As I type this a freshly baked strawberry cake sits in my kitchen waiting to be covered with vanilla buttercream frosting.
It’s more than a highly anticipated treat. It’s a delicious reminder of how sweet life can be when we’re willing to wait.
I’ve been working with a registered dietitian for a few weeks now, and one of the first goals we set was limiting desserts to two days a week.
The point of this goal has less to do with calories and more to do with teaching my body that sweets are meant to be savored. Making myself wait until Friday and Saturday to enjoy a treat has definitely made me appreciate them more.
However, baking a cake is an exercise of patience in itself.
First, the ingredients need time to reach room temperature. Is this step absolutely required? No, but it does help the cake bake evenly and come out fluffier. Though it means waiting an extra two hours, I never skip it because I refuse to waste my dessert day on a dense, greasy mess.
My patience seems to have been rewarded. The cake looks beautiful with even coloring and a high-rise, but, alas, I’m STILL waiting for it to cool off before frosting it.
Could I have gone ahead and frosted it fresh out of the oven?
If you’ve ever watched a baking challenge on tv, then you already know the disastrous consequences of putting buttercream on a warm cake.
It’s been a long week. I owe it to myself to just wait for the cake to cool completely, so I can bask in the satisfaction of having made something pleasing to the eyes and taste buds.
In many ways, patience is an act of self-love and kindness since it often results in a satisfying payoff in the end.
The benefits of patience aren’t always obvious in the moment, but they’re worthwhile—helping us persevere with long-term goals like emotional wellness, physical health, and financial stability.
Patience and Emotional Healing
If you’re on an emotional healing journey, you’ve probably heard the phrase, “Progress isn’t linear,” a time or two (or a million).
Sometimes we feel like we’ve finally gotten a handle on our emotions, but other times anxiety, depression, or irritability show up unannounced to wreck our positive vibes.
This is why patience is vital when it comes to emotional healing.
When we hit a low after a period of steadiness, it can be really tempting to simply write ourselves—or our coping skills—off as a total failure and give up on the pursuit of emotional wellness.
I found myself at this crossroad recently. I’d been so invested in my blog that I let my daily brain work routine get nudged all the way back to the dustiest corners of my mind.
I reverted to old habits like doomscrolling, and the flash flood of unchecked negativity sent me into the sharpest emotional low I’ve had since locking in on my mental wellness journey.
I was ranting non-stop to my husband about the ills of the world, impatient with people in traffic, easily distracted, and even more disorganized than usual.
For a moment, it felt like I’d slid right back to rock bottom, but I quickly realized the difference between this minor setback and the state I’d been in during my hospitalization two and a half years ago.
Back then, I didn’t have an organized toolbox of mental health tools and strategies, but now I do.
The answer was simple: I needed to acknowledge where I was, forgive myself, and recommit to my daily brain work routine.
Because of my ADHD, I’m prone to becoming hyperfocused, and I’d rediscovered my love of writing, so, naturally, I wanted to do it all the time. Letting my brain work fall to the wayside wasn’t a moral failing. It’s just how my neurodivergent brain works.
I wouldn’t shame someone with a medical condition like diabetes for not being able to manage their symptoms all the time—so why do that to myself?
As for doomscrolling, the news cycle is designed to exploit the brain’s negativity bias, and I, unfortunately, fell into the trap and got sucked in…again.
Did I circumvent the safeguards I’d put in place to minimize my exposure to bad news?
Yes, I’m willing to admit that my curiosity got the better of me.
Still, the damage was already done.
There was no point in berating myself for doomscrolling. I simply needed to go back to limiting my news intake to the simple, fact-based bullet points in my daily digest.
I’m happy to report that putting my mental health strategies back at the top of my to-do list and restricting my news intake have, in fact, restored my positive vibes. I’m back on track in my emotional healing journey.
None of us are perfect, and the world we live in can be incredibly disorienting at times.
Setbacks are to be expected, so we need to be patient with ourselves when we fall short.
After all, the only way to truly fail at emotional healing is by refusing to get back up after a rough patch.
Listen to this song for inspiration to get back on your mental wellness journey:
Patience and Physical Health
Patience not only helps us take care of our mental wellbeing. It helps us take care of our bodies as well.
