International Peace Day: 8 Benefits of Peace of Mind and Mindfulness
7 minute read
September 21 is International Peace Day, which is a day for the entire world to focus on peace. While we can all strive to bring about peace in the world, there are steps you can take to make a more direct impact on your personal life today.
Inner peace is important for your health and well-being. Being more mindful and feeling inner calm can not only do a lot for you, but it can impact the world around you, and in your own way, you’re contributing to peace in the world.
Benefits of Having Peace of Mind
While you may be able to immediately point to one or two reasons that you’d like to have inner peace, you might not realize the wealth of benefits you can achieve. Even if you don’t achieve peace of mind, just working toward it can help.
You know how you feel when you’re calm and have a sense of peacefulness, which is wonderful. In addition to how you personally feel, there are some scientifically proven benefits to practicing peacefulness.
Fights age-related mental decline: Previous research and a study published in Neuroreport looked at long-term meditation and discovered that meditation done regularly might offset age-related cortical thinning. This is directly associated with positive structural changes in areas of the brain that are used for sensory, cognitive, and emotional processing.
Peace makes your immune system stronger: According to an article in Psychology Today, there are four kinds of inner peace that can add to your life and provide a number of benefits including being better able to fight illness.
Add to that the evidence from a study published in Psychological Bulletin, and it’s clear that stress is bad for your immune system.
Reduces the stress hormone cortisol: Cortisol is responsible for the body’s ability to engage in a fight or flight response. It’s essential, but having too much of it can negatively affect your brain, immune system, and other organs.
Meditation, mindfulness, and inner peace can be effective at relieving stress and reducing cortisol, according to an article by Harvard Health.
| Related: How to Lower Your Cortisol (Stress) Levels Naturally |
How to Find Inner Peace
If that all sounds good to you, and you’re ready to embark on the road to inner peace, the following tips will help you get started.
1. Practice Mindfulness
Learn to be more aware and present. This lets you escape from worrying about what might possibly happen in the future and fretting over what has happened in the past. It recreates neural pathways that lead to inner peace with time and practice.
2. It Is What It Is
This is a common phrase you’ll hear people say, but do they really understand how important and profound acceptance of that phrase is?
By acknowledging that some things in life are just the way they are, you stop resisting and fighting. It might even be that by relaxing, you find a solution or a way around the status quo.
2. Keep Everything in Perspective
When something seems overwhelming or like it’s too much to handle, try to think of people who have it worse than you and then put it in perspective. If you make too much of something it can make it almost impossible to move ahead, but by gaining perspective, you instantly begin to feel better, and you can start making steps toward changing things.
3. Accept Responsibility for Your Emotions
There’s no point in blaming other people for making you feel or behave a certain way. You choose your behavior and, once you accept that, it becomes easier to stay calm and have peace.
4. Acknowledge Feelings
Whether you’re acknowledging your own feelings or those of another, it’s important to understand that feelings are natural and have a place in everyone’s lives. That said, it’s best to understand why you have those feelings and deal with them rather than let them fester.
5. Be Real and Honest
Avoid lying and trying to twist the truth. Being authentic to yourself and others helps you maintain your integrity and feel better about yourself.
6. Unhinge From Adrenaline
Adrenaline is a hormonal response to stress, but in today’s fast-paced, stress-filled world, it can become a jolt we need to get through the day. Letting go of that fight-or-flight response, and taking life at a more controlled pace, will reduce stress and help encourage peace.
7. Put Peace at a Priority
What are the things that give you peace and make you happy? Do you find happiness in donating your time to a PTA meeting, or do you find peace spending time reading with your child?
Make choices that bring more peace to your life, and select things that will make you happy at the end of the day.
8. Learn to Let Go
Let go of your negative feelings, of stress, and of hatred. When you begin to put the negative feelings out of your mind, you’ll be able to make room for more positive feelings and peacefulness. Direct your thoughts to the present, and find something that you’re grateful for in the here and now.
The Bottom Line
While world peace is the ultimate goal, creating peace within yourself is a fantastic way to start. If you feel more connected and in control, with less stress, you’ll reap a lot of health benefits for yourself and be someone who is more inclined to be accepting of others.
If you want to start on the road to peace of mind, begin by practicing mindfulness, and find some time in your day to do something that gives you peace. It’s an easy place to start, and it will instill some good peace of mind habits that feel rewarding and should be easy to keep up with.
It may seem inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, but one step in the right direction is big. Once you start making peaceful choices, you’ll begin to see more ways you can change your approach to life and find the happiness you desire.
