You 2.0: The Practice of Patience

Shankar Vedantam: Hidden Brain visited 16 cities with our Perceptions Tour in 2025, and we're excited to visit even more communities across the US this year. We'll have more announcements about tour stops in the months to come. For now, I want to make sure you know about two live shows that are coming up soon. I'll be in Philadelphia at the Miller Theater on March 21st, and at the Town Hall in New York City on March 25th. For tickets to either show, go to hiddenbrain.org/tour. That's hiddenbrain.org/tour. I hope to see you there. Okay, here's today's show. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In a famous Chinese parable, a man frustrated with all of his failures exiles himself to the woods. There, he meets a hermit with whom he shares his frustrations. Give me one good reason not to quit, the man tells the hermit. The hermit points to a tall patch of foliage. You see this bamboo? He asks. I nurtured it for a year, and it did not grow as much as an inch. But the hermit did not give up. The second year, he waters and nurtures the plot again. Nothing. A third year goes by. Again nothing. Year four, the same. By the fifth year, the hermit says, a tiny sprout emerged from the earth. And within six months, the tree grew a hundred feet tall. During all those years when it appeared that nothing was happening, the bamboo was growing, underground. Hidden from view, it had been rapidly spreading roots. All the time you had been struggling, the hermit told the man, you were growing strong roots. In the parable, the man learns his lesson and the value of persistence. He goes back to his life and continues his pursuits. It's beautiful, isn't it? This idea that we think we're getting nowhere, but our efforts might be paying off in ways we cannot see. Yet, it also raises an uncomfortable problem. How can you tell the difference between growing roots underground and when you're simply watering and nurturing a dead plot of land? Today on the show, we explore the conundrum of patience, when it makes sense to persist, even when you can't see what's happening below the surface, and when we should be impatient. Also, practical ways we can learn to be more patient, even in trying circumstances. Learning to wait, this week on Hidden Brain.

Shankar Vedantam: From a young age, we are taught to be patient. Sit still, wait quietly, hold off eating one marshmallow in order to enjoy two later on. When we become adults, with more power over how many marshmallows we can have, patience often falls by the wayside. At Baylor University, psychologist Sarah Schnitker studies the science of patience. She says that being patient may be a lost skill for many of us, but it's also one that's frequently misunderstood. Sarah Schnitker, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Sarah Schnitker: Thank you so much for having me today. Sarah, in 2012, a quarterback for the Washington, DC football team was injured during a game against the Baltimore Ravens. What happened to Robert Griffin III, or RG3 as he was called? Yes, RG3, Baylor's hometown hero. What happened in that game is that he was tackled, and they took him off the field, said, no, we're not going to play the rest of the game. They brought in Kirk Cousins, able to actually win the game. But RG3 really sustained this tough injury.

Game Tape: RG3, now it looks like he's hurt his right leg, and this would be devastating. You can watch his right leg. He's going to get... Oh, that didn't look good.

Shankar Vedantam: So the next day it was confirmed that he had a sprain, and RG3 was asked to sit out the next game to heal. But the team's head coach reported that the star quarterback had been medically cleared to play, so he came back in that game to success. But all was not well with his knee, was it?

Sarah Schnitker: No, all was not well. And the team doctor who had supposedly medically cleared him has since then said, no, I did not clear him. He should not have been playing. And I think there was just this immense pressure for RG3 to move back in. He was the superstar. He was this rookie sensation, the Heisman Trophy winner. He was all this energy behind him. And the coach and team just wanted him out there.

Shankar Vedantam: The fans wanted him out there as well. And I remember reading the newspapers in Washington, DC at the time, and there was incredible excitement about RG3 coming to town. The Washington football team had not been a good team for a long time. And the belief was that he was going to turn everything around. And, you know, everywhere he went, he was treated like the, you know, like the second coming of the Messiah.

