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Pam King: Hello, dear listeners. Before the episode gets going today, I wanted to take a moment to ask a favor. Here, at the end of this launch season of With & Four, we’re running a very short listener survey. You can find the link in our show notes, or you can be old school and type in your browser, thethrivecenter.org/podcast.
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What are you willing to wait for? What are you willing to suffer for? Research psychologist Sarah Schnitker has done groundbreaking work in the science of patience. By exploring the ways to become more patient with others and ourselves, and discovering the role of this timeless virtue in a flourishing life, she offers us a freeing and stabilizing approach to thinking about goals, perseverance, and navigating our fast paced world.
Sarah Schnitker: People who are patient are not less assertive, they are not passive, and if anything, they actually achieve their goals more successfully. Anything worthwhile, you’ll have to wait, and you’ll have to suffer. And so, we need patience, we need to be able to suffer well. Patience is not an eradication of emotions, it is the ability to feel those emotions, but to stay level headed, to regulate through them.
patience I see as doing that for something beyond the self. So patience is really staying engaged, continuing forward, and pursuing the good.
Pam King: I’m Dr. Pam King, and you’re listening to With For, a podcast that explores the depths of psychological science and spiritual wisdom to offer practical guidance toward spiritual health, wholeness, and thriving on purpose. I see.
We live in a high speed, high efficiency society, we talk about patience. I think you’re going to be surprised. Patience is worth the wait. But I realize the old adage, patience is a virtue, is really insightful here. Virtues are definitely part of the secret sauce to thriving. They are a key ingredient and my conversation with Sarah unpacks why virtues are so important to our spiritual health.
Sarah Schnitker is Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Baylor University and is a dear colleague who previously was on the faculty at Fuller with me here at Thrive Center. Virtues have a powerful emotional component that can serve to rev us up and motivate us towards our goals. Or they can have a really calming effect, like patience, to slow us down and recenter and be mindful of our aims and purpose.
This emotional component is kind of like a fuel system. However, virtues like patience are far more than just feelings that motivate us or calm us down. They are also infused with meaning and beliefs. So patience has to do with waiting, and at times suffering, and forces us to consciously or unconsciously consider what is worth suffering for.
Sarah defines patience as the ability to remain calm in the face of adversity and suffering, and being able to wait and not be inordinately overwhelmed by sorrow. And furthermore, her research shows that people who have had to wait who have had to endure suffering and exhibit patience in the pursuit of their goals, they actually pursue purpose more effectively.
She also talks about how to cultivate patience and the importance of becoming more aware of your feelings and why you’re feeling them and how you can learn habits to reframe those feelings for patience. One of my hopes for this show is that people can understand more fully how their spirituality, their spiritual practices, their faith, the rituals that they’re already doing alone or together can be even more effective for their own sense of thriving and well being.
In this conversation with me, Sarah Schnitker. We discuss the definition of patience as a virtue, the essential role patience can play in our pursuit of meaning and purpose, the connections between waiting and suffering, and the theological and spiritual context for patience. How patience is related to goal setting and complementary to courage.
And Sarah offers guidance on how to cultivate patience in our own lives. Using a research backed strategy to identify, imagine, and think.
Sarah, in the last decade, you’ve become the world’s leading expert on patience.
Sarah Schnitker: Because I’m the only one, Pam. Well, you know, I would
Pam King: like to talk about that, actually, why you’re the only one. But I’m really excited. Excited to hear about patience and how it’s kind of counter-cultural, but yet so relevant.
We started with a profound question, what are you willing to suffer for? But why suffering isn’t patience just about waiting? Well, our English word for patience comes from the Latin word for enduring suffering. For some that might conjure up the biblical concept of patience as long suffering. Sarah brings theologically rich dimensions to her psychological study of patience.
Sarah Schnitker: I was my first year of grad school and I was just starting to dive into all these awesome scientific studies on all kinds of different virtues, on forgiveness, on gratitude, on hope. And I read a book by David Bailey Harned, a moral theologian, and he argues that ever since the industrial revolution in Western society, we have abandoned patience.
that Christians come to see patience as a sign of failure, that we shouldn’t have to be patient, that our technology and our innovation should eradicate suffering and should eradicate waiting, which there are some people who believe that. The transhumanists out there, they’re like, yeah, we can actually achieve the eradication of all these problems.
But, and I guess we do too as Christians, but we believe that’s only through Christ’s second coming. in this world. And a lot of faith traditions say, yeah, but for the most part, we are going to have to suffer. And it’s only through suffering that we see that we actually experience the best things in life and live out or tell us that big purpose, anything worthwhile, you’ll have to wait and you’ll have to suffer.
And so we need patience and we need to be able to suffer well.
Pam King: it really does raise the question of what’s worth waiting for or what’s worth suffering for.
Sarah Schnitker: And I think, I mean, even a more fundamental question for some humans is, is there anything worth waiting for or suffering for? Um, and I think many people don’t have that clarity about what it is in their life that they are willing to suffer for.
So I think that search for meaning and purpose involves that. And I think We know from our research, from some of the research you’ve done, Pam, from research I’ve done and so many people that what really is worth something for has to be bigger than yourself. It has to be beyond the self. It has to be transcendent.
