Much of the modern world seems to be obsessed with speed and efficiency. Pretty much anything can be done or can happen with the click of a button or a voice command. As a result, numerous people experience stress on a daily basis and find it difficult to escape from it. Some have even become chronically anxious or depressed.
It’s therefore understandable that many individuals are searching for inner peace. But if you really want to achieve it, you have to be intentional about it first. You also have to remember that it involves a lifelong journey requiring strong commitment and persistence.
This article will provide you with information on how to find your inner peace as well as lasting happiness. Keep reading to discover the fundamentals of inner peace and how you can apply them in your life.
What Is Inner Peace?
Inner peace is the state of physical and spiritual calm even in the presence of stressors. This means that even if you’re dealing with problems on the outside, you can still be at peace on the inside.
Inner peace refers to an internal condition of spiritual and mental peace. It allows you to hear silence in the midst of a chaotic and deafening world.
Inner Peace and Modern Society
The world we live in today expects everyone and everything to be accessible anywhere all the time. This is mostly owing to smart technology and the internet, which are hallmarks of modernity.
You may have noticed that you have short breaks at work. Your weekends and rest days might slowly be turning into workdays, too. Perhaps you no longer anticipate going on vacations because you’re hustling for your retirement.
More mental health issues tend to surface because of this kind of lifestyle. In certain countries where overworking is a norm, suicide has become more common than ever before.
If you used to feel the pressure at work and the need to compete with your colleagues for job promotions, this time it’s different. You’re now going head-to-head with the whole world that’s putting immense pressure on and demanding so much from you.
Th0se are just some of the reasons that people seek inner peace these days. They may have already forgotten what it’s like to have weekends off, not be overworked, and feel appreciated at work or at home.
Why Is Inner Peace Important?
When you finally find your inner peace, you could become less worried, anxious, and fearful. It might help you attain self-actualization as well. There are so many possible benefits to having inner peace, such as the following:
- Function better in doing everyday tasks
- Better management of difficult emotions
- High level of energy
- Fewer worries and less stress
- Have a positive outlook in life and avoid too much drama
- Appreciate your family and friends and the little things in life such as your ability to walk, eat, and breathe and having a roof over your head
- Become more patient and unhurried and understand that you can do everything at your own pace.
- Interact with others in a kind and compassionate manner
- Be unaffected by negative comments
- Ability to handle toxic people
- More confidence in taking on challenges or activities you’d normally avoid
- Ability to think clearly and make sound judgments even in stressful situations.
- You get enough sleep and have a good appetite. You no longer resort to vices as an effort to run away from your problems.
- Your overall well-being is healthy, which in turn might make you look and feel younger than you actually are.
- You learn to make the most of your life knowing that it’s not going to last forever.
Peace and Happiness
Inner peace is related to happiness, the definition of which is complex and can be subjective. Generally, though, happiness is associated with life satisfaction.
Here are some commonalities between inner peace and happiness:
- Both are linked to positive psychology.
- They’re expressed as positive human experiences.
- Peace is a word often coupled with serenity, happiness, and harmony.
The question of which concept is more important surfaces because there’s a need to define which one leads to the other. Does peace bring happiness, or is it the other way around?
There’s no definite answer to that. According to scholars, the best way to look at the two concepts is to think that happiness and peace have a symbiotic relationship. Both have to do with positive emotions. Exposure to positivity increases your happiness level and gives you more peace of mind.
How Do You Find Inner Peace in Everyday Life?
There are a number of ways you can achieve inner peace. However, it may be challenging at times since you’d need to work hard every day in order to preserve it.
Finding your inner peace and happiness isn’t enough. You need to nurture such emotions by living as harmoniously as possible. Here’s a list of strategies you can use to find and maintain your inner peace:
Spending Time in Nature
One way to achieve serenity is going outside and being in nature. Enjoy the cool breeze and fresh air. You can relieve your stress and worries just by basking in the beauty of the natural environment around you.
Another option to consider is going on a nature retreat. This is meant to help you refocus on your body and mind. It would also encourage you to steer clear of daily stressors such as traffic or work pressure whenever you can. Nature retreats may include visiting parks or participating in religious or non-religious programs.
Meditating
When you practice mindfulness meditation, your anxiety level and risk of depression may decrease. This can also enhance your overall well-being. Mindfulness can be cultivated through meditation exercises such as sitting meditation, walking meditation, and mindful movements.
Meditation helps you focus and become less distracted. In addition, it could improve your emotion regulation, which is your ability to keep your current emotional state in check. Meditation also changes your self-perception. While doing it, you’re talking to yourself in the third person, so you’re encouraged to assess your current situation from a different perspective.