Sarah Schnitker: Indeed, indeed he was. And I think in the United States and especially in our sports stories, we love a recovery story that someone gets injured and they show this amazing grit and push through and come out of it. And so I think this narrative of this superstar, almost superhuman, who can instantly recover, was pushing RG3 to come back.

Shankar Vedantam: So he came back that same season to some success, but later on this season, during a wild card game in January of the following year, things took a turn for the worse. What happened, Sarah?

Sarah Schnitker: Yes, things took a turn for the worst indeed. And he was tackled again, and he re-injured his LCL. And he also tore a reconstructed ACL. And this is pretty devastating. I actually remember the fans at the time just being so sad that this rookie quarterback who is seen kind of as the messiah of the team was injured again and had to sit out that season.

Shankar Vedantam: So he ended up getting reconstructive surgery in the off season, but of course, a few months later, the new season began. RG3 was encouraged to rush back into his starting role, even though he had not played a single game in the preseason. Adidas even got behind his return with a campaign, all in for week one.

Sarah Schnitker: It's wild to me how intense this became. And I mean, I think in many ways it's unheard of to have your first game back be on week one and not do any preseason. And what you saw on that game was exactly what you'd expect, that this person was not ready, they were getting tackled a lot, that there was not that speed and agility. RG3 needed more time to recover and needed more time to practice before going out into a real live game. And you saw them throughout that year, never really got back to his condition that he was in when he began as a rookie the year before.

Shankar Vedantam: And in many ways, this is a tragic story, Sarah, because again, RG3 entered the football league with just such incredible promise and hype. What became of his career?

Sarah Schnitker: Well, you know, he never really performed the way that was hoped, and on social media, said he regrets his decision to go back so quickly and wishes he had taken the time, because he might have had a different career.

RG3: I know I shouldn't have played that year, but when you're a player and you're in fight or flight mode, you're always going to choose to fight. Sometimes we want something so bad that we're willing to hurt ourselves for it, but there's a difference between doing something because you love it and doing the smart thing.

Shankar Vedantam: Let's go from the world of sports to politics. In 2003, Howard Dean, a former governor of Vermont, announced his bid to become the Democratic presidential nominee for the 2004 election. He was an early critic of the US war in Iraq at a time when the war was still popular. Talk about how he rode a wave of anti-war sentiment among Democratic Party voters, especially younger voters, Sarah.

Sarah Schnitker: He got this huge, incredible early lead from this energy and really had such a grass roots upswelling that people were excited, they were eager. He just went into Iowa with all this energy and excitement.

Shankar Vedantam: There was a US. Senator who called Dean the Harry Truman of our time, the kind of plain-spoken Democrat that we need. He had a lot of enthusiasm behind him. What happened in that Iowa caucus?

Sarah Schnitker: Oh, the Iowa caucus, it did not go so well for him. His main rivals, John Kerry, John Edwards, they really outperformed him. He came out third and he might have been able to recover from that. But there is this infamous speech she gave that night after coming in third that many say may have doomed him.

Shankar Vedantam: So this was on January 19th, 2004. Dean and his supporters gathered at the Valair Ballroom in West Des Moines, Iowa. And what he was looking to do was not just to concede Iowa but to quickly reignite the enthusiasm of his supporters. What happened, Sarah?

Sarah Schnitker: Well, his supporters were really enthusiastic at this speech. So he started yelling louder and louder. Now, unfortunately, the TV viewers who are watching this could not actually hear just how loud the crowd was. And so as he begins to shout over these cheers and get louder and louder, he starts to sound a little bit unhinged. And he ends with this full-throated kind of scream.

Supporters: We're going to Washington, DC to take back the White House!

Sarah Schnitker: To me, it sounds like a dying goat. And this final, yeah, became known as the Dean Scream or the I Have a Scream speech. But this was just replayed over and over on the news and really undermined kind of the seriousness of his candidacy.

Shankar Vedantam: I think he was trying very quickly to get his supporters turned around after this defeat. And I think part of the problem was a mismatch between how urgent he felt the situation was and how urgent the situation actually was.

