Sidewalk Rage

Why Your Brain Hates Slowpokes

The high speed of society has jammed your internal clock.

“Why are we impatient? It’s a heritage from our evolution,” says Marc Wittmann, a psychologist at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany. Impatience made sure we didn’t die from spending too long on a single unrewarding activity. It gave us the impulse to act.

But that good thing is gone. The fast pace of society has thrown our internal timer out of balance. It creates expectations that can’t be rewarded fast enough—or rewarded at all. When things move more slowly than we expect, our internal timer even plays tricks on us, stretching out the wait, summoning anger out of proportion to the delay.

“The link between time and emotion is a complex one,” says James Moore, a neuroscientist at Goldsmiths, University of London. “A lot is dependent on expectation—if we expect something to take time then we can accept it. Frustration is often a consequence of expectations being violated.”

“Time stretches,” Wittman says. “We get mad.”