You can try yoga or do daily meditation in the comfort of your own home for at least 40-45 minutes. You might also want to grab a good book on meditation and listen to a podcast on the subject so you can perform it better and maximize your results.
Practicing Gratefulness
You should be grateful for what you already have. This is because you’ll never achieve peace of mind if you keep on poking your nose in other people’s business. Nothing good ever comes out of focusing on what others possess and envying them in the process.
Studies have indicated that those who are happy and at peace are appreciative of and content with their blessings in life. This is owing to how they can easily spot positivity in life. A grateful person prefers to give importance to their interaction and connection with their circumstances and other individuals. They aren’t driven by the desire to collect material possessions, either.
To practice being grateful, intentionally count your blessings. If you want, you can start a journal for that purpose. Every time you wake up in the morning or go to bed at night, write down what you’re thankful for.
Using Mantras
The term “mantra” means “a mind tool or instrument” in Sanskrit. It’s considered sacred, and it can supposedly have a powerful impact on your ability to refocus your subconscious mind.
When a mantra is repeated often enough, it’s said to have the ability to purify your mind and soul. Here are three powerful mantras you can use daily for the sake of boosting your happiness and inner peace:
Mantra 1: “Om Sarvesham Svastir Bhavatu”
This mantra is a universal peace prayer. It means “May you be happy and at peace.” It wishes everyone a sense of completeness and hopes that everyone succeeds in life.
Mantra 2: “Om Namah Shivaya”
This is a salutation to Shiva, one of the main gods of Hinduism. When you use this mantra in meditation, you can receive calmness, self-compassion, and self-confidence.
Mantra 3: “Om or Aum”
This mantra is the sound of creation and the universe. If you chant this while meditating, you may experience self-realization, enlightenment, and freedom.
Guided Meditation
To help cultivate your true inner peace and happiness, you can take advantage of guided meditation. As the term suggests, another person serves as your guide during meditation. Though it includes classical contemplative meditation practices, it can involve the use of guided imagery as well as potent hypnotic suggestions.
Some benefits of guided meditation are improvements in one’s sleep, a healthier weight, and better self-acceptance. You may also successfully attain deep levels of relaxation, which could help with stress relief. Both beginners and advanced practitioners can use this type of meditation.
Be Responsible for Your Actions
Being mature is about being responsible for your actions and taking accountability for your shortcomings. Don’t fall into victim mentality. If you constantly come up with reasons in defense of your actions, you’re not being responsible for yourself.
It’s hard for a lot of people to admit that they’re in the wrong. But doing so will give you peace of mind, contentment, and genuine happiness in the long run.
Accept criticisms and learn from your mistakes. Later on, you can use those learnings to better yourself. You should endeavor to become a resilient person so you won’t make rash decisions and be level-headed no matter the challenge you’re facing.
Wake Up Early
In the past, you may have experienced waking up late. Consequently, you become confused and disorganized as you scramble to make it to your appointment or work on time. What you’ll end up with is chaos, the opposite of inner peace.
Every now and then, things either don’t work out the way you expected them to or turn out worse than you thought because of how tense you are. It’s advisable to be prepared and early so you’ll have enough time to compose yourself and check if you lack anything. Being there 15 minutes in advance is a good idea, though it’d be much better for you to come an hour early.
Don’t Let Past Mistakes Define You
You’re a different person today than you were yesterday. If you’ve made a mistake, the damage has been done. There’s no point in dwelling in the past and feeling down about it for a long period. Instead, aim to be a better person today, tomorrow, and in the days that follow.
Don’t blame yourself for every misfortune you experience or situations you can’t control or prevent. You need to find the balance between taking responsibility for something and acknowledging that uncontrollable situations exist.
To find your personal happiness and peace of mind, remove regret from the picture. Remember: mistakes are part of life. Plus, you’re human, so there’s no way for you to avoid being flawed. Just accept your misgivings and learn from them.
Love Yourself
You should truly love yourself if you want to find genuine happiness and peace. One way to do this is to take care of your physical body. Of course, you have to look after your emotional, mental, and spiritual well-being, too. Taking care of yourself is about eating healthy, exercising habitually, and spending quality time alone.
When you’re filled with self-love, you’re noticeably happier, and everyone around you feels this positive aura. Not only are you at peace, but you impact other people’s energy in the best way, allowing them to find their joy as well.
Don’t Strive to Please Everyone
Here’s the truth: not everyone will like you, but on the upside, not everyone will hate you. So if you constantly seek the admiration and approval of others, you’ll never attain lasting happiness and peace.