Healthy weight management is an important aspect of self-care.
According to the American Heart Association, “Obesity contributes directly to incident cardiovascular risk factors, including dyslipidemia, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and sleep disorders.”
Nonetheless, many of us struggle to maintain a healthy weight.
Research suggests that only 20% of individuals who lose weight manage to keep it off long-term, and this isn’t surprising when we examine what’s often promoted by the wellness and fitness industry.
Eat no meat. Eat only meat. Eat only what cavemen ate. Don’t eat carbs. NEVER eat sugar.
We’re told to do everything except build sustainable habits over time. Learning to properly fuel our body’s needs, hitting at least 7k steps a day, and lifting heavy objects 3-4 times a week just doesn’t sell as well as 30-day fat blast challenges, flat tummy teas, and meal planning services.
We’re often pressured to lose weight in relatively narrow timeframes and for aesthetic reasons.
“Hot girl summer is two months away, besties!”
I’ve recently restarted my own wellness journey, but it has nothing to do with Summer 2026.
I’m two years away from turning 40, and I plan to enjoy the second half of my life to the fullest.
If I want to be able to do things like travel the world, I’ll need good musculoskeletal health to get around safely and comfortably.
A major caveat to this is the decline in bone density and muscle quality that happens as estrogen levels decrease during perimenopause and menopause.
Fortunately, it’s never too late to build habits that support healthy bones, muscle retention, and even hypertrophy—A.K.A. gains.
A lifestyle that includes 2-3 strength training sessions a week, plyometrics, and a higher protein diet that promotes a healthy gut microbiome not only helps women maintain their bone density and muscle mass. It can even reverse osteoporosis and muscle loss in postmenopausal women.
The key is consistency, though.
That’s why I find myself, once again, investing time and energy into exercise and learning to eat with intention—not too much, but never too little.
The difference is that this time my end goal is ideally forty to fifty years out—which means these habits need to truly become a lifestyle.
I need to picture myself as a deadlifting, bench pressing, and barbell squatting granny.
Realistically, this means I won’t be hitting the beach this year looking much different than I did last year because extreme caloric deficits are just not sustainable. Plus, they eat up precious muscle well before they even start to tackle the excess fat.
I can accept this slow progress because my why is so much bigger than aesthetics.
Even better—if I consistently strength train and eat in a way that supports my aims, I’ll be healthier, happier, and look even better than I did in my twenties.
Summer 2026 might not be my year of transformation, but Summer 2027 will be a totally different story.
Still, I don’t need to wait until then to love my body for what it is now. It built three amazing humans, and it helps me take care of them and my husband.
You don’t need to hit a goal weight or body fat percentage to love your body either. Each and every one of us was gifted with an amazing body that is capable of amazing things.
Our nervous system keeps us alive even during times when thinking feels too hard.
Our hearts beat. Our lungs breathe. Our cells regenerate.
They deserve time and attention well beyond a single season. Instead of shrinking ourselves to appease strangers on the beach, let’s show appreciation for our bodies by patiently building habits that’ll keep them going for decades to come.
Patience and Financial Wellness
Another way we can live a full life in our older years is by making wise financial decisions now.
Admittedly, this can be a real challenge when we’re constantly being manipulated by corporate marketing to make impulsive purchases.
I recently watched a video about how TikTok is being inundated with “slop”—and not of the AI variety.
People are allegedly telling the most outrageous stories or staging confrontations with their “cheating” spouses to sneakily promote sponsored products.
In my series about inner peace, I explained how negativity bias is actually a protective feature of our nervous system, not a bug.
This is why we stop scrolling when we hear something along the lines of, “Get ready with me to go catch my husband and his mistress in the act.”
We often chalk it up to us just being nosy, but it’s more likely that our brain wants us to take notes of what to look for in case something like that happens to us.
The whole time we’re sitting there listening to all the sordid details, the name and logo of a new app keeps popping up in the frame.
It’s a service that promises to help you find your partner’s dating profiles.
Your mind is now racing. Now that you think about it, your spouse has been acting a little strange lately.
One simple search with this tool, and you’ll have your answer in seconds.