Sarah Schnitker: Indeed, and you know, sometimes when you have a loss or defeat, it's actually okay to take a few moments and lick your wounds, to just take the time, heal a little bit. But you see when you watch this video that he just wanted everyone to be pumped up and have that same energy that he had a week before Iowa. And instead of kind of letting that loss take its course and then come back, he just wanted instantly to push back into that energy and excitement and that kind of winning celebration mode. But he wasn't there. And so the scream just encapsulates that.

Shankar Vedantam: I want to talk about one other case of impatience that had serious consequences, Sarah. We've all heard the phrase fail fast. Companies are often encouraged to rush their products to market and to fix problems later on. In 2016, Samsung rushed to release their new phone, the Galaxy Note 7. They wanted to beat Apple's release of the iPhone 7. Here's a clip from a news report about what happened next.

News Clip: It shows a Galaxy Note 7 apparently smoking on fire, it would appear, at a fast food restaurant. One store employee, as you can see there, actually used her oven mittens to grab the device. That is not a good thing when one is trying to sell those devices to consumers.

Shankar Vedantam: What happened to the Apple Samsung race, Sarah?

Sarah Schnitker: So, Samsung had seen that they might have an opportunity. Apple iPhone 7 was going to be coming out that year, and everyone had heard, oh, it's going to be kind of a dull update. And Samsung thought this could be a great opportunity to deliver their new splashy product with the Galaxy Note 7. And so, they were rushing to this deadline. However, as we heard in that clip, things did not go well. In their rush, they had some fatal flaws to those batteries. And this was creating all kinds of issues worldwide. And I think most ominously on airplanes, that the devices were overheating, and there was serious fear that this could cause a fire on a plane, that would be really catastrophic. And so people were afraid to travel with their devices. There were warnings that came out. It was not good.

Shankar Vedantam: I mean, I understand that Samsung eventually had to issue a recall. You know, regulators started banning the phone from various locations. This is not what you want when you're trying to sell a device to consumers.

Sarah Schnitker: This is not what you want. And I was actually a Samsung owner at the time. And I remember like, oh, no, should I still be having this Samsung? I hadn't upgraded it. It led to some serious loss of confidence in the brand. And so instead of doing the thing of actually capturing this new market by releasing before Apple, they actually were losing customers and losing profits because of that rush.

Shankar Vedantam: In a world where we are encouraged to fail fast and make overnight recoveries from illness, injury and setbacks, patients can seem like a lost art. When we come back, the psychology of patients and techniques to master the art of waiting. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. As a rule, human beings are not inclined toward patients. It's hard to sit quietly in traffic, to deal with a small, screaming child in the seat behind you on a plane, to go through a global pandemic where many sources of avocation and entertainment are cut off. At Baylor University, Sarah Schnitker studies the psychology of patients. Sarah, let's go back to the height of the COVID pandemic. The world was scrambling to find answers to so many questions, including how to treat this rapidly spreading virus. In our fear and in our panic and our desire to get this behind us as quickly as possible, people reached for all manner of outlandish interventions. Here's one news clip that described the moment.

News Clip: The Poison Center is again warning you, drinking bleach will not prevent catching COVID-19. The Poison Center says 46 North Texans drank bleach since the start of August.

Shankar Vedantam: Sarah, you say that our brains are wired for certainty. What do you mean by this?

Sarah Schnitker: Yes. Human beings want to have answers. We want to have a predictable world where we know when I do X, I get Y. So we really struggle in situations like the global pandemic, when we don't know what's going on, we don't know what to do, and you see people resorting to really dangerous behaviors like drinking bleach because someone told them this is a way to fix it, said it was certainty, and so we rush forward toward that certainty, even though it might actually harm us.

Shankar Vedantam: And in some ways, when you see a story like this, with a compassionate lens, the people who are doing this are doing this because they're afraid. They're doing this because they're worried. They're doing this because they're scared. They don't know what's going to happen, and they're trying to protect themselves.

