Peaceful Simplicity: Simple Habits to Make Your Life More Peaceful And Less Stressful

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When we have the wisdom to know how to enjoy peace and simplicity in our lives, we will be able to quiet down our hearts and minds, and feel more calm and peaceful and be content with all the simple pleasures in our lives. Once you change your perspective and have the realization that true happiness can come from a simple, peaceful life, your life will become more peaceful and meaningful. In this article, you will get to know about some simple effective habits to make your life more peaceful and less stressful so you can enjoy what matters most.

Habits matter! Over time we all develop some habits, things that we repeatedly do – sometimes without even realizing we are doing them. While some habits are healthy, others are not. Helpful, positive habits can make your life a lot simpler, easier, and more peaceful.

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Habits to Make Your Life More Meaningful and Peaceful:

Author Sean Covey said in his book – The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective Teens – “We become what we repeatedly do.”

Any positive, lasting change is the outcome of helpful daily habits. The small things that we do day in day out, week in week out, and then month in month out, go into making the person we are – how we think, feel, and act. In other words, our lives are the sum and result of our habits. Therefore, it’s important that you intentionally form some helpful habits that will help you make your life more peaceful.

Purge old items and get organized

One of the key habits to create a more peaceful life is to declutter and organize your home regularly. Your home is part of who you are. It represents your values, priorities, and lifestyle. You can’t experience peace and simplicity without simplifying your home. Many people, while trying to simplify their lives, forget about simplifying their physical spaces that can have a profound impact on their overall well-being.

Clutter and mess cause unnecessary distractions and stress. A cluttered space often creates a cluttered spirit. Take time to get rid of the stuff that are neither useful nor beautiful. Make room for things that you love, enjoy, and that add value to your life.

Declutter every corner of your home one by one, and organize everything to reduce your stress. Your paperwork should be sorted out and filed, and your bills should be organized as soon as they come in the door. Your clothes should be kept in an easily accessible fashion, and your everyday necessary items should be placed somewhere you can easily locate.

Create a calm, peaceful space by purging and organizing your stuff where you can relax and focus on the things that matter.

Don’t worry about the future

You may be complicating your life by worrying too much about your future. There is a direct connection between being mindful of the present and living a more peaceful life. Practice gently bringing your thoughts back to the present instead of dwelling in the past or worrying about future because worry doesn’t solve anything or automatically make things better.

There are some things beyond your control, and you can’t change them no matter how much you worry. So don’t waste your time and energy trying to predict what can happen tomorrow. Because worrying doesn’t take away tomorrow’s trouble; it takes away today’s peace. Worry won’t stop the bad stuff from happening, and it just keeps you from enjoying the good in your present life. As the old proverb goes, “Worry is like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it won’t get you anywhere.”

Simplify your life by choosing peace over worry. Make the best of your present life, stay positive, and concentrate on your goal. This will surely make your life more peaceful and less stressful.

You may also like to read: The Side Effects of Worrying—and What to Do Instead

Eat fresh, healthy food

One of the habits to make life more peaceful is to eat fresh and healthy. Food choices have an impact on your overall physical health, and also some foods can affect your state of mind. Eating well doesn’t have to be stressful. Do advance meal planning and try a couple of quick, healthy recipes when life gets busy. If you plan your meals ahead for the week and prepare them on the weekends, weekdays become much less hectic. You will order less takeout, save a lot of money, eat foods you really enjoy, and feel less stressed out!

Limit your screen time

It’s necessary to take breaks from technology and limit your screen time to free up more time for the important and meaningful things you want to do. We often complain that we don’t have enough time to do all that we need to do, but honestly, we waste so much of our precious time by staring down at a screen for hours.

It doesn’t have to be permanent but deactivating social media and significantly cutting back on TV time, even for just a few days-once in a while, can help remind us of what’s truly important. Social media can be a great way to stay in touch with people, but it can also be wasting our valuable time each day.

Social media can rearrange your values. And it has a profound impact on your attitude and outlook on life. Spending too much time on social media can even lead to low self-esteem and unhappiness by comparing yourself to others and trying to keep up with the Joneses. You may not want to “unfriend” someone completely, however you can choose whether you want to follow their posts that they share or not. If their posts cause you stress, allow some peace to come to you by simply hitting the unfollow option.

Check your expectations

By nature, people are not perfect. So, you should not expect them to act perfectly. What you expect from yourself or from others should be realistic or practical. Too many expectations can make life difficult, cause stress and frustration, and even put strain on your important relationships.

