10 Habits for Inner Peace
by Intelligent Change
Peace, mindfulness, calmness–some of the most desired states of being in today’s hectic times. Achieving peace in the coziness of your home on the weekend, while staying in nature, or stretching in yoga class is quite easy, but what about the rest of the time? How do we meet a passing deadline at work with peace? How to react to force majeure situations in a peaceful manner?
Stress is one of the most researched health-related topics nowadays, as it’s considered a catalyst to many physical and mental health conditions. While there are many different approaches to coping with stress (our favorite is befriending and owning your stress in order to break free from its negative consequences), little has been told about engaging in and achieving peace, as the ultimate antidote to stress.
In this article, we’ll describe several behaviors designed to bring you closer to achieving inner balance–habits for peace.
10 Habits for Peace
1. Non-Participation Can Be Good Enough Participation
Toxic behaviors and habits are a very common way of spending leisure time in today’s world. They can only make you feel anxious, uncanny, and overall unpeaceful. If you want to remain in peace with yourself, choose not to participate in those activities that compromise it.
Try to avoid negative, toxic emotions at all costs. This doesn’t mean that you should pretend that everything is perfect, however, you have the will and the power not to participate in situations that can only make things worse, not better.
2. Equal Peace for Everyone: Take No Sides
One of the main reasons why people get into conflicts is black-and-white thinking. If there was only one correct answer to basically anything in life, things would have been much simpler, however, they’re not. Thinking in opposites, this or that, us vs them is peace-breaking.
Even if you disagree with someone or with an idea, you can still coexist with them peacefully.
3. Find Your Peaceful Commune
Like everything else in life, peace tastes better when it’s shared. Sometimes it can be as simple as being present and acknowledging the beauty of a moment with a person dear to you. Or you can take it a few levels up and join a community working for a greater cause.
4. Pure Being: Your Soul’s Peace
Being is what keeps on happening even when all other processes end. Our workday is over, our kids are off to sleep, the house is tidied up, and we’re done with the last chapter of the book. Those moments when we’re alone with our thoughts are very important for inner-peace-building and well-being.
Take a few minutes every day to meditate, journal or simply switch off from everything and stay with yourself. Feel your body, your presence in space and time, and acknowledge your thoughts in that particular moment. Simply be there and exist.
5. Be of Service to Others
Although the phrase “at peace” usually brings up images of quietness and solitude, the reality is somewhat different. We imagine solitude and quietness because that’s what we crave in our everyday lives. However, life without other people would be nothing close to peaceful. Humans need each other. Just like we need food and water, we need social contact to survive.
Finding your peace in isolation is great, but in order to keep on living a peaceful life properly, you should spread the idea. Help someone achieve their peace, too. Be of service to other people. Whatever you choose, make sure to bring a positive attitude and peaceful thoughts.
6. Connect with Your Higher Inner Self: Have the Intention of Peace
If you want to achieve peace, you need to forget about the good old “fake it till you make it”, as you need to really mean it.
Use your meditation minutes to think about peace on a deeper level. Imagine your thoughts going up to the universe and returning as the energy of truth. Think about those who can’t achieve peace and send positive thoughts to the universe for everyone.
If you want peace to happen around you, you need to have the intention of peace. Do you really mean it?
7. Remain Calm and Focused
Human beings’ natural state isn’t chaos, although chaos is inherent to human nature, it’s seeking resolution and calmness. Just like our bodies seek food to calm down when our blood sugar and energy are low, or our nervous system requires crying to calm down when we’re upset. The ultimate goal of our mind and body is returning to peace, the most natural state.
Practicing mindfulness, tracking, noticing, and acknowledging your thoughts and emotions, or meditating, helps you identify when you begin to fall out from the state of peace. Then you can work your way back to returning to peace by practicing deep breathing, meditating, or thinking rationally about the situation.
8. Engage in Challenges
Challenges and obstacles are normal parts of our everyday living. Even so, most people simply put things under the rug and avoid dealing with them, as they make them feel uneasy. The solution to this is to change the way you view set-backs: they’re an opportunity to learn and grow, not necessarily a competition against the world and yourself that you have to win.
This other perspective is much more susceptible to peace. If you feel like you could use a bit of support from time to time when faced with more difficult obstacles, check out our latest art book Life is Right Now that contains inspirational quotes and drawings from Real Run, Wow! designed to give you a piece of peace whenever you feel like you’re simply not enough.
9. Practice Gratitude - Maintain a Positive Mindset
In a world that’s often overwhelmed with negativity and disturbances, we need to build a different perspective by seeking the good in life.
One of the best ways to achieve a positive mindset is practicing gratitude. With The Five Minute Journal, you’ll need no more than 5 minutes per day to switch your mind to another dimension, one of positivity and calm.
10. Journal
A gratitude journal is there to remind you that there are always good things to appreciate, no matter how hard life gets. A reflective journal is there to contain all of your thoughts, difficult and enlightening at the same time. Both can help you center yourself in different ways.
Whenever there’s something bothering you, or if you feel like your peaceful bubble is being shaken, open your journal and put it all on paper. As words flow out, you’ll feel your entire system returning to peaceful normality again. Your mind will be clearer and you’ll be ready to take on any challenge.
Final Words
“Habits for peace” may sound silly to you at first, but think about it: in our hectic reality, how else would you reach inner calmness?
Things don’t just happen to us, we need to work our way through to make them happen. Although the state of peace is the most natural state for us to be in, we still need to take proactive steps for it to happen.
Changing the way we think, reframing bad days, instilling a new mindset, and choosing in what activities do we participate in and in which way is how we reach our overall peace.