And we find that in the research on patience, that having something that is beyond the cell, ultimate type of big thing, whether that be God, some other type of power, a community purpose that is shared with others, the natural order of the universe, something, a moral and ethical ideals, we need something that’s bigger than ourselves.
Pam King: Patience does, in fact, draw us out of ourselves, beyond ourselves. It exposes and tests our ability to accept the realities we don’t control. I often talk about a transcendent, beyond the self kind of love. I think we’re always looking to those external realities, hoping they’ll Satisfy us and make us feel whole.
So with every social media app, every online dating experience, every productivity hack, in a sense, we’re always reaching out trying to get what matters most in the fastest way. Well, if we slow down and look through the lens of patience, we start to see things differently. I asked Sarah to define patience and explain what it means to call it a virtue.
Sarah Schnitker: Yep. So what is it and what is it not, I think is also really important with this virtue in particular. So I define patience as the ability to remain calm in the face of adversity, suffering, Waiting. Aquinas talks to not be inordinately sorrowed by the sufferings of life. So it is not an eradication of emotion.
It’s not that you don’t get emotions. It is the ability to feel those emotions, but to stay level headed, to regulate through them. And as a virtue, patience, I see as. doing that for something beyond the self. Right? I always use the example of a thief or an assassin, let’s say, right? It can be very regulated as they sit there and wait to assassinate someone.
But we don’t want to call that patience. So really doing it for a moral end for the good, of society and for others. That is kind of that pinnacle of patience. And another thing that’s really important too is patience is not passivity. So patience is really staying engaged and continuing forward and pursuing the good, your telos, and whatever the local good is as well, whether it’s It’s child rearing, like being a patient parent and I care about my child’s development.
So not giving up on disciplining my child or not giving up doing the hard work, right? It’s staying engaged in the goal, but with calm equanimity, right? Just to not become overwhelmed the point where you become reckless, right? So it’s kind of staying in that space. And our research actually supports that, Pam, that.
People who are patient are not less assertive, they are not passive, and if anything, they actually achieve their goals more successfully.
Pam King: One of the most interesting factors I see in Sarah’s work is the fact that she’s linked patience not just to our personal well being, but to setting and pursuing goals. So we might say that patience is both good for our souls and our goals. It’s an essential factor in any goal directed endeavor. So I asked her to introduce.
some of what she’s found from her psychological studies on patience and other related virtues. I love and so appreciate that you talk about being engaged, not just with the goal pursued, but engaged with the emotions. Being present to the suffering, the pain, the disappointment, the irritation, being honest about that.
Does patience ever involve restraint to opportunity in good things? So like, Oh, I am so excited to do this, but I might need to say no to pursue an immediate thing to pursue a long term goal.
Sarah Schnitker: Yep. And there still needs to be research in this area about disentangling patience from its near siblings like self control.
Um, how I would think about it right now is that your self control would say, I’m going to delay the gratification. I’m going to wait. But then you could have good self control and choose to wait, but then wait very poorly. So the patience would then come in and I’ve made the choice to delay and wait for good things and now I’m actually waiting well.
I am waiting calmly. without becoming dysregulated. Because you can wait really poorly and yet still stick it out. So I think the two virtues there.
Pam King: That’s really helpful how patience and self control both function like a brake system perhaps in modulating how you pursue a goal. One is more in response to a negative issue, obstacle, and one perhaps potentially positive.
Tell us about the research and what have you learned?
Sarah Schnitker: I mean, I think it’s interesting that you love to use language of telos and what is our purpose. And that’s very goal directed language. And that is some of my very earliest research on patience. I said, we need to look at this in goal pursuit. How do people actually pursue their goals over time and how does patience play out in that dynamically across time?
And so some of our work with goal pursuit, basically what we do. is we ask people to list the goals they’re pursuing. What are the five or ten goals you hope to accomplish? Asking like across your life, what are you trying to do? We might tweak the instructions a little bit depending on do we want them to be a little more like narrow, do we want them to be more big picture, but basically we’ll get things from college students or adolescents, get straight A’s, lose 10 pounds, grow in my faith, love God, Be kind.
I mean, impress girls, get a date to prom. I mean, we get things all over the place and be a good mom is like mine. Be a good researcher, right? We have all these different goals. And then for each individual goal, we will ask people to rate that goal in a variety of dimensions. So things to ask, are they being patient?
I can stay regulated. I can stay calm as I pursue this goal. Even if I face obstacles, I’m patient in its pursuit. And then the other thing we do is we also can code what type of goal it is, those domains. So is this a goal related to achievement? Is it interpersonal? Is it spiritual? What are all the different kinds of goals people have and code those.
And then over time, every couple weeks, We’ll bring the goals people gave us the first time around and bring them back to them and say, okay, how’s it going? How are you in the last two weeks since the first time you took this questionnaire? How patient have you been? How much effort have you exerted and how satisfied are you?
How much meaning is this goal giving? So a variety of different things. And then we can do really fancy, almost feels magical, statistics where that allows us to look at how this plays out over time and allows us to look at Some of the generalities. So are people patient in pursuit of all of their goals the same way, or are there some specific things about their interpersonal goals or their achievement goals or different things like that?
And so that’s the setup of these kind of studies with goals and what we find, we find some really awesome things. So in one study, we found that when people were more patient, two weeks later, they exerted more effort in goal pursuit. They had more meaning for those goals and they actually had higher achievement satisfaction.