Set your expectations straight regularly, and you will experience more peace and less disappointments or frustrations.

Let things go

Knowing when to let go is never easy, but that certainly makes your life easy and more peaceful. The harder and tighter you hold on to something, the deeper it hurts. In order to create a simple, peaceful life, you need to stop dwelling in your past, let the grudges go, and focus on your present life.

When you decide to forgive someone, you let the grudge go that was weighing you down emotionally. You free yourself of the anger and bitterness that were only causing anguish to yourself. For a peaceful life that is free of mental burden, you need to forgive others, accept your past, learn from it, embrace change, and move on. By living in your past, you are unnecessarily complicating your present life.

Surround yourself with the positive, like-minded people

One of the most effective and simple ways to reduce your stress and make your life more peaceful is to change who you surround yourself with, and it’s totally within your control. Cut off the people who only bring negativity and drama into your life, and make it complicated and stressful.

Also, try to get out of all the toxic relationships you might be involved in. A toxic relationship is not only stressful but harmful, too. Surround yourself with the people who are positive minded, and who truly care for you, encourage you to do better, and add value to your life.

Listen to understand, not to respond

So often in conversations, we use our ears to give us cues about when it is our turn to say what we want to say. Practice active listening, ask relevant questions, process, and then speak. When you listen with the intention to understand, you listen with an open-mind, versus a prejudged conclusion.

People with good listening skills are more productive, make better partners and colleagues, are better problem solvers, and have healthier interpersonal relationships.

Simplify your finances

In order to create a more peaceful and less stressful life, you must form the habit of simplifying your finances. Financial concerns rank top on the list of what causes people stress. A person’s financial situation has a significant impact on their mental and physical well-being.

WebMD lists finances as a major stressor that’s capable of triggering long-term diseases – causing you more stress and busting your budget even more. Take the time each month to do a sustainable budget, track your expenses, and check that against the money you have coming in.

Make yourself a priority, as often as you can

Your life is more than just work and responsibilities. Sure, there are some exceptions like when you have to take care of your responsibilities and forego a few more minutes of sleep or rest for an important task. And that’s fine, as long as you are in the mindset that you are not all about your work or obligations.

You are more than just what you do and earn, and your inner peace and well-being matter.

Observe what you unconsciously consume

What we consciously or subconsciously consume always determines the lives that we live – food, music, books, TV, social media/websites. These things affect how you feel throughout your days. Even the music and talks you listen to shape your mind and your heart. It dramatically influences the focus of your mind throughout the day.

So, don’t underestimate the power of the things you don’t even realize you are letting into your life. It’s wise for us to pause often and review the influences we are allowing into our mind and our body if we want to live a peaceful life.

Simplify your priorities and goals

Many of us have tons of goals in life that aren’t in alignment with our true values. To achieve those goals, we keep ourselves busy with things that aren’t really important and meaningful. Also, it becomes a lot harder to accomplish things when you have more goals than what you can manage to achieve with a reasonable amount of efforts. That can complicate your life, and make you feel overwhelmed, frustrated, and unhappy.

Take a few minutes every day to think about your values and priorities. Then ask yourself how your relationships, your finances, your home, and your overall lifestyle reflect this vision. Go through your priority list, remove those that don’t go with your current values and principles, and only focus on those goals that are truly important. By reducing the number of goals that you are striving to accomplish, you will feel less stressed and more peace and happiness.

Understand that everything being a priority actually means nothing is a priority. Therefore, you need to prioritize your goals. By simplifying your goals, you’ll simplify your life and live peacefully.

Reinforce your goals daily

If you are serious about accomplishing your long-term goals, you can’t state them once a year and then forget about them. You need to work on your goals daily, and remind yourself of the direction you want to go every day.

You can break your goals into small actions, and then work towards achieving them – one small step at a time.

Don’t procrastinate

Nothing adds stress to our lives like waiting until the last minute. You can take breaks from time to time, but can’t always put things off for later times when you are able to do those on time with little efforts and planning.

Constant procrastination creates burden that hampers the progress you might be making in simplifying your life. It overwhelms you and makes you lose focus on what you want to achieve in your life.

Find your joy in the simplicity of everyday life

Show yourself that you don’t need extravagance to have a truly incredible internal experience. You don’t need anything other than what you currently have to start living the life you want.