Sarah Schnitker: Exactly, and I think this is not just kind of a minor fear. It's a global pandemic, and I'm afraid I'm going to die, or my loved ones are going to die. And our minds just latch on to something that sounds certain and take action, and that feels better and helps reduce that uncertainty.

Shankar Vedantam: I'm wondering if you can talk a moment about why our brains despise uncertainty as much as they do, Sarah. What is the origin for this, do you think?

Sarah Schnitker: Well, if you think about kind of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, uncertainty often means a threat, that when things are certain, even if there's something bad happening, you know at least what to expect and what to do. But when things are uncertain, it's just such an aversive state for people. And we have to not only prepare for threat, but we don't know what the solution is. And it really is tough. It takes a lot of effort to persist in that uncertainty. And it just doesn't feel good.

Shankar Vedantam: I understand that you had a moment when you were a kid, when you had to decide whether to invest in basketball, and in some ways, this was an example of your capacity to sit with uncertainty. Tell me that story. What were you like as a kid, and what was your basketball story?

Sarah Schnitker: I grew up very tall, very quickly. So by the age of 12, I was at my current height, which is five foot 11, which is quite tall for a woman in the United States. So everyone when I was young was telling me, oh, you must be so great at sports. You must be an athlete. You must play basketball or volleyball. And so when I joined the basketball team in fourth grade, I could not meet these expectations that I wasn't actually that great. I was new to it. The work arts were hard. I ended up crying at every single game we had. I know, it was so sad. And I remember my mother who played basketball in college was just like, what, why can't my daughter figure this out? What's wrong with her? At the end of that fourth grade season, I said, you know what, I'm not athletic. That felt much safer and more certain and secure rather than saying, oh, maybe I stick with this for a couple of years and try it out. And maybe, maybe I actually can be good. I just need more practice. And, you know, it's kind of one of those things. When I got to college, I started working out just because my friends were. And I actually realized I'm not bad at this. I can actually be somewhat athletic and strong and good at things related to sports. And so it's one of those things you look back on and say, oh, maybe I missed out from all the benefits of kind of a team sport that we see for female athletes in particular, just because it didn't come quickly. And I was afraid maybe I couldn't be good.

Shankar Vedantam: So we've talked about how aversive it is to feel uncertainty, how miserable it can feel to wait. Can you talk about the role of boredom in driving impatience, Sarah?

Sarah Schnitker: Yes, especially in the United States, but I think in plenty of cultures around the world, we really hate to be bored. I just think of myself as a child, and now my own child when you go on a road trip. It's just the constant, are we there yet? Are we there yet? You asked me five minutes ago, no, we are not there. We just, we hate to be bored, and part of that boredom too is that I want the situation to be different, and yet I'm stuck in it and it's uncertain when it will end. That's why kids are constantly asking, are we there yet? But we're just stuck in it.

Shankar Vedantam: We talked earlier about RG3, the football player who was rushed back to the sport after a set of serious injuries. You say that athletes are often discouraged from taking time off to heal because we want them back quickly. And I understand this played out with the Olympic gymnast Simone Biles?

Sarah Schnitker: So Simone Biles, she had been at the Olympics in Tokyo and was finding herself on her twists and turns losing kind of that sense of equilibrium in the air and decided that she was not going to finish the competition, was going to take a break, take care of her mental health. She withdrew from the all around and several finals and said, I've got to prioritize my well-being. I'm afraid I'm going to injure myself. I don't feel safe. I'm stopping. And took that step back. People did not like this at the time. Some people applauded her, but others said she was letting down her teammates. Piers Morgan, I remember said, she's letting down her teammates, her fans, and even her country that how dare she do this? And she should have pushed through and had that story of grit like RG3. But what we actually see is that Simone Biles took all the time she needed and comes back to Paris in 2024 and absolutely killed it at the next Olympics, became really the most decorated Olympic gymnast ever. So you see that she was able to actually be patient and wait and instead of pushing to come back to competition too early, really listened to herself and prioritized her body and her mind and what it needed instead of pushing forward.