And interestingly, also we find some reciprocal relationships when people have more effort or meaning that also predicts that they have more patience two weeks later. So these things are co occurring and patience is really part of that facilitation of adaptive goal pursuit. Which is. Really cool to find and also to show that meaning really matters too.
That meaning pushes you to be more patient. We also have a very recent study looking at patience in this goal pursuit paradigm, but also looking at another virtue, the virtue of courage. And again, our finding patience really facilitates that adaptive goal pursuit. We also find that people are more patient in those self transcendent goals.
And I’m not sure if this is actually in the one you have, Pam, because there’s two papers out there. Um, we find that when it’s a goal related to spirituality, when it’s a goal about other people and interpersonal, they’re more patient. People struggle and are less patient with their achievement goals, which I think again shows that virtue is really supported by that beyond the self purpose.
Pam King: So when something is spiritual. or connected to another person and as relational people, we attach so much meaning that sometimes we’re more able to sustain patience.
Sarah Schnitker: Yes, exactly. And there’s a reason to wait. It’s something that matters. And what matters? The spiritual and other people. Achievement. We all need achievement.
We all like, and many of us, myself included, maybe seek after it too much, but that’s not the thing that really matters. It’s those personal achievements.
Pam King: One of the ways I talk about telos, or our purpose, is this intersection of our goals, our roles, and our souls. Our purpose is really found at that intersection of the personal, the role, relationship, and the spiritual.
And really interesting to hear you say that research gives evidence that people can hang in there more when goals are connected to people in our faith and spirituality.
Sarah Schnitker: And if I could, there’s a cool study Hanging in there that I think shows this, they can hang in there even when life is at its worst.
Yeah. So this is another study that found that during hospitalization at a psychiatric inpatient unit, these are people in acute psychiatric distress. Even among these folks, the virtue of patience was a real strength. So in one paper, we found that patience was really correlated with their major depression disorder symptoms.
And the extent to that they grew in patience across hospitalization, their depression symptoms were alleviated. They saw improvement. So that was super cool. And then in another paper that came out last year, we found, we looked at suicide risk and, and this is a sample that some of the people are there because of their suicide risk.
So a very acute sample, we found that patience and gratitude buffered. against the existential crisis and spiritual struggles people were having, which is normally a very strong predictor of suicide risk. So when people feel like there’s no meaning and purpose in life and that they’re struggling in that domain spiritually, that predicts very high risk of suicide.
If people had patience and courage. it was not so strong. So their existential struggles could be there and they could stick in that spiritual struggle without having that same extremely elevated suicide risk, which is kind of amazing.
Pam King: So we’re learning something that might be surprising here. Patience isn’t just a stuffy old boring virtue from long ago.
It’s actually deeply connected to many facets of our well being and experience of the world. And not the least of these being our sense of meaning and purpose. Sarah explains that when it comes to patience and developing our connection to lives of meaning and purpose, it’s actually about developing habits that help us regulate and reappraise the world.
Sarah Schnitker: People who have cultivated patience and when we think about virtues, think about connecting the habits that help you regulate well and help you. persists through suffering with that big story. So someone who’s, even if they have a crisis of that big story and that big meaning and that tell us of the moment, if their habits are there, that have helped that they have the patience that can carry them through that and that they have just this way of being and are used to reappraising and used to saying, you know what, this isn’t, this moment is not forever.
We continue and know how to kind of. remain patient. They have that habitual response. And even if they have that crisis point, they still have the habit that is still there. Even if the narrative and that tell us is a little bit under fire. Kendall Bronk is doing a study to look at how people are patient in their pursuit of purpose.
She is actually looking at specifically that question of how young emerging young adults. as they try to find their purpose in life, how patience can serve as a strength in that quest.
Pam King: I was delighted to hear Sarah bring in the work of Dr. Kendall Bronk. Kendall’s work focuses on how patience can help us find purpose. In particular, I love the way she conceptualizes Kendall defines it as the ability to stay Stay calm, but actively engaged in the face of frustration or suffering. This work is testing the role of patience and optimizing our search for purpose.
And I personally believe this is urgent work. In a world where we can get almost anything we want right away. We still suffer from rising levels of anxiety, depression, and disconnection from others. Recent studies show that one in five teens suffer from depression. And we don’t know enough about the mental and spiritual health effects of smartphone and social media usage, but we have enough studies to be very concerned.
So Id just want to try and Offer an example, I was really struck when Fuller’s former president, Mark Labberton, wrote an article in the school paper about when he was a divinity student and suffered depression, and how he attended a local church called All Saints, which was Episcopal, which had very high liturgy of bowing and kneeling and going through hymns in the lectionary.
And he said, In that season of his life, even when he didn’t have the energy for the beliefs, the liturgy physically moved him through and sustained the beliefs for him. And I think that’s the example that you’re giving is that even when our meaning systems get rocked, which, you know, with pandemics and all the things that go on these days, that happens that if we have habituated Practices of calming, of regulating, of pausing, of saying no, those psychological capacities or habits can take over even when we can’t make sense of them.