You don’t need to buy the latest iPhone or go on luxurious vacations every few months to find joy or experience calm and peace. Why? Because the life you want is ultimately rooted in a feeling — a feeling that you can induce simply by shifting your perception.

So, make time to do things that bring you joy in every day, and take the time to appreciate them. It could be playing a game with your kids, watching an interesting documentary or your favorite TV show with your whole family, reading a good book, gardening, having a piece of homemade chocolate cake, or enjoying a cup of tea/coffee in a nice, quiet corner of your home.

Pay attention to what you seek

You find what you seek – that’s the simple truth. If what you subconsciously want is to see all the things that are wrong with your life, that’s exactly what you will find. If what you seek is knowing all the ways you are as unworthy as you fear you are, that’s what you will see, too.

So, of course, if you look for the positive, you can find plenty!

Be comfortable with silence

One of the effective habits to make your life more peaceful is to be comfortable with silence. Spend some alone time in silence every day. Turn off all the background noise as much as you can. Try to connect with your inner self by disconnecting yourself from the surroundings.

Various research revealed that there are some health benefits to spending time all by yourself. Spending time alone allows you mental space and clarity to reflect – to figure out what you really want in life and who you really are. In order to foster peace and happiness, it’s important to have a good balance between quiet alone time and time with others.

Quit comparing yourself to others

There is a popular saying: “Comparison is the thief of joy.” Live your life on your own terms. You and your journey – both are unique. Your values, goals, dreams, and priorities are different than others. Everyone has their own shares of failures, struggles, and accomplishments. Everybody you know is dealing with their own challenges and setbacks.

Comparisons are unhealthy and detrimental to your own self-esteem and self-respect. Instead of comparing yourself to others and consider yourself any less or unworthy, focus your time and energy on being the very best version of yourself. Try to be better than what you were yesterday. Pay careful attention to your own goals and dreams. Strive harder and do what is required to achieve them.

You are unique, and you are who you are! There is no point in trying to be like someone else and lose your own identity. Live at peace with yourself instead. Successful people don’t have time to worry about the successes or failures of others because they are too focused on what they want to accomplish in their lives.

If you keep comparing yourself to others, you will not be able to enjoy your own life and truly celebrate your own achievements – however little or big they are.

Comparison makes finding contentment a million times harder!

Count your blessings and practice more gratitude

Gratitude is all about shifting your focus from what your life lacks to all the things you currently have – big and small. Gratitude makes people more resilient, improves physical, emotional and mental health, and reduces stress. Research has shown the link between living with gratitude and multiple health benefits including better sleep, less stress, improved relationships, and increased happiness.

Simple, peaceful living requires you to focus on all the good things in your life, count all your blessings, and express gratitude for those. Make your own gratitude list and read them often. Every day find at least 3 reasons/things to be thankful for. Just by doing that consistently, you will notice a significant increase in your happiness and overall well-being.

Count your blessings today. It’s important to constantly remind yourself of all the blessings you should be grateful for – your breaths, a healthy family, a caring friend, a job to support yourself and your family, a place to call home, good food, a warm sunny day, a special talent etc. Make a list of all the things you are grateful for, and go through that list often. You will soon notice your days becoming brighter and happier.

Gratitude makes what you have enough and more.

Say “no” often

By doing more than you should, you are complicating your life. Stop saying “yes” to everything and learn to say “no” more often. If you say “yes” to every request, you will spend all your free time and energy by keeping busy with the things or people that will not leave any quality time in your schedule for yourself or for the things that matter most to you.

Remember that every time you say “yes” to something you don’t like to do or don’t have time to do, you are saying “no” to something else that you truly want/need to do. Saying “no” when you need to say “no” is actually one of the key habits to make your life simpler and more peaceful.

Create a “Jar of Awesome”

It’s kind of like creating a “gratitude list” but in a fun way. Whenever something awesome happens to you, big or small, write it down on a piece of paper and put it in a jar, says author and entrepreneur Tim Ferriss. Then, whenever you are feeling down or experiencing some negative emotions, open the jar and read your notes. You will feel so much better.

Be kind to yourself

One of the best things you can do to make yourself happy is to be kind to yourself intentionally. Life will become easier, your relationships will most likely improve, and you will experience more peace and happiness. When you practice self-love and be kind to yourself, it lessens your stress and anxiety and so much of your struggles.

