This post examines the virtues of patience and forbearance. I mean to explore what other people have learned about these virtues, rather express my own opinions about them, though I’ve been selective about what I found interesting or credible, according to my own inclinations. I wrote this not as an expert, but as someone who wants to learn. I hope it helps people who want to know more about these virtues and how to nurture them.
If you have patience and forbearance you gracefully put up with the usual slings and arrows that beset a human life. You can show patience in the face of boredom, suffering, difficulty, pain, wait, and annoyance. Forbearance usually means, more specifically, restraint in the face of difficult people. Someone with forbearance suffers fools gladly, because, well, why let their foolishness stop your gladness? A person with forbearance is slow to anger, and tolerant of insults and idiocy.
Patience and forbearance include self-regulating your emotions and moods, as well as moderating your behavior.
These virtues are related to self-control / serenity / good temper / moderation / balance / harmony (you don’t lose your cool), perspective and humility (it’s not all about you), charity / forgiveness / mercy / clemency / tolerance (you give other people more slack), dignity and grace (patience is a good look), endurance, perseverance, and stoic acceptance. The virtue (or “pāramitā”) of kṣānti includes both patience and forbearance.
Levius fit patientia, quicquid corrigere est nefas
(“What cannot be quite cured, is made easier by patience”)―Horace[1]
Patience makes it easier to acquire skills that require practice and to accomplish things that are difficult or time-consuming. It helps us to decline immediate gratification in exchange for future rewards. It helps us wait for opportune moments to act.[2]
Impatience can make a bad situation worse, both by being unpleasant and by prompting us to make suboptimal decisions.
Patience is also a factor in the “attention span” that everybody seems to complain about in this day and age. By helping us resist the eyeball-capturing techniques of clickbait instant gratification and peripheral ⓴ notifications, patience helps us more rationally prioritize our time.
Patience makes it easier to avoid jumping to premature conclusions, so it can help you consider nuance, change your mind, see things from other points of view, and develop greater understanding of the unfamiliar or challenging. Patience is correlated with “proactive coping” and “using cognitive reappraisals that reduce distress.”[3]
The theory of “ego depletion” (that people have a limited reserve to draw on for tasks like willpower, patience, and self-control) is also disputed and remains under investigation. There does seem to be a folk intuition that patience is a depletable resource, as reflected in phrases like “I’m running out of patience.”
I find it easier to be patient with something when I am well-rested, well-fed, unwearied, and not beset by distractions and stress from other quarters. Attention to environmental factors like these might be a useful way you can indirectly improve your patience.
Thubten Zopa recommended a method of training in forbearance, when you encounter a difficult person, that doubles as a way of immediately bolstering your patience. Instead of seeing the difficult person as someone who is being a jerk and trying to ruin your day, see them as someone who is sacrificing their own mental stability in order to provide you with exercises to strengthen your patience. For example:
Ask yourself, “Where did I learn this patience that I practice? I learned it from those who have been angry at me… Therefore, all the peace and happiness that I enjoy in this and future lives as a result of my practice of patience has come from the angry person… How kind this person is! How much benefit this person has given me!”[4]
This reminds me a bit of the advice from Marcus Aurelius: “Say to yourself in the early morning: today I shall meet meddling, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, and uncharitable men.”[5] You are less likely to react with impatience if you habitually factor in a certain expectation of people being difficult sometimes.
Long lines at the post office, medical appointments that leave you sitting in the waiting room long past the scheduled time, traffic jams… you can recharacterize all of these as opportunities to strengthen patience and forbearance rather than as excuses to throw a tantrum.
Any task you want to accomplish or skill you want to learn that takes time and that involves some frustration and difficulty can be also an opportunity to strengthen your patience. If you look upon such tasks and skill-building in this way, this may increase the value you get from them (not only am I accomplishing X, but I’m also building patience!).
Turkish researchers developed a ten-session patience training course for university students. The class taught students about the importance of patience and the downsides of impatience, and about how to recognize situations that would benefit from a patient approach. At the end of each session, students were asked how they planned to apply what they learned; at the beginning of the following session, they shared the experiences of their attempts. The researchers compared students who took the course with a similar control group who received no intervention and found that the course significantly improved the patience levels of those who took it.[6]
Caroline R. Lavelock developed a “patience workbook” for interventions she tested. She describes it this way:[7]
Each section of the workbook focuses on one of the five steps to reach a patient SPACE; S=Serenity, P=Patient listening and perspective, A=Allow boredom [or “allow inactivity”], C=Comfort with delays, and E=Endure with perseverance. These steps are engaged in a variety of methods, including responding to YouTube videos which exhibit patience, drawing representations of patience using Paint, and identifying pop culture references related to the benefits of patience. The workbook begins with instructions and self-monitoring assessments intended to focus the
participant on his or her experience with patience...[8]Six sections, roughly ten exercises each, then define patience and engage the participant through the SPACE model. At the end of the workbook, an identical group of assessments is given so that the participant can get an idea of his or her progress.