Sarah Schnitker: And I would even say, right, that virtue development that’s happened has made it so that your autopilot is the virtue. And that’s, I mean, that’s what Aristotle talked about, and Aquinas, and all of these great thinkers. It takes a lot of work to get there, but once it’s a virtue, It’s your go to. Now that’s hard to get to that spot.
I think that’s when we need to really look to folks who have suffered and look to people who have that long term wisdom. I know when I am in those places, I seek out the mentors who have suffered greatly in life and have learned to do this and have them Even them kind of carry me to let them speak in and say the things.
And I think that’s where our, we thrive and have virtue as a community. I know our family had some really hard things during the COVID pandemic. I know, you know, this Pam, but my husband runs a psychiatric nursing home and just had some deaths in our family. And when I would look to others to almost carry me through and to say to them, My belief is in doubt right now.
I need you to be the one to pray today. And that we don’t do this alone, I think is so important. And that the community has the habit, even if one member is faltering. Just
Pam King: coming out of a study that we were both involved with, the project on gratitude. I was really struck by how often we think of gratitude as an individual practice.
And I think people often think of patience is something I have to endure or practice alone. But how do we think about how we can be patient communally? And how do we wait or suffer together? Our culture doesn’t often think of like communal patience.
Sarah Schnitker: Yes, I think that is such a great thing to point out, Pam, that maybe that’s why we struggle with patience because we aren’t actually thinking about it communally.
I think we do have some rituals. When it’s real big things, I think we recognize it needs to be communal. When someone’s in the hospital for surgery for a brain tumor, when someone has a death and is suffering, like there, I think we’re like, Oh, we need to do things communally. But I think we aren’t, even then we don’t do it enough probably.
And then I think it’s the small things, right? How do I normalize? the patience and share with others. For example, in my undergrad lab meeting every week that we have in the science virtues lab at Baylor, we are a ritual we’ve created is we all start each meeting with what is our gratitude and what is our growth from the end.
Just real quick, go around and share. Everyone shares their thanks. And then a lot of times it’s like something I’m separate, like I’m learning to be patient in this and I’m learning to grow in this and really. Having that regular conversation. And then we can know each other’s struggles by creating rituals like that.
And I think we have them in our faith traditions. Um, many, many faith traditions. I’m Episcopalian as well, so we have our liturgy, but I think other faith traditions have it as well. And I think even in non-faith based settings, right? In our lab, we aren’t doing it as a spiritual tradition, but it can be so helpful, and to just make that a common part of the conversation.
Pam King: You create a moment where it’s beyond the self. We’re sharing our gratitude. We’re sharing our growth journey together. And we’re not doing this alone. We’re doing this together. The big picture, the telos, is something that we hold in mind for thriving.
And in your writing, I think this is, we both share that virtues really help us not only modulate or regulate almost like the fuel system of heading towards our telos or purpose, but it’s also a guidance system in reminding us actively of where we’re headed and that pausing to reflect on why we’re being patient or what we’re grateful for really helps us keep those life goals before us.
Well, I’d love to ask you, you know, it’s one thing to be the world’s expert on patience, and it’s another thing to live it. And you know, I often find that people study things that not only are opportunistic, but that are meaningful or have had salience or they’re curious about in their own life. And I wonder if you’d be willing to share about that patience in your own life, a past experience or currently how you wrestle with it.
Sarah Schnitker: Yeah. I mean, it’s a very personal virtue to me. Um, yeah, I mentioned earlier how I started studying patience my first year of grad school. Very soon after, I started to experience some very serious chronic health problems.
One of the things I have is called Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome. It’s as bad as it sounds, and I laugh about it now when it’s under control. But, you know, basically I started throwing up one day in grad school, and basically threw up straight for about six months. And extremely serious, took a long time to figure out what was going on.
extremely uncertain. And then even since then, it is chronic, so it never goes away. It’s definitely a life hardship that in my early 20s started to learn about and just realized how many people have burdens like this. And to realize I was not well equipped at that time to deal with it. It definitely gave a whole new understanding at a deep level of what it means to be patient, or to try to be patient, and also made me aware of how I wish there were more tools and things readily available in the world to help people be ready for this.
Because I think at some point in life, everyone’s going to get something hard. People don’t get it till later in life, but I, many people get it earlier. And how do we prepare for when you do get there to that thing? And sometimes you’re at a disadvantage if you’ve never had some big, hard things. Then when the big thing comes, you aren’t ready to suffer well.
And so it, my own experience with that just has. Given a deeper sense of urgency, I think, I mean, right, but be very patient in my pursuit of the research. But just that this matters.
Pam King: Patience has both religious and philosophical connotations, and Sarah helps to frame the pursuit of patience as a pursuit of wisdom and as a daily way of life.
So, Sarah, people often say patience is a virtue. Is it really, is it always a virtue? Can you have too much patience or not enough? How does that work?
Sarah Schnitker: You know, I say patience is indeed a virtue. And what we think of as too much or too little patience is actually not patience at all. That we are actually talking about vices.
And it’s really cool, Aristotle, many, many years ago, he said, talked about this idea that virtues are really this golden mean, this middle way between a vice of excess of too much and a vice of deficiency or too little. And that this is a beautiful way to think about patience. So I often think about impatience as a vice next to patience as a vice That we all think about, where you’re reckless, you’re just going forward, that would be too little patience, right?