Treat yourself the way you would treat a friend or someone else you cared about. Forgive yourself when you are not perfect. You owe yourself the love that you so freely and willingly give to others. You deserve the same level of care and respect from yourself.

Connect and bond with others

Making that emotional connection with other people, especially if they are your significant other, family, or friends, brings an abundance into your life that money can never buy for you. When it comes to mental and emotional wellbeing, other people matter. Evidence shows that connecting with others and strengthening bonds with family and friends are important for mental wellbeing.

Each day, take some time to truly connect with the people that really matter to you. Tell someone you love and care for them, because nurturing our relationships can help us feel happier and more secure, and can give us a greater sense of purpose.

Learn to accept things

Accept things as they are. Don’t try to change or control everything. This is one of the essential habits to make your life more peaceful. What you can’t change, accept. Try to overcome your natural desire to control the uncontrollable in life, and then replace struggle with acceptance and peace. Don’t allow your inner control freak sabotage your sense of peace, and get in the way of external relationships as well.

Every time you catch yourself wishing you could change something that is unchangeable, change your self-talk with positivity instead, and say, “It’s okay. I’m going to accept this just as it is and move on.”

Declutter your commitments

One of the big reason why our lives are so stressful is that our lives are way too full. We can’t possibly do everything we have committed to doing, and we certainly can’t enjoy it if we are trying to do everything. So many people lament that there is not enough time in their days. One of the main reasons for that is we fail to manage our commitments well. Too many commitments increase your stress level and may even cause depression.

Decluttering your commitments and only keeping the essential ones will help you unearth more quality time in your days. Doing so will allow you to spend your time doing the things that are truly important and meaningful. know that you want to do what’s important to you, and try to eliminate the commitments that are not as important.

Stop multi-tasking

Instead of multi-tasking, try to do one single task at a time and enjoy what you are doing, because this is one of the essential habits to slow down and make life peaceful. That way you won’t have to deal with the mental and physical pressure of doing several things at once, and you can accomplish more things in a productive manner.

Doing two or more things at a time can be overwhelming and very stressful. Multi-tasking doesn’t always increase your productivity either. While you focus on more than one task at a time, you usually accomplish less and feel more stressed in the process.

Do less each day

Doing less is not about being lazy or unproductive. It’s about focusing on quality rather than quantity. It’s about getting off the autopilot of busyness, so that you can focus on something great or meaningful rather than just being busy all the time. Don’t always fill your days up with things to do. You will end up rushing to do them all while experiencing overwhelm and frustration.

As much as you can, simplify your to-do list down to the essentials. This allows you to rush less and focus more on what’s important. Slowly cut back on non-essential commitments or tasks. Only do the things that are important and that add value to you and your family. This will give you time to do what you need to do, and not feel any pressure.

Related post: 8 Amazing Benefits of Becoming Unbusy

Smile more often

Make it a habit to smile more often. Smiling can actually reduce stress and improve your mood. Even if you have to “fake it until you make it,” there are many scientific benefits of smiling and laughing. Intentionally do things that make you smile.

Also, pay attention to your facial expression when you are stuck in traffic, or the person ahead of you in the grocery line is taking too long, or you are kept waiting longer than you should be while visiting your doctor. During those times, consider smiling. It may sound like a hard thing to do, but believe me – it will make you feel better and bring your heart rate down, too.

Spend time in nature

One of the helpful habits to make your life less stressful and more peaceful is spending time in nature. Spending 30 minutes or more a week in nature can help lower your blood pressure and depression and increase your happiness, according to a 2016 study from a Trusted Source.

According to another 2017 study, exposure to outdoor green spaces can reduce depression, anxiety and health risks such as high blood pressure, obesity, and diabetes. Your green space could be anything from your riverside, neighborhood park, your own lovely backyard, or a rooftop garden — anywhere you can enjoy some nature, sunshine, and fresh air. Because fresh air and vitamin D have the power to transform your mood. Even if it’s for 5 to 10 minutes a day, make a point to spend time outdoors.

So, make it a habit to get outside in nature as often as possible, and spend some time there admiring the beauty of Mother Nature without any distraction.

I hope you have found these habits helpful in order to make your life more peaceful in today’s fast-paced, chaotic world. By increasing the peaceful nature of your lifestyle, you can actually help prevent many health problems and foster more meaningful relationships which, in return, will reduce your stress significantly.

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Peaceful Simplicity: Simple Habits to Make Your Life More Peaceful And Less Stressful