Learn self-soothing techniques to increase your patience and decrease hypertension
Stress for Success
March 7, 2006

“Impatience is a fuse to a stress explosion”, said my husband. It can go off while standing in line at the grocery store or while navigating rush-hour traffic. People who irritate you or hold you up in some way can also be the detonation. For some, it can be ignited by pretty much anything.

Our techno-stress-age with its accompanying expectations for everything to be faster can push even patient people to the edge. However, for health reasons the concern is for those who are impatient much of the time, often over insignificant events.

Impatience and hostility are a form of stress and are part of the Type A personality. Research has long shown that stress activates the sympathetic nervous system, causing a series of heart and blood vessel consequences, including narrowing of the blood vessels and an increase in blood pressure. These traits increase even a young adult’s long-term risk of developing high blood pressure, according to a study funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and published by the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2003.

3,308 blacks and whites, ages 18 to 30 when the research began in 1985, were studied. It found that higher levels of impatience and hostility were significantly associated with the development of hypertension after 15 years. Greater amounts of these equated to a greater risk. Interestingly, competitiveness, depression, and anxiety didn’t seem to increase the risk of hypertension.

The subjects rated their time urgency/impatience on a scale from zero to 3 - 4. After 15 years, participants with the highest score of 3 - 4 had an 84% greater risk of developing high blood pressure. Those with the second-highest score of 2 had a 47% greater risk. What didn’t affect the results: race, age, gender, education, blood pressure at the time of enrollment or the presence of hypertension risk factors such as overweight/obesity, alcohol consumption, and physical activity.
If you experience a great deal of time urgency and therefore impatience, you need to decide if hypertension is too high a price to pay. If it is, you’ll need to learn patience. The most important thing to help you is to develop self-soothing techniques.

Impatience is a form of anger, which pushes you to look for the cause outside of yourself, like the *!☆~ who cut you off in traffic. But this implies that the other person has to get out of your way for you to be soothed. Since that person is beyond your control you’ll instead need to soothe yourself.

• Deep breathe every time you find yourself becoming impatient.
• Distract yourself when impatient. For example, while standing in a checkout line read the sensationalist and comical headlines of tabloids.
• Ultimately you must change how you interpret whatever is getting in your way. Learn to recognize your impatient interpretations, "You ignorant moron!" Instead invent your own self-soothing-interpretation such as, "How important will it be in one year that this person is slowing me down?" Hopefully, more often than not you’ll answer, “It’s not at all important. Why am I wasting all of this energy on it?”

You've learned to be impatient and therefore can learn to be patient. It’s more difficult for those who experienced great amounts of early childhood trauma, which can program a short fuse for your fight flight response. Much of the trick to self-soothing is to learn to distract your mind at the earliest possible red flag of impending impatience/time urgency. Ironically, you’ll need to be patient to continue looking for techniques that calm you. Be very persistent in using them. The more you do the sooner and the better they’ll soothe you.

Jacquelyn Ferguson, M. S., of InterAction Associates, is a trainer and a Professional Coach in Lee County. E-mail her at www.jackieferguson.com or call 239-693-8111 for information about her workshops on this and other topics or to invite her to speak to your organization.