6 Daily Habits That Can Help You to Cultivate Patience
How to build up your patience one day at a time.
Patience is a superpower.
No matter if you’re building a business, pursuing a college degree, or trying to improve your physique, you’ll need a significant dose of patience to advance in life.
Things don’t always happen on our schedule, and trial and error is an inevitable part of any personal growth endeavor. That’s why being patient is a must. But what does it mean to be patient?
The Cambridge English Dictionary definites patience in the following terms:
“The ability to wait, or to continue doing something despite difficulties, or to suffer without complaining or becoming annoyed.”
Simply put, patience is the human capacity to keep going when times are tough. When the chips are down, a patient person will continue their journey, stay calm, and focus on long-term growth.
So, how do we cultivate patience? How do we build resilience to navigate hurdles? Like many invaluable skills, patience doesn’t magically appear. It’s a trait that people nurture over time.
That’s where daily patience boosters come into play. A set of daily patience-furthering activities can boost your tenacity, perseverance, and calmness.
On this basis, here are six habits that will foster your patience every day.
Take a few minutes every day to change your lens
If you want to become more patient, start by dedicating a few minutes every day to a different perspective. In other words, change your lens to analyze your current situation from another point of view.
It’s easy to lose patience with a coworker, a client, or a personal connection if you don’t see their perspective. In that same vein, your patience with a solo project can fade if you fail to look at the challenge from different angles.
Remember, your colleague isn’t missing deadlines on purpose. Change your lens and analyze the reasons behind a delay. Your startup isn’t trying to annoy you by growing slowly. And finally, the long queue at the supermarket didn’t form just to lengthen your shopping trip.
Look at the situation from someone else’s eyes — and you’ll identify a variety of causes for the event that triggers your impatience. And once you know that the origins are manifold, you’ll stop assessing problems exclusively through your lens — creating a broader picture that will foster your patience.
Analyze your daily actions in the context of your long-term goals
The next patience-furthering habit is to analyze your short-term actions in connection with your long-term objectives.
Many people lack patience as a result of not seeing instant results.
We grow impatient with our side hustle because it doesn’t generate 1,000$ a month in its early stages. We lose motivation to go to the gym because the mirror doesn’t reveal significant changes after three weeks. And we stop learning that new language because we’re not fluent in a matter of weeks.
In short, we chase ambitious goals that take time and become impatient when facing a natural learning curve.
That’s why we need to focus on daily actions, not short-term results.
Instead of asking yourself how far you’ve come, ask yourself the following:
“What did I do today to get closer to long-term goal X?“
Once you start questioning your daily actions — instead of lamenting the lack of instant gratification — you’ll see your habits in a broader context. You’ll accept that personal growth takes time and that waiting for measurable gains is an unavoidable part of the journey. As such, you’ll direct your energy toward building a productive daily routine that will guarantee long-term results instead of fleeting gratification.
Practice stillness by adding calm stretches to your days
Sometimes, short periods of stillness provide an antidote to impatience.
Whether it’s meditation, journaling, or forest walks, make sure that your schedule contains enough stillness breaks.
In this context, Leo Babauta from Zen Habits recommends the following:
“Often it’s best just to walk away for a few minutes. Take a break from the situation, just for 5–10 minutes, let yourself calm down, plan out your words, actions, and solutions, and then come back calm as a monk.”
Personally, adding a few “empty time blocks” to my days has worked wonders for my patience. I use those pauses for neighborhood walks, short reading stints, and “do-nothing time.”
Because they break up your busy daily groove and add a few minutes of peace and serenity to your routine, they shut down your mind — creating a patience-fostering environment.
Identify your patience killers and remove them from your daily routine
Determining the elements that kill your patience in everyday life is another powerful habit.
Write down all the events, habits, and activities that reduce your patience.
In the words of Inc Magazine’s Rhett Power,
“We live interrupted lives as we try to multitask, and it is frustrating when we feel we aren’t making progress. It is better to be mindful of our thoughts, and the best way to understand this is to write down what makes you impatient. This will help you slow down and focus on one task at a time and remove those things that stress you out.”
Consequently, identifying patience-killing thoughts and activities is the best way to acknowledge their existence and work on ways to remove them from your routine.
Better still, singling out particular elements that decrease your patience — like watching the news, comparing yourself to others, or endlessly checking your business’ earnings — is a powerful way to concentrate your energy in the right areas and stop multitasking.
Use a Stoic exercise to reframe situations that require patience
Adverse circumstances demand a patient attitude, and it’s here where Stoic exercises come to fruition.
The Stoics famously trained their perceptions. Nothing was inherently good or bad. Everything was a matter of perception, and you control those perceptions.
As Ryan Holiday writes in a Daily Stoic blog post,
“The Stoics had an exercise called “Turning The Obstacle Upside Down.” What they meant to do was make it impossible to not practice the art of philosophy. Because if you can properly turn a problem upside down, every “bad” becomes a new source of good.”
When you face a difficult situation that tests your patience — like a professional challenge, relationship issues, or struggles with illness — try to turn the situation upside down.
Ask yourself what kind of opportunities hide amid supposed negativity.
Once you master this exercise with mundane problems that arise in your daily life — traffic jams or a bad atmosphere at work, for example — you can apply it to life’s more substantial challenges.
As such, using the Stoic approach for small problems will train your patience every day — and it will become useful in other areas of life.
Prioritize daily self-care
Finally, the last essential patience-fostering habit concerns daily self-care.
In our uber-busy, permanently connected lives, self-care is often a faraway concept. We forget to allocate time pockets to our mental and physical well-being because we have “something more important” to do.
That thinking pattern is a surefire way to kill the remainder of your patience. If you always believe that you “have something to do” — like checking your work emails or chasing random entertainment, you’ll let your impatience grow.
To become more patient, you need to prioritize self-care.
In this context, I took a leaf out of Tim Ferriss’s book and implemented one of his nightly rituals.
The rule consists of the following: for the last hour of the day, I leave my phone in a different room and switch off all other electronic devices. I spend the next 60 minutes exclusively on self-care habits like meditation and hot baths.
The 60-minute self-care ritual kills two birds with one stone. First, it teaches mindfulness and patience by forcing me to stay calm and disconnected for the last hour of the day. Secondly, it guarantees an empty mind at night — creating the right mental state for a serene start to the next day.