Shankar Vedantam: You know, I recall when she withdrew from the Tokyo Olympics because she actually was with her teammates in Tokyo, and she had been selected, she was representing the country. And there was a sense, I think, among some commentators that she was being selfish, that she had taken a spot on the national team and now was pulling out, and in fact had deprived somebody else of the opportunity of competing in the Olympics. And of course, there was this trope of, Simone Biles is a selfish person for not putting herself out there no matter the cost. But of course, in the long run, it was not just the right decision for Simone Biles, it was the right decision for gymnastics in general, and certainly for the United States in particular.

Sarah Schnitker: Yes, she needed that time. And she just dominated later in 2024. And so I think it's a short-sighted perspective in general in our culture, instead of saying things take time and we have to be patient, we want instant results. I mean, I'm truly amazed that Simone Biles had the strength to not cave into that pressure. I just thought it was incredibly courageous and patient what she did.

Shankar Vedantam: I'm curious, Sarah, about the potential limits of patience. In his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. expressed his frustration with hearing the word wait time and time again when it came to civil rights. In another speech he made on the subject, he actually makes a case for the virtues of impatience. Here he is.

MLK Jr.: We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.

Shankar Vedantam: Is patience always a virtue, Sarah?

Sarah Schnitker: I think what we might say is that virtuous patience, good patience, is always a virtue. But there is a vice of what might be called too much patience. So you can be reckless and move forward with violence and recklessness to your goal, which we often think about as impatience. But you can also fall prey to passivity or inaction or in waiting too long. And so to truly be doing patience well, we have to find that real sweet spot, that golden mean between recklessness and passivity. And so you see that MLK is calling out in this speech that, no, we should not be waiting any longer. We demand rights and equality. And MLK is just a really interesting example for patience because it takes immense patience to practice civil disobedience. And yet he knew that patience had its limits and that just waiting around is not going to get you there towards a just and good society. And so you see this real tension of patience and action that people have to work out in their daily lives and in these historic events as well.

Shankar Vedantam: How do we tell when we are at that sweet spot of patience where we're not waiting too much, but we're not being reckless either?

Sarah Schnitker: You know, one of the things that we've shown in our research is that a great indicator is that we should see that we're acting both with courage and patience. If you're only practicing patience and you don't see instances of courage, you might be coming too passive. So really, instead of thinking about patience just by itself and as the only thing you should be trying to do, also thinking about, am I being courageous? And am I pursuing things even when I might be afraid or feel under threat? And balancing those two really seems to help to ensure that you're not becoming too patient and passive.

Shankar Vedantam: And of course, we see that certainly in MLK's life. We see abundant patience, but also abundant courage.

Sarah Schnitker: Exactly. In one of our studies, we tracked participants over four weeks and we're looking at the goals they were pursuing and asked them about how much patience they were using in each goal and how much courage. And what we found is that when people had both patience and courage like MLK, they did not show passivity or recklessness, but when they had one and not the other, that's when you see them starting not to pursue their goals really well and either becoming passive or reckless. So those two together are really key.

Shankar Vedantam: When we come back, how we can all learn to be more patient, and why we should.

Shankar Vedantam: You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Do you have questions about today's episode? Maybe you are someone who is known as exceptionally patient. What helps you to keep your cool? Have you ever lost your patience and paid a huge price for it? If you have a personal story you would be willing to share with a Hidden Brain audience, or a question or comment about this episode, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone. Two or three minutes is plenty. Email the file to us at feedback at hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line patience. That email address again is feedback at hiddenbrain.org. In a world that thrives on instant gratification, it's easy to believe that patience is passive, something that involves sacrifice and clenched teeth. At Baylor University, psychologist Sarah Schnitker challenges this idea. She says there are ways to learn the art of patience and to make it less painful. Sarah, you say that there are three types of patience. You call the first interpersonal patience?

