Can Patience Be Trained?

The loading bar has stopped at 97%. The bus was due four minutes ago. The person ahead of you in the queue remembers they forgot the bread and goes back for it, leaving their basket on the belt.

In each of these moments something tightens inside. We tell ourselves we should be more patient, as if patience were a reserve that some people have more of than others. But is that right? And if patience can be developed, how exactly?

Patience is not one thing

For a long time the word "patience" in psychology covered at least two different ideas.

The first is delay of gratification: the ability to turn down a smaller reward now for a bigger one later. The best-known example is the "marshmallow test", in which a child can eat one marshmallow straight away or wait and get two.

The second idea is newer. Psychologist Kate Sweeny of the University of California, Riverside, and her colleagues proposed treating impatience as a distinct emotion, like anger or anxiety. In this model, patience is not a trait but a way of coping with that emotion when a goal is delayed.

The difference is more than wording. If patience is a trait, you either have it or you don't. If it is a way of regulating an emotion, it can be learned, much as people learn to calm down before a talk.

What makes waiting unbearable

In 2024, Sweeny, Jason Hawes and Olivia Karaman tested this model in three studies with 1,401 participants. Most of the time participants imagined familiar situations: a traffic jam, an endless meeting, a doctor's waiting room. The researchers varied the details of each scenario.

Impatience grew not simply when the wait was long, but when it lasted longer than expected and seemed unfair or unreasonable. It was worse when the wait itself was unpleasant, when the goal mattered a lot, and when someone was clearly to blame for the delay.

The second finding is more interesting. How well people stayed patient depended more on them than on the situation. The more patient participants were more comfortable with uncertainty, more emotionally stable, more skilled at understanding and managing their emotions, and more agreeable.

The authors themselves call this a first test of the model. Most of the data come from imagined scenarios, not real queues.

The marshmallow, rewritten

The classic marshmallow test of the 1960s and 70s turned delay of gratification into something close to a symbol of success. Later follow-ups of the same children found that those who had waited longer did better as teenagers. From this grew a popular idea: willpower at four predicts the future.

In 2018, Tyler Watts, Greg Duncan and Haonan Quan repeated the study with a much larger and more diverse sample: more than 900 children in the United States. The link between waiting at age four and school achievement at fifteen was about half as strong as in the original studies. Once family background, early cognitive skills and the home environment were taken into account, it shrank by about two thirds.

Earlier still, in 2012, Celeste Kidd and colleagues at the University of Rochester added one step before the test. The researcher either kept her promises to the child or broke them. Children who had just seen the adult be reliable waited about 12 minutes on average. Children whose promise had been broken waited about three.

That study involved only 28 children, so it is more a vivid example than a final verdict. But the idea matters: waiting makes sense when you believe the promised thing will really come. What looks like a lack of willpower can be a sensible response to an unreliable environment.

Can it be trained?

So patience depends both on the person and on the situation. Can the first part be changed? The honest answer: in the short term, yes; on long-term effects there is little data.

The best-studied technique is called episodic future thinking. People are asked to imagine a specific event in their own future: where they will be, what they will be doing, and with whom. A 2021 meta-analysis of 47 studies found that after this exercise people more often chose a larger but later reward in laboratory tasks. The effect was moderate, and it came mainly from imagining pleasant events; neutral or negative ones made almost no difference.

An important caveat: this was measured right after the exercise, mostly in lab tasks. These studies do not show whether people become more patient in everyday life a month later.

In Sweeny's research, participants also described what helps them in moments of impatience: distracting themselves, taking a few calm breaths, looking at the situation from another angle. These are self-reports, not a tested experiment. But they fit the model: if impatience is an emotion, it can be regulated in the same ways as other emotions.

Where this picture falls short

Sweeny's model is young and has obvious limits. An imagined traffic jam is not a real one. And ideas of what counts as a "normal" wait probably differ between cultures and even between cities, so the model still needs testing in different settings.

There is also a deeper question: is patience always good? If impatience arises when a delay seems unfair, sometimes it is simply pointing correctly at unfairness. Waiting patiently for someone to fix an obvious mistake is not always a virtue. Sometimes it is better to go and ask.

Finally, the marshmallow story is a reminder that what looks like a personal trait often partly reflects the circumstances a person grows up and lives in.

What to do with this

None of these findings promises that you will be unflappable within a week. But a few observations follow from them.

• Name what exactly is irritating you. According to Sweeny's data, the length of the wait is rarely the issue. Does the delay feel unfair? Is someone to blame? Is the goal very important? Sometimes the answer alone eases the tension a little.
• Change what you can about the situation. An unpleasant wait makes impatience worse, so a book in the queue or a place to sit is not a trivial thing.
• Picture a concrete "afterwards". Not an abstract reward but a pleasant scene: what you will be doing once the wait is over.
• Ask whether it is worth waiting at all. If promises are routinely broken, impatience may be not a flaw but a sensible signal.

A small experiment: play a slow game with no clock — 9×9 Go works well for this. Every time you want to make a move "just to get on with it", stop for a second and try to name what exactly you are impatient about. Don't fix anything; just notice.

Questions for discussion

1. Which kind of waiting irritates you most, and is it really about how long it lasts?
2. Have you ever been in a situation where impatience turned out to be the right response?
3. Has your patience changed over the years? What do you think influenced it?