4 Tips For Immediate Peace
Life can throw us some interesting challenges and if we aren’t able to slow our minds down and take control of our thoughts, we can easily find ourselves in a spiraling negative cycle of anxiety and fear. When this happens, we can get stuck in the cycle for days, weeks, and even months and not even realize how dug such a deep hole for ourselves. While there are many things in our lives that are outside of our control, we have full control over our thoughts and how we allow them to affect our levels of peace.
This article will give you 4 practical tips on how you can increase your level of peace right now.
1. Meditation
Meditation is one of the single best tools anyone can begin using who is looking to improve their level of peace. It doesn’t cost a thing and in as little as 5 minutes, you can see drastic improvements in your overall mood.
To do this, set a timer for 5 minutes and begin to slowly breathe in and out. Close your eyes and begin to let go of every thought that enters your mind by staying focused on your breath. As thoughts enter your mind, acknowledge them and let them slowly dissipate into the background by bringing your attention back to your breath. Bring a gentle smile to your face and just allow yourself to be there, without needing to do anything and without letting your thoughts run rampant. This can be difficult to do at first, but calming our minds is crucial if you want to experience more peace.
If you are brand new to meditation, check out The 7 Day Challenge, a 7 day meditation challenge that will walk you through everything you need to get started. And it’s completely FREE!
2. Pause In Between Tasks
As we go through our busy lives, we often bounce from task to task trying to accomplish as much as we can so we can tell ourselves we had a productive day. Although having a good work ethic and taking pride in what you do is great, it can rob our peace if we do not give ourselves adequate time to clear our minds for our next task.
Taking a 60 second pause to breathe and clear your mind before starting your next task will give you the clarity you need to organize your thoughts and prepare for your next task. It will also allow you to make sure that the next task you are jumping into is the most productive way you can spend your time. Very often we jump to the next task thinking it is vital to complete when in reality there was something else we should have been working on that would have helped us reach our goals much faster. Taking a minute pause to collect our thoughts will not only help us to be more productive, but it is also vital if we want any kind of peace.
3. Be The Watcher
It is estimated that 85% of our thoughts are negative. Although some have mastered their minds and do not fall into this category, the truth is most of our population suffers from continual negative thought patterns day in and day out. So how do we become like the few who have mastered their minds and do not have these destructive negative thought patterns running through their mind all day? We take control of our minds rather than letting our minds control us.
Mastering our minds takes dedication and repetition to master, but everyone has the power within them to control their thoughts and emotions. One way that I found very helpful in mastering this was setting a recurring alarm on my phone that went off every 30 minutes. When the reminder came through I was to judge my overall level of peace and joy on a 1-10 scale. If I was at a 7 or above I would continue what I was doing. Anything less than a 7 and I was to stop whatever I was doing and trace back to the best of my ability, what the cause of my discomfort was. I would always find that a simple thought was the culprit and could literally spiral into ruining my entire day. This exercise helped me to train my mind to pay attention to my thoughts rather than falling back into the same mindless trap I had been in for years. This exercise can be annoying because 30 minutes comes quick, but if you are serious about gaining more peace in your life, I promise this will work wonders. After a while, you begin seeing massive shifts in your overall mood and you will no longer need the timer to remind you to be the watcher of your thoughts.
4. Start A Gratitude Journal
As we go through our busy lives, we tend to forget just how blessed we truly are. As we live busy and stressful lives and continue to have the same negative thoughts entering our minds all day, we can begin seeing life through a dark, dreary lens. When this happens we are blinded to seeing the truth of how blessed we truly are.
To start a gratitude journal all you need is a notebook and five minutes. At the end of each day, find at least five things that happened during the day that you are grateful for. This could be something as simple as your heated steering wheel on your way to work, the extra whipped cream in your Starbucks latte, a loved one who reached out to say hi, your dog being there to greet you, etc. This can literally be anything you can dream up. The idea is to never write down the same thing, so each day you will have five new things you can be grateful for. This begins to shift our negative thought cycles and opens our minds to the reality of how blessed we truly are.
The key is to not make this legalistic where we are just listing things out to say we did it. Real change transpires when we take the time to “feel” gratitude within us, rather than just writing words on a piece of paper. By taking a moment to breathe deeply as writing these out and let them sink deep within our minds and bodies, we begin truly experiencing gratitude rather than just writing things down on a piece of paper.