How to Find Inner Peace When Life Isn't Peaceful

In my book I retell a parable called Gods from Olympus, which I first found in another book. After creating the world, the gods had some creative power left over, and they sat down with Zeus to decide where to hide it, because a human who found it would become their equal. One god suggested the sky, Poseidon the depths of the ocean, but Zeus refused both: curious humans would one day reach the stars and dive to the bottom of every sea. Then Athena, the goddess of wisdom, made the suggestion that won. Hide it inside the humans themselves, deep in their souls, where they would never dare to look. They would spend their lives wondering what they were capable of, never knowing what they carried.

I think of this parable whenever someone asks me how to find inner peace. We search for it in the sky and at the bottom of the sea: on the next holiday, in a quieter job, in the year when everything is finally sorted. And all the while it is exactly where Athena hid it.

In my book Courage on the Journey of Happiness, the parable closes the challenge I call daily relaxation of the mind. By the end of that chapter I had come to a simple conclusion: the more you grow, the fewer techniques you need, because you discover that what you were looking for was within you from the start.

What is inner peace?

Inner peace is a calm, steady state inside you that doesn't depend on everything around you being calm. Yi-Chen Lee and colleagues, including the psychologist Barbara Fredrickson, developed a scale for peace of mind and describe it as “an internal state of peacefulness and harmony”. They built the scale because the usual measures of well-being focused on pleasure and missed the quieter states valued in Chinese culture¹.

What inner peace is not matters just as much. It isn't a life without problems, it isn't feeling nothing, and it isn't pretending everything is fine. It is the ability to stay yourself while something difficult is happening: to feel worry or sadness without letting it run your whole day.

Signs you've lost touch with your inner peace

You might recognise yourself in a few of these:

• you feel calm only when everything is under control
• a small remark can unsettle you for the rest of the day
• you reach for your phone or another task the moment you have nothing to do
• you keep arguing in your head with people who aren't in the room
• you keep promising yourself rest “after” this project, this phase, this year

Why is it so hard to find inner peace?

Partly because many of us were taught to chase a different kind of good feeling. Psychologist Jeanne Tsai studies ideal affect: not how people actually feel, but how they would like to feel. In her studies, European Americans valued high-energy states such as excitement more than Hong Kong Chinese did, while Chinese and Asian American participants valued calm more. Culture, her work suggests, shapes the feelings we want more than the feelings we have^2,3. If you grew up admiring the busy and the excited, calm can easily feel like boredom, or even laziness.

When Yukiko Uchida and Shinobu Kitayama asked people to describe happiness, Americans linked it with personal achievement, while Japanese participants linked it with social harmony⁴. Achievement is wonderful, but if every good feeling has to be earned, peace becomes a reward you will collect one day, and that day keeps moving. None of this is your fault; it is the water most of us swim in.

Living in peace is not the same as ignoring your problems

Early in my book, before the challenges begin, I wrote a remark in brackets that sums up this whole article. Many of us confuse peace with avoidance. We stay quiet to avoid a conflict, look away from a problem and keep smiling. That buys a moment of quiet, but not peace, because the challenges we ignore tend to grow, while the ones we face begin to shrink.

People like to say that life never gives us more than we can carry. In the same pages I wrote that it is not the burden that breaks you, but the way you carry it. Inner peace is a way of carrying. It doesn't make the load disappear; it changes how it sits on your shoulders.

To live in peace in spite of a challenge is not the same as ignoring it.

What happiness research says about inner peace

As an economist who has spent many years studying happiness, I find one study especially telling. Antonella Delle Fave and an international team, including Ingrid Brdar from the University of Rijeka in Croatia, asked 2,799 adults aged 30 to 60 in twelve countries to define happiness in their own words. Across countries, with little difference by age or gender, inner harmony was the most frequent psychological answer, and its largest part was inner peace: peace of mind, serenity, tranquillity. Yet, the authors note, research has largely neglected it⁵. When ordinary people describe happiness, being at peace comes up again and again.

And meditation, the first thing most people try? Madhav Goyal and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins reviewed 47 trials with 3,515 adults living with a range of health conditions. Mindfulness meditation programmes showed moderate evidence of easing anxiety and depression and low evidence of easing stress or distress, with effects the authors call small to moderate. There was no evidence that meditation beat other active approaches, such as exercise or other behavioural therapies⁶. In plain words: it can help a little; it is one door to peace, not the only one.

Nature may be another door. In a small study, Gregory Bratman, James Gross and their colleagues at Stanford sent 38 healthy city dwellers on a 90-minute walk, either through grassland with scattered oak trees or along a busy road with heavy traffic. After the nature walk, participants reported less rumination, the loop of dwelling on negative thoughts about yourself, and brain scans showed lower activity in an area linked to it. After the urban walk, neither changed⁷. One small study is a hint, not proof, but an easy one to follow.

How to find inner peace: seven gentle steps

You don't achieve inner peace once and for all. You return to it, the way you come home after a long day. These are the steps I recommend.

1. Stop waiting for a quiet life. Peace that waits for everything to be sorted never arrives. Ask instead: what would peace look like today, with things exactly as they are?
2. Give your mind five quiet minutes a day. In my book I wrote that relaxation, meditation and a few minutes without thoughts all serve one purpose: peace, and that you need no special knowledge for it. Five minutes of following your breath is a perfect start; what matters is coming back.
3. Find your own door. Start with the breath and add whatever suits you: a slow walk, quiet music, prayer, a guided meditation. There is no single right technique; I only share what has helped me.
4. Name what steals your peace. For one week, notice what knocks you off balance: a person, the news, an overfull calendar, a thought you keep returning to. You can't protect your peace until you know how you lose it.
5. Face one thing you have been avoiding. One honest conversation or one overdue decision can bring more peace than a month of trying to relax around it.
6. Go outside without a goal. A walk among trees, by water or in a park, with no podcast and no step count.
7. Put down what isn't yours to carry. Other people's moods, expectations you never agreed to, the need to control what you can't. Often peace begins with one kind no, which is the heart of healthy selfishness.

How to find peace within yourself

Remember Athena's hiding place. Finding peace within yourself also means making peace with yourself: with your mistakes, your past choices and the voice that says you should be further along by now. You can't feel at home where you are constantly criticised, even when the critic is you.

That is also why inner peace is a practice of the present moment: it can't be felt in yesterday's regrets or tomorrow's worries, only now, as I explain in how to live in the present moment. And if restlessness or anxiety is with you constantly rather than only on hard days, a qualified professional can help; asking for that help is part of being at peace with yourself.

Inner peace grows most easily in a life you have given yourself permission to live, among people walking the same path. That is the heart of my programme Permission for Life. But it starts much closer than that, with five quiet minutes and the courage to look where the gods hid the treasure.