Don’t let someone else dictate what you should and shouldn’t do, especially if you know you’re not hurting anybody. Also, stop letting what others think of you get under your skin because at the end of the day, their opinions don’t matter.
Give Yourself a Break
Regardless of your profession or work ethics, you need time to rest so you can perform well in the long term. Think about it: even your appliances and gadgets at home overheat and break down when continuously used for extended periods. You, too, can experience burnout and fatigue if you don’t take a breather.
Since the world won’t stop for you, you have to initiate the break yourself. It’s perfectly fine to put your busy life on a short pause. Like everyone else, you deserve a vacation that’ll allow you to recharge and de-stress.
Cultivate Good, Healthy Relationships
You should strive to develop inner peace and then have it radiate outward. To do this, engage in relationships and choose environments that encourage calm and harmony. Healthy relationships help control the noise you’re exposed to daily. This, in turn, lets you focus more on yourself.
Be Accepting and Content
Acceptance and contentment are important in one’s search for peace of mind. You should welcome all the ups and downs that life will throw at you given that they’re inevitable. What’s more, you need to learn how to deal with even the most challenging situations. This way, you’ll have more time for happiness and less for misery.
As for contentment, keep in mind that this encompasses every aspect of your life. You should be happy with whatever it is that you have now—emotionally, physically, and financially.
Get Rid of Mental Clutter
Decluttering isn’t only limited to the idea of organizing your home and personal belongings. If peace of mind is what you’re after, cleaning out unnecessary and negative thoughts is a must as well.
You may be compelled to clean the moment you see a closet overstuffed with clothes or a kitchen pantry in disarray. If physical disorder stresses you out, how much more the clutter in your head?
With that said, you have to declutter your mind. Weed out the what-ifs and other assumptions that only make you worry, especially those without factual basis. Remind yourself that overthinking about such matters won’t do you any good.
Decluttering and inner peace are concepts requiring consistent learning. When you stop learning, you may unknowingly give superfluous thoughts permission to enter your mind, negatively affecting you. If you can avoid putting yourself in stressful situations, then by all means, do so. Should that be difficult to do, decluttering can help you take control of your life.
Inner Peace and Mental Health
These days, many individuals suffer from various mental health issues. You could be one of those simultaneously drowning at work and struggling with problems at home. Because of that, you may feel the need to start your journey toward true inner peace and happiness in hopes of saving yourself.
When you feel that the balance in your life is threatened, you might immediately get the urge to set things right. The ideal quick fix that should come into mind is talking to someone about it. However, the reality is that most people would rather eat their stress away, binge-watch their favorite TV show, or stay up late drinking.
If you choose to take any of those routes, the next day, you can expect to still feel sad and empty. You may even feel worse than before. Should this cycle repeat, it’ll only increase your chances of developing both physical and mental health conditions.
How to Maintain Inner Peace
Your inner peace is your shield from all sorts of distractions and disruptions. Since it takes a regular beating, you should look for ways to maintain it. Doing so could be quite a hurdle to overcome, particularly when you’re vulnerable and prone to making harmful decisions.
Is it possible to have inner peace, then? Very much so. Here are some of the ways for you to protect and maintain yours:
Be Wary of Greed
When you feel that you’re craving more than what you need, pause and reset your focus because that kind of urge would disrupt your sense of contentment. Try to differentiate between your wants and needs. Don’t succumb to earthly pleasures for those will pass before you know it. Rather, be thankful for what you have, and prioritize necessities over desires.
Be Mindful of Defensive Behavior
When faced with criticism, don’t allow yourself to resort to self-blame. Defensive behaviors are a common response when someone’s personally attacking you. But do you really want to waste your time and energy being defensive about your actions? That’s not worth doing if you want to find your inner peace.
Be More Open
Inner peace encourages you to live in the present moment. Even so, it’d be equally beneficial for you to be open to changes that could happen in the future. Don’t be afraid of the unknown and uncertain. Accept the existence of possibilities and how they’ll always be there due to factors you can’t control or predict.
Peace for All
Everyone hopes for world peace, which is more likely to happen once everyone has obtained inner peace. You need to be patient with inner peace and genuine happiness alike since they can’t be attained overnight. It could take you years of mind conditioning to achieve them.
Each person has their own strategies in finding joy and peace of mind. Focus on your own strengths and weaknesses to determine the best approach for you. If you need guidance, go ahead and consult a professional mental health provider such as Counseling Now. We offer counseling services that won’t require you to step out of your home.
Counseling Now is here to support you as you work toward your mental health goals. Our team can help you develop inner calm despite the curveballs that life may throw at you. Book an appointment now to start your journey with us.