Sarah Schnitker: Yes. The first type is really about being patient with other people. Being patient with your relationship partners, with your spouse, your children, your coworkers, with the person in front of you in line who can't seem to find the coins to make change because why are they paying in cash, right? This is all the people in our lives who require patience from us.

Shankar Vedantam: Have you found that to be true in your life, Sarah, that when you have been patient with the relationships, in fact, they transform and become quite different than what you might have imagined at first?

Sarah Schnitker: Yes, I have. There's lots of things that can be disruptive to a relationship and things that annoy us about others. But as I got older, I've learned, like, you know what, maybe this friend and I aren't on the same page right now. Let's still keep in touch. I might try to talk to them. But even if we can't resolve that specific conflict, we can come back around and that there's something really lost when you give up on a new friendship or even an old one when the person's having a hard time too soon. And that continuing just to be patient with others allows for the richness of deep relationships to really be a part of your life and it just takes a lot of patience in waiting.

Shankar Vedantam: So we've talked about interpersonal patients, but there is also the patients involved in dealing with setbacks at work and in life. Can you talk about the role of this challenge in your own life, Sarah? I understand that in the third year of grad school, you became very sick with a mysterious illness. What were the symptoms of this illness?

Sarah Schnitker: Oh, it was a really rough time. I started throwing up one night in the middle of the night, and I proceeded to kind of have chronic vomiting for months on end. I came to find out later after I got a diagnosis, I have what's called cyclic vomiting syndrome, which is a pretty rare disorder. It's kind of like abdominal migraines, so it's in the brain, similar to migraines, but instead of getting a headache, I just would start throwing up, and it was really, really hard. It took me six months to find out a diagnosis, and I was studying patients, and then given this life hardship, where I had to actually practice my patients, and deal with this chronic illness now for my entire life, it became apparent that this is not something that would go away, it was something that I would have to learn to manage.

Shankar Vedantam: I'm wondering, Sarah, if there were times when you felt so frustrated that you wanted to give up, but also felt somewhat hypocritical because you were studying patients.

Sarah Schnitker: So, I definitely felt that. But then there were other times when I also found that my research on patients encouraged me to take the time my body needed. I think I was learning, you know what? Pushing through is not always the answer. And I would actually make little rules for myself of like, okay, if you feel nauseous or are feeling ill, maybe go lay down for 20 minutes and see if that rest and kind of practicing mindfulness or kind of taking time, instead of just trying to push through on my work and write, taking the time and coming back and being a little bit more gentle with myself. I found when I did that, I could be much more successful across the course of a month than actually getting my work done. And so, trying to learn, instead of being like RG3 with just always pushing forward, I don't care about my body, my nausea doesn't matter, I'm just going to push forward, it would lead to like getting so sick that I would have to be hospitalized for fluids and dehydration. So just learning the lesson of Simone Biles of listening to my own mental health, listening to my own physical health, prioritizing those because without my body and my mind, in a good place, I couldn't achieve my other goals. And so, it was a really useful lesson to learn earlier in life because I think a lot of us don't learn that till later in life.

Shankar Vedantam: So besides the challenges that come with our interactions with other people and the challenges that come with these life hardships, there's also the impatience we feel with daily hassles. Now, these don't rise to the level of crisis and catastrophe, but they're still a pain, right, Sarah?

Sarah Schnitker: I think for a lot of people, when they hear the term patience, they think of being stuck in traffic and stuck in line, and what is it, the six months of life, you'll probably stand in line. Like, this is a huge amount of our time. You know, when we practice our patience in these daily hassles, not only does it improve that moment, but I also like to think of it as good practice for the bigger life hardships and for our relationships, that the daily hassles might be a nice lower stakes game to practice patience so that you're ready when you have that illness come up or your child frustrates you in a new way, that you're prepared for those things that might actually be more monumental.