Religions often teach some variety of delayed gratification, be it storing up treasures in heaven or foregoing sensual pleasures for the hope of more profound ones.[9] People who are more religious are also more apt to sacrifice immediate rewards for better future ones.[10]
One way religion is thought to help in this way is by changing the way people think about time: it helps people “to stand outside of their immediate sense of time and place to view life from a larger, more objective perspective.”[11]
Religions may also have doctrinal (“in your patience possess ye your souls”) or narrative (“the patience of Job”) templates of patience that followers can reference when an occasion for patience arises in their lives, and can use as ways to cognitively reassess a trying situation as an opportunity for religiously-motivated outlook and behavior.[12]
The practice of meditation removes other distractions so that you and your impatience can meet face to face. If you stare down your impatience, boredom, and fidgetyness in a meditative context, you may find that these things are more paper tigers than they had first appeared.
Self control is a major component of patience, and so you can expect that interventions that build self control will also help you build patience.[13]
When it comes to developing patience, if all else fails: be patient. Patience seems to develop with age:
Older people are less reactive, demonstrate increased capacity for self- and emotion regulation, have an enhanced ability to deal with problems, experience better mental health, and participate more in “passive constructive behavioral reactions (e.g., doing nothing) than younger adults.” Patience is one of those “passive constructive” responses.[14]
Horace, Odes Ⅰ.24 (“To Virgil on the Death of Quintilius”)
“One of the primary mechanisms by which patience increases eudaimonic well-being is by facilitating goal pursuit. Although somewhat paradoxical, it appears that the patient acceptance of suffering and frustration actually allows people to better achieve their goals, in part, because they are able to exert more effort on goals at later points in time rather than disengaging from the goal or acting at the wrong time.”
S. Schnitker, B. Houltberg, W. Dyrness, & N. Redmond “The Virtue of Patience, Spirituality, and Suffering: Integrating Lessons From Positive Psychology, Psychology of Religion, and Christian Theology” Psychology of Religion and Spirituality (2017), citing:
Vaughn E. Worthen “Patience as a Development Virtue and Common Therapeutic Factor” Issues in Religion and Psychotherapy (2018)
Schnitker (2012)
Thubten Zopa, Virtue and Reality (1998)
See also Romans 5:3–4 “[W]e glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; And patience, experience; and experience, hope…”
And Lorenzo Scupoli (The Spiritual Combat, 1589, ch. ⅩⅬⅠ): “When thou findest thyself in any painful position whatsoever, and bearest it patiently, take heed lest the devil, or thine own self-love, persuade thee to wish to be delivered from it…”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, book Ⅱ
Patience was measured in subjects and controls by means of something called the “Patience Scale,” which was developed by S.A. Schnitker in her doctoral dissertation. I haven’t found a copy of that dissertation anywhere, so I don’t know how it measured patience. I think it was probably a Likert-scale, self-report sort of thing rather than an objective measurement.
A.E. Bülbül & G. Izgar “Effects of the Patience Training Program on Patience and Well-Being Levels of University Students” Journal of Education and Training Studies (2018)
C.R. Lavelock “Good Things Come to Those Who (Peacefully) Wait: Toward a Theory of Patience” (doctoral thesis, 2015). She says the subjects who completed the workbooks significantly improved in their patience scores, but subjects who completed workbooks on a different topic (positivity) also often showed improvement in patience, so maybe this had more to do with getting practice patiently enduring a research study and its workbooks than with the contents.
Including the Patience Scale and the HEXACO-PI Patience Subscale, and, in one study, the 3-Factor Patience Questionnaire (these again are self-report measures):
Schnitker & Emmons (2007)
A.L. Duckworth “The Significance of Self-Control” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2011)
E.C. Carter, M.E. McCullough, J. Kim-Spoon, C. Corrrales, & A. Blake “Religious people discount the future less” Evolution and Human Behavior (2012)
R.L. Piedmont “Does spirituality represent the sixth factor of personality? Spiritual transcendence and the Five-Factor Model” Journal of Personality (1999)
S.A. Schnitker, et al. “Dual Pathways from Religiousness to the Virtue of Patience versus Anxiety among Elite Athletes” Psychology of Religion and Spirituality (2020)
Schnitker, et al. (2017)
Worthen (2018) referencing