You’re deficient. But too much patience, what that would end up being a vice is what I like to call apathy or passivity. There’s even the term acedia or akedia, that is you’ve given up and totally disengaged from the good and pursuing love and justice. And that is now a vice and is not patience because patience regulates you to stick with it.
And what can happen is you become so overwhelmed with the emotion. I think that’s really a more of a failure of patience. At least if you’re angry, you’re still fighting there. You’ve just, I throw my hands up and we’ll let evil win or we’ll let the good go. And so I think in U. S. history, patience has at times and still is weaponized and is.
a way to oppress, telling people to be patient. And that is not patience at all. And when they mean when they say be patient is be passive. And so when we think about, for example, the civil rights movement and continued work for social justice today, or other important times of moving forward to promote justice and love in the world, that we cannot fall prey to either the vice of excess or vice the deficiency.
We need to stay calm, regulated in a way that allows us to move forward strategically and with purpose and to actually achieve the goal and not get reckless and mess it up, but not fall prey to passivity and give up.
Pam King: Sarah pointed out that patience pairs quite well with courage. When suffering and fear are both in the mix, that can create chaos. So I asked her about how these complimentary virtues can work together,
Sarah Schnitker: and our data also suggests that we need to consider patience alongside other virtues. And one virtue that we’ve put forward in particular is the virtue of courage.
That courage and patience are complimentary. that having both of them strong allows you to avoid those vices that they share the places that too little patience is recklessness. That’s what too much courage starts to almost look like is recklessness, right? And too much patience is passivity. Too little courage leads to passivity.
And so these two in concert. are potent, they’re one two punch, right? And, right, and our data in our goals study shows this, that when you have both, that’s when you’re really flourishing, that’s when you’re actually pursuing those goals well, well, and so I like to always talk about patience, alongside courage and a whole host of other virtues, right?
We talked about self control, we can talk about love. I mean, we need the hope, we need them all in the mix, but I think patience and courage in particular, we want to keep them both moving forward.
Pam King: I love your offering that. I think this is so important. It’s so dynamic because so often in our world, we get really black and white.
And there’s such paradox in holding courage and patience together. And when you’re a person with, you know, a transcendent narrative, whether you’re a Christian or whatever your pursuit of justice and being love in this world, like to live out love, we need patience. I know I do with my kids to be a loving parent, but we need courage to, to love boldly.
and in face of injustice. And I love your comment about being strategic about moving forward determined by purpose. And I think one of the words you’ve given me that’s been so helpful about patience that I hadn’t thought about was how patience and courage keep us engaged. And it’s not passivity. It’s not dulling one’s emotional response.
It’s not numbing out. It’s staying fully engaged and present.
Sarah Schnitker: I think even loving your enemy, right? Your enemy might be the person who is not working for Justin, but you are still loving them and you are patient, but you also are courageous and speak truth like that. That is a hard feat. I say we’re not doing it so well in our country at the moment when you look around our polarized world, but I think we must have patience.
Pam King: How then can we become patient? What incremental steps can we pursue that will cultivate the patience that can so deeply improve our lives and lead us towards purpose? Sarah offered some practical tips and guidance for growing more patient. She encourages us to identify, imagine, and think.
She started with identify, how can we become aware of our situation and see the need for patience?
Sarah Schnitker: The first one is to identify your emotions and just identify, stop, understand what is happening, what’s happening in your body, why, what’s going on? And so this could play out in a variety of scenarios, right? Child rearing, right? Let’s say you have a teenager, you’re about to, Once you scream at them and vice versa, they are also frustrated with you, right?
So as a parent, just stop. What am I feeling right now? I’m angry. I’m actually scared. Is that actually what’s going on? So just to take, stop, take a breath, take a pause, kind of a tune in and become aware of what you’re feeling and why you’re feeling it. This sounds actually so simple, but actually so, so hard.
And so I think there’s a variety of practices you can start to engage on a daily basis to start to build that skill. So basic, just sometime, like one thing I heard that I practiced for a while is every time I walked through a doorway, take a deep breath and just notice what I’m feeling, like kind of some very basic mindfulness practices.
And there’s a lot of mindfulness tools out there to go to and. kind of calm breathing, like just, but cultivating that awareness. There’s actually research showing that having a more diverse emotion lexicon, I think we find that Just that in itself can actually help you with your emotion regulation. So yeah, I think that attuning is really key.
And I do agree, Pam, at this stage, it’s not judging it, really. It’s really just identifying it and just, and feeling it for a moment. And, yeah. Just being there with it, I think is key.
Pam King: The next step in cultivating patience is imagine. Can we explore our emotions and feelings and connect our experience to them?
Sarah Schnitker: And so then after that identify, we move into the imagine phase and this is now we want to start imagining situation in a new way. And so doing some kind of mental gymnastics in a way, like workout. And start to think about things differently and to imagine in a way that can create some distance psychologically and take this from a very hot emotional state and move to a more analytic way of processing that thinks about it differently.
And one of the most common methods that has This huge empirical support is what we call reappraisal. And this is, okay, take a simple situation. How can you think about it differently? That might help you to bring down the emotion. So for example, with the pandemic, oh my goodness, beginning of the pandemic, we all were stuck at home.
