“I’m so impatient!” is how the conversation started. She had thought this way about herself for years, and others reinforced this thinking. But the problem wasn’t impatience.
We all experience impatience, not usually to the degree experienced by folks with ADHD or other forms of Neurodivergence (ND). But did you know there are different types of impatience? Yep, it’s more than just being restless or in a hurry! There’s impatience due to problems with delayed gratification, and then impatience due to time-blindness.
Common factors that drive impatience include:
Expectations: Believing things should happen quickly or as planned. Example: Getting frustrated when a meeting starts late, disrupting your carefully planned schedule.
Perfectionism: Needing everything to be perfect and efficient. Example: Feeling impatient when a project takes longer because you keep changing things.
Urgency: Believing time is wasted if you aren’t working on something. Example: Feeling restless while waiting in line, thinking, “This is wasting my precious time.”
Control: Needing control over situations. Example: Becoming impatient when a flight is delayed or when you keep running into red lights.
Frustration: Intolerance for frustration (things not going smoothly) or inconvenience. Example: Feeling impatient when internet speeds are slow, disrupting your flow. I SO get this!
Competitiveness: Needing to be first or at least in the lead. Example: Feeling impatient with a group decision-making process that needs to move faster for you.
Conditioning: Expecting instant responses. Example: Becoming impatient when a website takes more than a few seconds to load, or when you have to wait on hold, or someone doesn’t respond to your text immediately.
Overcommitment: Associating busyness with success or productivity. Example: Feeling overwhelmed when unexpected tasks arise and unable to say “No” or delegate.
Anxiety and Stress: Feeling incapable and overwhelmed by everyone’s expectations. Example: Becoming impatient with colleagues for not meeting high standards set by management or with classmates for chatting instead of working.
Empathy: Believing your time or needs are more important. Example: Feeling impatient in a restaurant when service is slower than you’d like. I’ve seen someone act out under these circumstances. It’s wildly uncomfortable.
Culture: A cultural emphasis on speed and efficiency. Example: Experiencing impatience in a slower-paced business environment when working with cultures emphasizing speed and efficiency, like Japanese and German cultures.
Insecurity: Insecurity leads to a need for quick wins with low risk. An example is feeling impatient when you receive feedback on a task, as you tie it to your sense of worth.
Time-blindness, on the other hand, is a flavor all its own.
Time blindness refers to difficulty perceiving time and experiencing the passing of time, like managing a schedule. This is often found in folks with ADHD (myself included) and other forms of ND.
Unlike impatience, which can stem from previously listed factors, time-blindness is more about a cognitive difference in how time is understood and experienced.
People with time blindness may struggle with estimating how long tasks will take, remembering deadlines, or accurately feeling the passage of time. This can lead to impatience, but it’s rooted in a different cause: a neurological or cognitive challenge in processing time-related information.
In many cases, time only feels present. “Later” may as well be “never.” So, if it doesn’t happen now, it may never happen.
Helping my clients understand their relationship with time and how to strategize so the problem is manageable is life-changing.
The bottom line is that the previous examples are driven more by external factors or internal emotional states than anything neurological.
For example, impatience due to expectations or perfectionism is about how we want things to be, while time-blindness is a fundamental difficulty in perceiving and managing time.
Self-awareness and strategies to compensate for time blindness are critical when you want to be included in a world of appointments, meetings, and deadlines. This doesn’t mean you’ll never be late again, but it decreases the likelihood of it happening.