Shankar Vedantam: I want to go over some of your ideas on how we can build our patience. You say that one way to do this is that when we're feeling impatient, we should stop and reflect on the experience. Now, I think most people want to do exactly the opposite. They don't want to focus on the fact that they're feeling impatient. In fact, they want to get rid of that feeling as quickly as possible. What's the point of dwelling on it, Sarah?

Sarah Schnitker: Yes, I think it's somewhat counterintuitive, right? We often think of patience like, don't be upset, don't be upset. But we actually find that does not work. People who are patient don't actually try to suppress their feelings. Instead, they acknowledge them and that it's okay to take that moment and say, oh, I'm really frustrated with this person in the workplace who is asking me the same question for the 15th time this week, or my partner who is making that funny noise that they always make, or my child who's throwing a temper tantrum. If we actually stop and pause and say, oh, this is what I'm feeling, and just let that feeling be there for a moment, that actually removes some of the power of that feeling. What you also see is if you can almost try to observe that feeling as a third person, instead of just feeling it, to say, okay, this is what I'm feeling. I can understand why. That really is the first step to actually being patient.

Shankar Vedantam: You also talk about the value of something you call reappraisal. What is reappraisal, Sarah?

Sarah Schnitker: Yeah, so reappraisal is really just this trick of learning to think about a situation differently. So one common reappraisal strategy is benefit finding. So what is the good thing that I can notice in this scenario? I know for myself sometimes it's just, oh great, this is an opportunity to practice my patience waiting in this line. Reappraisal could also include thinking about it from someone else's perspective. So why is this three-year-old screaming on the ground and kicking? Oh, because they don't have the words or the capacities to tell me what they want. So this is all they've got and I'm going to feel for them and how they're feeling. So that reappraisal is just shown across many, many studies just to be a highly effective way of regulating and helping yourself become more patient.

Shankar Vedantam: The researcher Kate Sweeney ran a study that looked at how people spent their time during the COVID-19 pandemic. She found that some people were better able to deal with their impatience than others. Can you describe for me what the study found?

Sarah Schnitker: Yes, what Kate and her colleagues found is that when people were able to immerse themselves in activities and experience what we call flow, that state really helped people to cope well with COVID-19 and all the stressors of the pandemic in China, in particular during the most intense lockdowns. And so, engaging in these flow experiences really helped people across time, not just in the moment, but even later when the researchers followed up with them. People who were able to do that were able to be patient, whether it was cooking homemade meals or playing video games even, which we often think of as a negative thing. They found that that can actually induce a flow state. And this was important in that time of really heightened uncertainty.

Shankar Vedantam: You know, I find sometimes when I'm waiting in line or waiting on hold, I'll pull out my phone and I'll start playing a game of chess. And within about five or six minutes, I'm so absorbed in the game that when someone finally comes on the phone, I'm like, why are you interrupting my game? This is far more important than anything I need to talk to you about.

Sarah Schnitker: Exactly, how dare you come back so quickly? Yes, I feel the same way. I love to do my writing when I travel. And so it makes that wait in the airport or on the plane just so much faster when I'm like, oh no, the flight's almost over. I want longer. Yes, it's a good strategy.

Shankar Vedantam: We've talked previously on the show, Sarah, about how purpose can give us patience when it comes to achieving difficult goals. When we know why we are doing something, it becomes easier to bear the setbacks along the way. Talk about the role of purpose in helping us deal with our impatience.

Sarah Schnitker: It can really motivate us to do better when it comes to patience, when we have a reason for that waiting and for that suffering, that we need a higher order purpose, a why. Why do I continue to suffer in this way? Why should I wait for this thing patiently? When you have that big why, it becomes much easier to practice the how, to actually practice your reappraisal, to practice your naming of the emotion, to get into that flow state. And what we find is that when that purpose is bigger than yourself, it's not just about me and my pleasure and my positive emotions. Instead, it's something bigger than me. We find in our research that when people have that, they're actually able to be more patient and they actually grow more in patience over time.