You whip out your credit card. Who cares if one search is $20?! Your marriage is on the line.
Twenty dollars seems like a small price to pay, but what happens when your favorite artist or brand launches a special edition item in limited quantities?
Are you tempted to put that $130 sweatshirt on a credit card out of FOMO?
Even worse is when companies remove your need to grab a credit card at all by accepting payment from buy-now-pay-later companies like Klarna or Afterpay.
Why wait to pay for the whole thing in full when we can treat ourselves now at a fraction of the price—am I right?
I think our future selves would whole-heartedly disagree—especially if they’re dealing with exorbitant gas prices and inflation.
Instant gratification feels like an act of self-love or kindness in the moment, but it can quickly spiral into self-sabotage when it becomes a habit rather than an intentional choice.
Unsecured credit card debt and personal loans often come with higher interest rates that compound over time. The longer we carry a balance on these accounts, the more our debt grows month to month.
This can make it even more expensive to borrow since interest rates tend to increase alongside our debt-to-income ratio. Heaven forbid we need to finance a medically necessary procedure or car repair when we’re still trying to pay off the retail therapy we did months ago.
Debt not only affects us financially. It impacts our physical and mental health as well.
Our nervous system doesn’t differentiate between stress caused by a credit statement or a lion ready to pounce. It senses a threat and reacts accordingly—increased heart rate, rapid breathing, slowed digestion, panic attacks.
Most of us will spend the bulk of our adult lives working hard. Don’t we deserve to feel good about the things we have?
Saving up for the things we want may not seem that exciting while we’re in the process of waiting, but it’s better than having the experience clouded by guilt and anxiety over how we’re going to settle our debt later.
Next Steps for Your Self-Discovery Journey
If you’d like to join me in making patience a daily practice this month, here are some resources to help you get started.
Subscribe to receive your free Patience Readiness Toolkit, designed to help you explore this month’s theme at your own pace.
Gentle Ways to Apply This:
- Take inventory of what supports your emotional wellness before life throws a curveball. This free printable, My Emotional Wellness Toolbox: A Personal Reference for Finding Your Way Back, is designed to be a map back to what works for you.
- Build a health vision rooted in who you actually want to be decades from now—not a deadline or a number on a scale. Use this free gentle worksheet, My Physical Health Vision: Building Habits That Last Decades, Not Just a Season, as a gentle guide.
- Think ahead about the impact your financial decisions might have on your future self. This free A Letter From Your Future Self & The Purchase Pause Worksheet printable can help you build the habit of thinking about your future self before your present impulse.
Podcast Recommendations
Bonus Tip:
My strawberry cake is semi-homemade. I made the buttercream frosting from scratch, but don’t be too impressed because homemade frosting is one of the easiest, most forgiving baking items to DIY.
Here’s my favorite recipe: The Best Vanilla Buttercream Frosting – Belle of the Kitchen
Once you make it yourself, you’ll never want to go back to buying the premade stuff.
To save myself a few extra steps, I doctored a box cake mix.
You can use any brand or flavor you’d like and fancy it up with these tips:
- Add one more egg than what the mix requires
- Add a pudding mix with a complementary flavor (or buy a cake mix that already has it)
- Use milk instead of water
- Use butter instead of oil
- Add a teaspoon of a complementary extract
Patience Pays Forward
Your future self deserves to be happy, healthy, and free from unnecessary debt. They’ll thank you for not giving up on your emotional wellness after every setback. They’ll rejoice in being able to chase after their grandkids because you used your younger years to build healthy habits. They’ll be relieved that they aren’t in debt as the cost of living rises year after year.
Every act of patience is a long-term investment that compounds like interest—enjoyed by you, not some creditor.
If this post resonates with you, please share it with anyone who needs encouragement to be patient with their progress.
What obstacles have you overcome in your emotional, physical, or financial journey, and how did patience play a role in your success?
Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. If you’d like to receive an email notification when the next post goes live, you can subscribe using the form below. Next week we’ll begin exploring how patience lends itself to joyful parenting.
Keep it kind, respectful, and focused on self-love and growth—let’s make this a safe, uplifting space. 🌿