You saw people engaging in a lot of reappraisal, a lot of parents are like, oh, I get to spend time with my family or I. get to spend more time with my partner, or this is an opportunity to slow down and reevaluate what is good about life. And so one type of reappraisal really is benefit finding that is highly successful because it starts to then even induce gratitude.
But that’s one way, um, reappraisal can also be taking someone else’s perspective. So this is really helpful when other people are the source of frustration. So maybe your spouse or partner, that’s something that frustrates you. You can try to reappraise and think about it from their perspective. And it sounds simple.
It’s not that easy, actually. And it takes patience, right? And just taking the moment. And so one thing I’ve suggested over the years, and we’ve done in our research, is It might be too hard to do it in the moment when you’re starting and when you’re beginning to intentionally try to cultivate your patience, but maybe take some time at the beginning of the day or the end of the day, or maybe your car ride home from work is a good moment for reflection.
And to say, All right, every ride home from work this week, I’m going to think about what was the situation that was most stressful or led to me being impatient today and kind of go through the process there. Okay, what was I feeling? Why was I feeling it? How could I reappraise it? to think about it differently.
Pam King: Finally, Sync. How can we develop a goal based plan for moving forward?
Sarah Schnitker: With the Sync, here is where you get the why. It’s not just identifying your telos and your big purpose in life, but then connecting these two. experiences to that. How does my frustrating co worker, how does being patient with them actually relate to who I want to be in this world and what I want to do at a very big spiritual beyond the self level?
How does even the way I sit with in traffic or the way I deal with an illness or the way, right? All these things, once you make it connected to that big thing, You actually want to be patient instead of just saying, this doesn’t matter, right? It doesn’t matter how I interact with this person or this or my child or my spouse, but and say, actually, no, this matters.
And it matters because it’s somehow related to this big thing.
Pam King: I think that’s so profound because we often can say, Oh, this is my goal. This is my hopes. These are my aims. And one of the reasons I like to cast and tell us quite broadly to include the goals, the roles, and the soul. It’s because sometimes we need to understand like patience in light of this is going to enable me to be better in relationship or better for my parenting journey or my children long term. So to hold ourselves as whole people and realize, you know, patience is a whole life game.
Sarah Schnitker: And that’s where it matters too. So interpersonal patience, especially, is what we find really matters for well being outcomes.
Pam King: One very interesting study Sarah and her team implemented was a look at patience and fasting, specifically by looking at the practices of Muslims during the sacred month of Ramadan, a time of prayer, fasting, no drink or food during daylight, devotion, and community, and is actually happening right now as the This episode is being released.
Sarah Schnitker: We’re really interested in not just drawing out the psychological ingredients, but we really think and have data suggesting that actually having it practiced as a spiritual practice is essential. So one of the studies we’ve done in the last couple of years, and that is so important So groundbreaking and so innovative on a couple levels, and I can say that because I am kind of the cheerleader of this.
I’m part of it, but I need to credit Merve Balkaya Inche, Medea Tazeem in particular, who are both in my lab as the leaders of this project. We wanted to look at the practice of fasting. in Muslim American adolescence. And so almost all religious traditions have some type of fasting practice where you refrain from food and drink.
And during the holy month of Ramadan in Islam, they do the dry fast from sunrise to sunset. I have personally done fasting from food for 24 hours, but I’ve never done a dry fast. It is very intense. I’m watching my friends, who do it. It is a serious adjustment for the body. It’s interesting in Islam, it is actually called oftentimes the month of patience.
And from that tradition, it is viewed that this is really a time to cultivate patience. And that this practice, even though it taxes you so much, that actually builds patience, which is kind of wild to think about, but we know from some of our psychological theory around regulation and things like that, that indeed we, by practicing these skills and these habits, people actually can build up their patience and self control and things like that through the practice of it.
And the other thing that’s really interesting with Ramadan too, is just, this isn’t just a fast, right? That this is. whole spiritual month and their special prayers for the meal you have before you start fasting for the meal when you break your fast. There are special corporate events and prayers and So there is, it’s a very holy sacred time where while you are physically fasting from food and drink, you are also doing something instead that you are praying and you are connecting this activity to the transcendent in a very potent way.
And so what we did is we looked at adolescents. We had about 240 Muslim American adolescents, which is a really large sample from around the United States in the whole country. We had them do an intense study. So for seven days before Ramadan began, three times a day, we would ping them on their cell phones and ask them, how patient are you right now?
Are you grateful right now? All these different things. We’ve asked them what they do the hour before. Have you prayed Quran, right? So we’re doing this intensive sampling. So that we get it in the moment without any bias of, Oh, yeah, I fasted today. Did you fast right now? And patience was one of the things we were really looking at.
And so we did this for seven days, three times a day before Ramadan began, during kind of one of the holiest weeks in Ramadan, the whole month. And then a month after that, after Ramadan was over, we looked at their patience alongside some other virtues. And what we found is that these adolescents, and this is within individuals, we were able to analyze that they increased significantly in patience during Ramadan.
And they sustained it, not quite at the same, the super high level that they had during Ramadan, but higher than they started a month after Ramadan.
Pam King: This illustrates just practically how you were talking about with patience or virtues, you like to think about the why and the what or the how, and that the physical practice of restraining from food, what that does to your body physiologically, the other habits that are added of prayers, um, sharing together cultivates muscles, but also the practices really reinforce the why and why this is done.
