Brain health · Sanctum

Difficulty waiting

Waiting your turn, queuing, holding a thought until it is your moment, or hearing ‘in a minute’, can be genuinely uncomfortable. It is not bad manners. The wait itself feels almost physically hard to bear, and it has to be now.

This sits alongside impulsivity. A brain that struggles to hold the brakes also struggles to hold a pause. Anticipation builds fast and sits badly, so waiting is not just boring, it is effortful in a way that is hard to explain to someone who does not feel it.

In children it gets called impatience or being demanding; in adults it hides as restlessness, interrupting, or a low tolerance for delay. Either way the underlying difficulty, that waiting simply costs more, goes unnamed.

We treat difficulty waiting as part of the picture, not a behaviour to correct in isolation, because where it comes from is what matters. None of this is a diagnosis. It is what we explore with you.

Written by Dr Asad RaffiConsultant Psychiatrist · Founder & Medical Director