanting dimension, supports working with it. The recognition is part of beginning to address sustained patterns.
Build tolerance for delay through practice
Capacity for tolerating delay develops through practice. Various practices including waiting deliberately, engaging with slower activities, and contemplative practice support development of tolerance for delay over time. The capacity is workable when sustained practice is undertaken.
Examine costs of sustained impatience
Sustained impatience produces costs including increased stress, relationship difficulties, poor decisions made through pressure to act, and various effects on wellbeing. Recognising these costs supports motivation to address impatience patterns. The costs are often substantial though sometimes obscured by the urgency that impatience produces.
Address underlying conditions when present
When impatience reflects ADHD or other underlying conditions, addressing the underlying conditions through appropriate assessment and treatment often produces more change than working on impatience directly. Various treatable conditions produce impatience that responds to specific treatment.
Engage with traditions that address it
Various contemplative traditions specifically address impatience and develop capacity for sustained patience. Engagement with these traditions when they speak to you provides resources for working with impatience that pure individual engagement may not provide. Specific practices including various meditation traditions can support development of greater tolerance for delay.
"Research on delay discounting and frustration tolerance has shown substantial variation across individuals and contexts in capacity to tolerate delay without producing impatience."
— A theme in research on waiting
What is impatience?
Impatience is restless, agitated wanting for something to happen faster. The body has been activated by sustained pressure for what is wanted to arrive more quickly, with quality that combines restless agitation with frustrated wanting. The chest is restless with pressure. The body cannot settle. There is a quality of being unable to bear the pace of what is occurring, of wanting things to move faster than they are, of operating from sustained agitated pressure that finds the present pace intolerable. Impatience specifically refers to restless agitated wanting for something to happen faster.
Where do people feel impatience in the body?
Impatience has a distinctive signature of restless agitated pressure. The chest is restless with pressure. The breath becomes shallower and faster. The body cannot settle, often with fidgeting, foot tapping, or repeated checking. The face shows particular agitated impatient quality. The voice may carry sharp impatient tone. The body holds itself in a way that suggests pressure for movement: posture may be tense or fidgety, gestures often quick and abrupt, attention shifts repeatedly between awaited outcome and present circumstances. The state is typically brief at peak but can be sustained pattern in particular contexts.
How is impatience different from urgency?
Urgency involves response to actual time pressure that warrants quick action. Impatience can occur without actual time pressure. A person can have urgency without impatience (appropriate response to genuine time pressure without specific agitated wanting). The distinction matters: urgency responds to actual circumstances and may serve well by supporting appropriate quick action; impatience often operates regardless of warrant and typically produces difficulty including stress, poor decisions, and relationship difficulties. The two can coexist when actual urgency produces impatience as additional response, but they are distinct: urgency is appropriate response to circumstances; impatience is agitated wanting that may not match circumstances. Examining whether the situation actually warrants urgency or whether impatience is operating independently supports better engagement; urgent situations may warrant quick action while impatient agitation may benefit from being addressed as separate concern.
Why do some people get impatient so easily?
Several conditions can produce more readily experienced impatience. Significant wanting combined with delay produces impatience through the combination of strong desire with slow pace. When the pace of something does not match your preferred or normal pace, impatience often develops; people who normally operate at faster pace often experience impatience with slower paces. Some sustained impatience reflects patterns including ADHD features, particular temperamental dispositions, or sustained patterns from various sources; these patterns may produce more frequent impatience across many contexts than situational factors alone. Various cultural patterns specifically support faster pace and reduced tolerance for delay; contemporary contexts with rapid communication, instant gratification options, and various other features may produce increased impatience affecting many people. Research on delay discounting and frustration tolerance has shown substantial variation across individuals and contexts in capacity to tolerate delay.
How do you become more patient?
Several practices help. Recognising impatience when it is operating is the first step; it often operates without explicit recognition, framed as appropriate response to slow pace. Building tolerance for delay through practice including waiting deliberately, engaging with slower activities, and contemplative practice supports development of tolerance over time; the capacity is workable when sustained practice is undertaken. Examining costs of sustained impatience supports motivation to address patterns; sustained impatience produces costs including increased stress, relationship difficulties, poor decisions, and various effects on wellbeing. Addressing underlying conditions when present often produces more change than working on impatience directly; when impatience reflects ADHD or other conditions, appropriate assessment and treatment can support broader change. Engaging with traditions that address impatience including various contemplative traditions provides resources that pure individual engagement may not provide; specific practices including various meditation traditions can support development of greater tolerance for delay.
No source-level citations are stored for this entry yet. The dictionary draws on the broader literature in affective neuroscience, psychology and cross-cultural emotion research. See the About page for the project's wider references.
Impatience sits in the anticipation family as one of its more agitated forms. It overlaps with eagerness when positive anticipation is involved, with urgency when time pressure is central, with frustration when broader blocked-goal response is the focus, with what delay discounting research has examined as related construct, and with what ADHD research has identified as feature of the broader condition.
See where impatience sits among the other 402 emotions.
Open Impatience on the wheel