It would be hard to do. that kind of fasting in the name of vanity and diet. But when you have a beyond the self spiritual purpose, it makes more sense. And a community that’s doing it along with you to support that.
Sarah Schnitker: Right. We’re all doing it together. And I think this is something really interesting for the experience of Muslim Americans where they are a religious minority in this country and how one of our future studies we dream of is to do it actually also in a Muslim majority country to see when the entire community is doing this, how that works differently or similarly.
Because it’s. So people actually in Muslim majority countries, the whole sleep schedule tends to change during Ramadan. And that even happens to a certain extent for Muslims in the U. S. But the rest of the world, the rest of their community is not changing with them.
Pam King: People from all traditions can learn from this study of how practices connect us to our bodies.
They connect us to our purposes and our beliefs. And I think in a day and age where there’s a lot of questions about attending religious services or What is religion that your science really reinvigorates? The importance of spirituality. and of spiritual disciplines or spiritual practices that they’re not just to check off the list but they are very formative and shape us into people who can thrive and contribute to our society.
I hope you can now see how patience is interwoven through a life of purpose, spiritual health, and wholeness. Patience is an essential part of a thriving life. So I closed our conversation by asking Sarah my beloved question, What is thriving to you?
Sarah Schnitker: To me, it’s loving God and loving others and living in a society where we have love and justice.
I think that is the very simplest view. And then my mission as a human is to understand how we can thrive and how people can cultivate virtues so that we can achieve our love and our justice as a community.
Pam King: Well, I love how you live that out through your scholarship and mentoring, parenting, relating.
Sarah Schnitker: You do too, Pam. You are always a great example of bringing your whole person to your work as a scientist, which is not always encouraged in psychological science. I love being at places, I loved being at Fuller and now at Baylor that, that actually see the whole person.
Pam King: We want people to thrive as their whole selves.
Well, thank you for your time.
Sarah Schnitker: So grateful. Yes. Thank you.
Pam King: Sarah Schnitker’s psychological research is a refreshing reminder that patience is more than relevant. It’s timeless for a reason, and it’s essential for navigating our modern technological world.
The key takeaways that I will carry with me from this conversation are the following.
Waiting is not easy, but in our fast paced world, we need to slow down and cultivate the timeless virtue of patience.
Patience helps us both to regulate and reappraise our emotional life. helping us deal with really difficult situations.
We can learn and cultivate patience in a variety of contexts in the family, school, work, and its uptake is enhanced when supported by a spiritual community.
When paired with courage, patience has the potential to make us truly resilient.
Finally, patience is transformative for our thriving and better world. Deeply connected to our pursuit of meaning and purpose.
As the episode wraps up today, I would really appreciate your taking a few moments to fill out our survey and offer feedback on guests you’d love to hear from. topics you’d like to hear covered on thriving in spiritual health, and how we can grow within four. You can find the survey in the episode show notes, or you can type in your browser, the thrive center.
org backslash. Thanks so much for helping us grow With & For.
With & For is a production of The Thrive Center at Fuller Theological Seminary. This episode featured Sarah Schnitker. This season, new episodes drop every Monday. For more information, visit our website, thethrivecenter.org, where you’ll find all sorts of resources to support your pursuit of wholeness and a life.
I am so grateful to the staff and fellows of the Thrive Center and our With and For podcast team. Jill Westbrook is our Senior Director and Producer. Lauren Kim is our Operations Manager. Wren Juergensen is our Social Media Graphic Designer. Evan Rosa is our Consulting Producer. And special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology and Marriage and Family Therapy.
I’m your host, Dr. Pam King. Thank you for listening.
Episode Summary
What are you willing to wait for? What are you willing to suffer for? Research psychologist Sarah Schnitker (Baylor University) has done groundbreaking work in the science of patience. By exploring the ways to become more patient with others and ourselves—and discovering the role of this timeless virtue in a flourishing life—she offers us a freeing and stabilizing approach to thinking about goals, perseverance, and navigating our fast-paced world.
Show Notes
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“People who are patient are not less assertive, they are not passive, and if anything they actually achieve their goals more successfully. Anything worthwhile, you'll have to wait and you'll have to suffer. And so we need patience to be able to suffer well. Patience is not an eradication of emotions. It is the ability to feel those emotions, but to stay level headed to regulate through them. As a virtue, patience, I see as doing that for something beyond the self. So patience is really staying engaged continuing forward and pursuing the good.” (Sarah Schnitker)
We live in a high-speed, high-efficiency, get-it-done-yesterday society. Why would we talk about patience? But the old adage, “Patience is a virtue” is true. A core ingredient to our spiritual health in our frenetic modern world is the ability to live fully in the moment, exercise control and stability through arduous or challenging (and even traumatic) circumstances—doing so with poise and style.Research psychologist Dr. Sarah Schnitker of Baylor University has pioneered the scientific study of patience among the virtues, exploring the physical, emotional, spiritual, and philosophical dimensions of this timeless and timely virtue. She defines patience as the ability to remain calm in the face of adversity and suffering—being able to wait well and not become inordinately overwhelmed by anxiety or sorrow.Patience makes us ask not just “What’s worth waiting for?”, but “What’s worth suffering for?” Our English word for suffering comes from the Latin word for “enduring suffering.” And Sarah Schnitker brings theologically rich dimensions to her psychological study of patience.