Shankar Vedantam: You ran a study involving Muslim adolescents during the month of Ramadan. What were these adolescents doing during Ramadan and what did you find, Sarah?

Sarah Schnitker: Yes. Ramadan in Islam actually is called the month of patience. During the month of Ramadan, devout Muslims will dry fast from sunrise to sunset. That means no food or drink, not even water across all of daylight. This is an incredibly challenging time, but it's also a time of great spirituality, and that the Islamic community, you see there are all kinds of special rituals and prayers and meals to break the fast or to begin it. What we found in our research is that when teenagers were engaged in this Ramadan sacred time that they actually grew in their patience. And then what was really cool is that a month after Ramadan was over, so back to just kind of normal daily life, they actually sustained some gains in patience. So they were still more patient than before Ramadan had began. So what we interpret is going on here is that they are doing this really difficult training in patience, and it feels like suffering in the moment, and you really want to be able to get that drink, and having to wait for that sun to set is difficult. So when they practice their patience, but do it for a bigger reason, to bring glory to Allah, and to be a part of their community, and do this together with others, it really seems to be a powerful intervention that, I'm not doing this for myself or my physical fitness, I'm doing this because this is what good Muslims do, and we are doing this for the sake of this higher power, and that is an incredibly potent experience, and our data show that it indeed has these benefits for patients long term.

Shankar Vedantam: I understand that this work has been echoed by other research you did that looked at young adults who were training for marathons?

Sarah Schnitker: Yes, we also looked at adolescents and young adults who were running half or full marathons with a philanthropic training team. And what we found is that they didn't necessarily grow in patients if they were just doing the training for health and fitness reasons. The philanthropic purpose of the training team was to raise money for clean water efforts in about eight African countries when they were running for the sake of helping those other people or running to grow spiritually to get closer to God. When they ran for those motives that were bigger than themselves, that's when you see them also grow in their patients through this training activity.

Shankar Vedantam: I'm wondering, Sarah, if we can take a moment and talk about what scientists like yourself are finding about the costs of impatience.

Sarah Schnitker: Yes. We see that impatience leads to not just irritability or negative emotions, but higher risk of heart problems, difficulty handling stressors. Stress starts to actually become anxiety. We see it can lead to a lack of self-control. We also see that impatience is associated with loneliness. So I think this makes a lot of sense. If you are unable to be patient with other people and you are impatient toward them, that's going to be a strain on the relationship. It's going to be harder to have those deep connections. Then we also see one of the most robust associations we found in my research is that impatience is associated with greater depressive symptoms. And conversely, that patience helps to ameliorate depression symptoms over time.

Shankar Vedantam: There's one form of patience that I think we have not discussed, Sarah, and that is patience with ourselves. We've talked about how we need to be patient with others, with the illnesses that afflict us, with hardships, with the hassles of daily life. But as we look at ourselves, and especially if we look at ourselves honestly and critically, we will find flaws and we will find limitations. And that is a source of frustration as well. Can you talk a moment about the value of being patient with ourselves?

Sarah Schnitker: Patience with ourselves is quite critical. Oftentimes, people have expectations for themselves that might even be higher than the expectations they have for others. And so, patience with ourselves is partly recognizing our own limitations as humans. That we are not superhuman. That we are just human beings and flawed like everyone else. Just like we have to have self-compassion, we also have to have patience with ourselves and realize that growth, and whether that's growth in our character, our morals, our abilities, our relationships, that we're not going to be where we want to be right now. And that it's a long game. There was a famous quote, I think it was Stanislaw Leck said, you have to have a lot of patience to become more patient. And someone might listen to a session like this and say, okay, I'm going to become more patient and really try to do it quickly and then become discouraged and just give up and say, I'm just an impatient person. I can't be good at this. So I think learning to have patience is a slow go, and it's going to take a lot to practice. And I don't think anyone gets it done very quickly.

Shankar Vedantam: Sarah Schnitker is a psychologist at Baylor University. Sarah, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Sarah Schnitker: Thank you for having me.