Developing Patience 10 Weeks to Love and Abundance

Welcome back to these overview videos of my newest book, 10 Weeks to Love and Abundance. In this video, we're going to talk about patience, and I'm your host and the author, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. Why is patience important? Well, we all know that patience is supposedly a virtue, but why? Patience helps us conserve energy that we often waste nurturing anger or impatience. Think. Think about when you get impatient about something like getting results back from the doctor or getting a present or getting a package, and you start getting frustrated because it's not happening fast enough. That's your body dumping a whole bunch of energy by activating that HPA axis. For what? Being impatient doesn't make it happen any faster. Generally, patience helps improve blood pressure and blood sugar regulation because that HPA axis isn't always dumping cortisol. When cortisol is dumped, it causes your body to dump blood sugar to give you energy to fight or flee. So people are better able to regulate their blood sugar even if they don't have diabetes or some other issue. It improves health due to lower oxidative stress. And, you know, if you're not running hot all the time, if you're not, you know, putting the pedal to the metal, as they say, then you're not going to produce as many free radicals, which means there's less oxidative stress, which means your body's cleaning crew can keep up with getting rid of the free radicals before they start to cause problems. When you're patient, you tend to have fewer mistakes in everything you do because you're taking your time. You're not trying to rush through it and get it done as quickly as possible. Patience also helps you spread your energy around to all of the things that are important to you instead of using a bunch of energy. Getting angry at somebody because they didn't do something the way you wanted, getting angry at yourself because you made a mistake, getting angry because your package from Amazon hasn't arrived. You're using that energy. You're saying, no, I'm not going to waste my energy on getting angry over things I have no control over right now. I am going to use that energy to either fix a mistake I made or focus on things that are important in my rich and meaningful life, in my life of love and abundance. When we're patient, we tend to have improved concentration, irritability, anger triggers the HPA axis trigger triggers a adrenaline and another chemical called glut, glutamate. Those chemicals impair our ability to concentrate and see the big picture. They cause us to have tunnel vision so we tend to make poorer judgments and tend to not be able to concentrate. Our body is focused on fleeing the threat, not concentrating on writing the report or whatever that you're supposed to be doing. Improved relationships are also a consequence of patience because you have more energy and improved focus, attention and less irritability with other people. You can actually pay attention to what they're saying and you're able, when you're more patient, oftentimes you're able to tolerate different perspectives more easily. Patience also helps you improve your self esteem because you focus on your progress, not perfection. You recognize that, okay, maybe you want to get in shape or lose weight. It's not going to happen overnight. When you're patient, you see your small progress, you see that you can walk a little bit faster this week, or you see that you've lost a quarter pound this week and you celebrate those successes instead of being angry that you didn't make a bigger goal. When you're patient, you have improved self confidence because by taking your time, you often do things right and make fewer mistakes. When you're patient, you have reduced emotional turmoil when others don't behave the way you want them to. And I remember when my kids were little, pushing the buggy through the store, repeating to myself over and over, God grant me patience. You know, getting angry at them probably wasn't going to solve the problem. They were bored, they were hungry, they were over tired, whatever it was that was causing them to act out. And I mean, thankfully they weren't acting out horribly, but they were trying my patience and it was important for me to recognize that, okay, getting super angry is probably not the best way to handle this situation. Being patient with them, recognizing what's going on and then addressing it in a calm, assertive manner is generally better. Patience will help you have improved relationships because you're less critical and more supportive and empathetic of other people. Even if they don't do it the way you want to, if they do it and get it done and get it done right, then okay, you know, my daughter and I have very different ways of doing things. My son and I have very different ways of doing things. But we all can get those things done. Done. We just go about it a different way. And instead of being critical and insisting they do it my way, you know, it's a lot more effective to empower them to find their own way. And finally, patience enhances your compassion. When you're able to step back and view situations from other people's perspectives or compassion for yourself. If you're able to step back and view a situation that happened in the past from the perspective of yourself at that point in time. You know what was going through your head this, this afternoon, when you got angry, what was going on. As they say, hindsight is 20 20, so sometimes when you retrospectively look at things, you can have more compassion with yourself, learn from the situation so you don't make the same mistake again. As I mentioned in the intro, each chapter starts out explaining kind of what the topic is and why it's important. And then there's a self assessment. And the self assessments are generally relatively brief, but they help you kind of get a feel for where you're at with that particular trait. Patience means tolerating delays and enduring provocation without responding with anger. Anger triggers your stress response system, or that HPA axis causes the release of cortisol, that stress hormone, and triggers you to get in that fight or flee mentality. So think of three examples. When you've had to wait for something and were anxious and impatient in each of those situations, did anxiety and impatience make them happen any sooner or did it just burn up a lot of your energy and distract you from being able to use those moments to notice the things that were wonderful in your life that you did have? Identify three examples of when something was hard and you wanted to give up because you couldn't get it right immediately. Calculus for me. Did impatience make it any easier to get through? Did it help you get through it any faster? A lot of times the answer is no. And for both of those situations, how did anxiety, anger, impatience impact your sleep, your appetite, your pain levels, your overall immunity and health, your mood, your attitude, your relation and your relationships while you waited or endured? Learning something while you waited for something to happen. In the chapter on patience, there are five strategies for developing patience. And obviously there's lots of other strategies, but I highlighted five. The first one is going to be to define what patience looks like. And it's important to really know. How do I know if I'm being patient? What does that look like to me? And a lot of us have different role models. So you're going to figure out what it is that patients looks like so you know when you've developed it. This next activity I call beta testing. Beta stands for breathe. Evaluate, think and act when something happens that might trigger that impatient reaction. Taking a breath, stepping back, evaluating the situation, thinking and then acting. Set micro goals. This helps you focus on progress instead of only getting a reward or only feeling accomplished. When you've achieved perfection, practice, empathy and perspective taking in order to have patience. Like I said with my kids when we were in the store, even know I got frustrated because there was a lot of stuff that I, I needed to get, I needed to get the grocery shopping done or what have you. And they were being less than compliant. However, when stepping back and saying, okay, it's 4 o', clock, they've been at school all day, they've had to hold it together, you know, it's late, they're hungry, okay, you know, from that perspective, I can see how they may not be, or they may be having more difficulty behaving the way I want them to behave and finally, radically accept what's going on and use distress tolerance skills. And radical acceptance means embracing the good with the bad. It's raining outside today. Okay, well, I prefer sunny days, but it's renting off my car for me and it's watering my garden. So. Radical acceptance means recognizing that every situation has positives and negatives to it and embracing them as a whole. The book contains discussion, writing, meditation prompts and activities for each of these strategies. So each day you've got activities that you can do in order to develop these strategies for patients. Patience can help you cope with things that are out of your control and slow down to improve your effectiveness. Patience with yourself improves self esteem. Patience with others improves your relationships with them. Patience helps you more effectively use your energy to change the things you can instead of being angry and frustrated over the things that you can't change or aren't happening fast enough. Effectiveness, self esteem, and healthy relationships are all resources that can help you develop abundance.