In this conversation with Sarah Schnitker, we discuss:
- The definition of patience as a virtue
- The essential role patience can play in our pursuit of meaning and purpose
- The connections between waiting and suffering—and the theological and spiritual context for patience
- How patience is related to goal-setting and complementary to courage
- And Sarah offers guidance for how to cultivate patience in our own lives, using a research-backed strategy to identify, imagine, and think.
Show Notes
- Learn about Sarah Schnitker’s research on virtue and character development on Science of Virtues Lab.
- Pam King introduces Sarah Schnitker (Baylor University)
- Biblical concept of patience as “long-suffering”
- David Bailey Harned—eradicating problems and losing faith in patience
- “Anything worthwhile you’ll have to wait and you’ll have to suffer.”
- “I think many people don't have that clarity about what it is in their life that they are willing to suffer for. So I think that search for meaning and purpose involves that.”
- Patience as a “beyond the self” virtue
- Definition: “the ability to remain calm in the face of adversity, suffering, and waiting”
- “It's not that you don't get emotions. It is the ability to feel those emotions, but to stay level headed to regulate through them.”
- Patience and goal-setting
- Patience and self-control as different but working together
- “Patience is really part of that facilitation of adaptive goal pursuit, which is really cool to find and also to show that meaning really matters too. That meaning pushes you to be more patient.”
- Telos: “the intersection of our goals, our roles, and our souls”
- Patience and courage
- Habits to help us reappraise meaning and purpose in the world
- “This moment is not forever…”
- Kendall Bronk on patience in emerging adults
- Patience as “the ability to stay calm, but actively engaged in the face of frustration or suffering.”
- Depression, mental health
- Mark Labberton’s story of allowing the rituals and habits of Christian sacraments and liturgy to calm and regulate and provide meaning
- Autopilot as the virtue
- Gratitude and patience as a communal practice—what is communal patience?
- What is your gratitude? What is your growth?
- Virtues help us as a fuel system and guidance system
- Patience in Sarah Schnitker’s personal life
- Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome
- Virtue Ethics and Greek philosopher Aristotle
- The “Golden Mean” of virtues
- Impatience is too little of the virtue of patience (the vice of deficiency)
- Passivity (or the spiritual vice of “acedia”) is too much of patience (the vice of excess)
- Weaponizing patience is not a virtue.
- How patience pairs well with courage
- When you have both patience and courage, that’s when you’re pursuing your goals well and loving boldly, seeking justice
- Patience and loving your enemy
- Practical Steps: How can we become patient?
- Identify, Imagine, and Sync
- Identify your emotions, notice what you’re feeling, developing a larger emotional lexicon
- Imagine, think about things differently, think differently, reappraisal to bring down the emotion, perspective taking
- Sync, moving forward with a goal based plan connected to meaning and purpose
- “Patience is a whole-life game.”
- Patience and the Muslim practice of Ramadan
- Measuring the impact of fasting during Ramadan on the cultivation of patience
- Understanding the sacred practice of spiritual fasting and its connection to virtue development
- Patience increased significantly during Ramadan
- Practicing patience as a spiritual community
- How practices connect us to our bodies, purposes, and beliefs
- Sarah Schnitker on “What is thriving?”
- Loving God and loving others for the sake of justice in society
- Pam King’s key takeaways:
- Waiting is not easy, but in our fast-paced world, we need to slow down and cultivate the timeless virtue of patience.
- Patience helps us both to regulate and reappraise our emotional life, helping us deal with really difficult situations.
- We can learn and cultivate patience in a variety of contexts in the family, school, work, and its uptake is enhanced when supported by a spiritual community.
- When paired with courage, patience has the potential to make us truly resilient.
- Patience is transformative for our thriving and deeply connected to our pursuit of meaning and purpose.
About Sarah Schnitker
Sarah Schnitker is Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Baylor University. She holds a PhD and an MA in Personality and Social Psychology from the University of California, Davis, and a BA in Psychology from Grove City College. Schnitker studies virtue and character development in adolescents and emerging adults, with a focus on the role of spirituality and religion in virtue formation. She specializes in the study of patience, self-control, gratitude, generosity, and thrift. Schnitker has procured more than $3.5 million in funding as a principle investigator on multiple research grants, and she has published in a variety of scientific journals and edited volumes. Schnitker is a Member-at-Large for APA Division 36 – Society for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, is a Consulting Editor for the organization’s flagship journal, Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, and is the recipient of the Virginia Sexton American Psychological Association’s Division 36 Mentoring Award. Follow her on Twitter @DrSchnitker.About the Thrive Center
- Learn more at thethrivecenter.org.
- Follow us on Instagram @thrivecenter
- Follow us on X @thrivecenter
- Follow us on LinkedIn @thethrivecenter
About Dr. Pam King
Dr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy. Follow her @drpamking.About With & For
- Host: Pam King
- Senior Director and Producer: Jill Westbrook
- Operations Manager: Lauren Kim
- Social Media Graphic Designer: Wren Juergensen
- Consulting Producer: Evan Rosa
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