Winning the Waiting Game
Waiting time is a funny thing because the way we translate it dictates our experience of it. Imagine someone waiting for a loved one to pass. We would cherish those last minutes with them. Studies have shown that anticipating something good like a vacation can actually bring more happiness in the wait before the event than the actual event itself generates. We can transform times of frustrated waiting with a mind shift to a gift of a few extra moments to recharge, renew, and relax. Getting frustrated about waiting certainly doesn’t make the time go by more quickly nor magically shorten the wait anyway.
Generally I think I’m a fairly patient person. I can understand when restaurants and stores have long lines and I have no problem, by and large, waiting my turn. But this afternoon while I was waiting at the pharmacy for a flu shot, my patience start to wear thin.
I had an appointment at 5:00 PM and I was there a few minutes early so I could fill out the paperwork. I was really hoping to get in and out after a very long, very involved work day. I was told to take a seat and I would be called into the pharmacist’s office. And so I started waiting. I looked through the few items for sale at the pharmacy, checked my blood pressure—which at the start of the waiting period might have been a bit lower than it was after waiting so long—, and looked through a few emails.
But then the waiting game started to get the better of me. After having my appointment be half an hour late, my mind started creating all kinds of possible reasons why the pharmacy was so dysfunctional and I plotted to take it over and make it more efficient. I fought the feelings that the sweet lady running the customer service window somehow had it against me and was secretively loving delaying my appointment.
Of course, none of that actually helped and none of it was true. And after about 40 minutes I did get in to see the pharmacist who explained that the pharmacy had been short staffed because several employees were out sick and that she had worked so hard all this week. After a few minutes of processing, she gave me the immunization and I went my merry way.
But I’ve been thinking a lot about why waiting can seem so arduous sometimes. At face value, there is nothing particularly unpleasant with standing in a well-lit, air conditioned room while familiar Top 40 hits from the early 2000’s plays softly in the background. To add to that, I also had just eaten a nutrias meal so I wasn’t hungry, or sleep deprived, or lacking in clean water. Nor was I waiting for a life-saving remedy that was in any way time sensitive. And on top of all of that, I started to think of what I would be doing at home if I wasn’t waiting at the pharmacy. And I had to admit, that I probably wouldn’t be doing anything Earth-shattering back at home anyway.
Language is such a powerful thing, in part, because it can literally make our world. Depending on what we call a behavior or place or activity can dictate whether a thing is felt to be good or bad, desirable or regrettable, and pleasurable or annoying. And though we might not have total control over our first impressions on all of these experiences, we can decide the conscious part that comes soon after those first impressions hit us.
Had I approached that waiting time differently, I might have celebrated that I had 40 minutes to unwind from work. I could have been grateful that the immunization was so easily accessible for me that the whole experience, including driving time, only took about an hour while just a century ago, millions of people could have died from the very disease that I was being inoculated against.
Waiting time is a funny thing because the way we translate it dictates our experience of it. Imagine someone waiting for a loved one to pass. We would cherish those last minutes with them. Studies have shown that anticipating something good like a vacation can actually bring more happiness in the wait before the event than the actual event itself generates. We can transform those times of frustrated waiting with a mind shift to a gift of a few extra moments to recharge, renew, and relax. Getting frustrated about waiting certainly doesn’t make the time go by more quickly nor magically shorten the wait anyway.