How to Lower Your Frustration and Increase Your Patience

Frustration and impatience – don’t mentally scold the person in front at the red traffic light, don’t have to know anything at the moment what your partner or boss found out about X, no rush to cook dinner, have lunch with a friend, or eat your own lunch for one. As with many things in our lives, learning to deal with frustration and be more patient is about rewiring our brains. The good news is that rewiring our brains is doable, but it will take practice.

We can divide it into two parts:

Part 1: First Aid

First Aid is a two-step process if you’ve already reached your limit:

Step 1: Be Aware

If you want to change how you feel, you need to change what you’re doing, and the starting point is to be aware that you’re feeling frustrated, impatient, tunnel vision, and physically rushed. What triggers all of this is our old friend fear, and fear usually revolves around our worries: you have to get to work on time, the car in front of you is waiting at the light for too long and you’re afraid you won’t make it; You haven’t heard from your partner or boss and you don’t know how to plan your day.

Or it’s about expectations: the driver should be considerate of other drivers, pay attention to the lights and not dally; Your partner or boss should be in charge and get back to you immediately. Even though your anxious brain is telling you it’s about the other guy and his failure to act, it’s not – it’s about you.

And if you’re getting impatient with yourself — cooking dinner is taking too long, or you should have gotten the project out yesterday — it’s again about worries and expectations and often a voice in your head shaking your finger — go for it it better be better . Your critical brain gets activated and worries that you might screw up.

Step 2: Slow down

Once you know what is going on, you now have a choice, an opportunity to act differently. Ideally, you want to act as quickly as possible to calm your anxious brain before it plunges you down that rabbit hole and becomes too difficult to rein in. This is where your brain rewiring begins. Your anxious brain is pushing you to get others or yourself to do something now, but you need to push yourself back and get your rational brain back online.

It’s time to take a deep breath. Tell yourself this is a first world problem, not the end of the world. Imagine the worst that can happen – if you’re a few minutes late, unsure of your schedules, or dinner not being prepared on time. Make a plan quickly.

Part 2: Practice

You can practice these skills outside of these first aid situations and, over time, rewire your brain to increase your frustration/impatience tolerance.

Step 1: Sign up for yourself

Here you check in with yourself about every hour to assess your emotional state. You wake up already irritable or harried or come home; You’re already worried about X. By catching that bad mood early, you have time to act and calm down before it triggers and auto-boots. They act proactively rather than reactively.

Step 2: Now decide what you can do to lower your emotional temperature

As soon as you notice your mood getting low, take a deep breath, focus on the song on the radio, text your boss what you’re worried about, or just let your partner know that you’re already in a bad mood to have. And if there’s anything they can do to help, tell them.

Step 3: Practice stepping back and noticing what happens when frustration/impatience sets in

By mentally stepping back and watching what unfolds, you are already getting out of that fearful mindset and into your rational brain; you remove yourself from the emotion. By being curious about what’s going on inside you—your thoughts and feelings—not only can you push back, but simply observing will help you calm down.

Step 4: Practice all of the above exercises

said Nuf.