Mental Health

6 Psychological Practices for Achieving Tranquillity Amidst Inner Turmoil

Practical strategies for creating mental space and finding inner peace by tackling and overcoming setbacks mindfully

Reducing the effects of negative thoughts, unpleasant feelings, and undesirable behaviors can alleviate stress, bring you to a stable state, allow better problem solutions, and increase the quality of your life.

However, these solutions do not usually come with expensive living conditions, pills, or supplements. Instead, they reside in your mind and body, which can be activated with mindfulness practices.

With reduced negative thoughts, by lowering the intensity of anxiety, fear, anger, guilt, sadness, and other uncomfortable emotions and replacing them with pleasant ones, you might taste intense feelings like euphoria leading to a healthier and more satisfying life.

Gaining inner peace with mental clarity and conscious effort can bring sustainable joy and contentment. While it might be arduous to maintain a calm state when experiencing turmoil, mindfulness practices can increase the chance by offering practical solutions to achieve this goal.

Even though physical aspects significantly impact our mental clarity during challenging times, in this post, I only focus on cognitive strategies to deal with difficult situations, such as unexpected setbacks in our daily lives.

The purpose of this article is to share six simple, natural, and powerful strategies to reduce the effects of excessive stress responses, prevent the accumulation of unpleasant feelings, and lower the impact of undesirable behaviors to calm the mind and deal with situations more effectively.

1 — Observe your thoughts, emotions, and behavior.

Tranquility starts with observing your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Intentional introspection can lead to awareness, a growth mindset, and an openness toward others.

Anxious thoughts, unpleasant emotions, and disturbing behaviors are part of our lives. However, they can lead to psychological and physiological issues if left unchecked.

The amygdala, an alert system in the brain, triggers stress hormones when you feel anxious about known or unknown situations. Excessive stress and anxiety can exacerbate the amygdala and make it overactive. This condition is known as the amygdala hijack.

A powerful way to calm the amygdala is intentionally using the thinking brain by observing thoughts, sensations, and behaviors without catastrophizing them. Gradually exposing yourself to perceived threats can also be helpful. Another practical way is to use breathing and moving the body intentionally.

By mindfully observing your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors and using breath and gentle exercises, you can calm your mind amidst emotional turmoil by creating a space that can lead to serenity and tranquillity.

2 — Accept situations and events no matter how intense and disturbing.

Acceptance refers to being realistic and staying in the reality zone without interpreting situations or events out of context. The opposite of acceptance is denial, which can be detrimental as it suppresses negative feelings and delays solving your problems.

Acceptance is essential to mindful living, as it allows you to observe situations and events without judgment and gain a fresh perspective on reality. Therefore, mindfulness practices encourage the acceptance of conditions and circumstances as they are.

When you accept a situation or event, no matter how intense and disturbing it is, you can understand its symptoms and root causes, which can be beneficial in finding solutions. After accepting them, you can work toward understanding the symptoms and root causes of the problem and finding viable solutions.

By gradually increasing your tolerance to physical and mental discomfort, you can strengthen your neocortex (thinking brain) and calm down the limbic system (emotional brain), especially the amygdala, which generates alerts for perceived threats to survival.

3 — Clear the mental clutter with conscious breathing and gentle workouts.

Anxious behaviors can form due to a cluttered mind with accumulated negative thoughts and unexpressed emotions. A chaotic and confused mind can activate the amygdala and release stress hormones to cope with the stress.

You must exceptionally be aware of the three universal threats that can affect everyone. They are fear of uncertainty, loss of control, and lack of information.

From my experience, the most effective ways to lower mental clutter are through mindful breathing and gentle exercises. Traditional meditators have used conscious breathing for centuries to reduce anxiety and improve focus.

You might try various breathing techniques. For example, you can observe each breath without changing for a few minutes. Then you might try deep inhaling and slow exhaling for another few minutes and watch the breathing rhythms again.

Legendary Wim Hof introduced powerful breathing techniques that you can check on YouTube.

You can use physical workouts such as slow walks in nature, stretching, martial arts, dancing, pilates, or laughter yoga, focusing on the present moment to clear your mind and lower anxious thoughts and unpleasant feelings. Therapists recommend these exercises to reduce anxiety.

By focusing on our breathing and engaging in physical activities, you can observe your thoughts and feelings better and change your behavior as desired.

4 — Practice compassion for yourself and others.

I saw many stressed people who criticize and get self-judgmental of themselves by catastrophizing, magnifying small mistakes, and turning them into significant issues.

Self-compassion is a powerful coping mechanism for chronic stress and anxiety. It also can help you become more empathetic and less judgmental toward others. In addition, this mindful approach can create a healing space in the mind and body.

Self-compassion involves loving yourself unconditionally despite your mistakes. This approach can lead to improved problem-solving abilities, faster stress reduction, and better coping with internal turbulence.

In addition, self-compassion can also lead to greater self-confidence and improved relationships with others, helping to calm your mind and lowering anxious thoughts and unpleasant emotions.

Turn envy into admiration, forgive mistakes, accept people as they are, take personal responsibility, and refrain from perfection to improve your relationships and social connections.

People with self-love can solve problems effectively, reduce cumulative stress faster, and might cope with tense situations better. Loving yourself and others unconditionally despite mistakes might put you in a better mental position

5 — Beware of your blessings and cultivate gratitude with realistic optimism.

Gratitude allows you to recognize and appreciate the blessings in your life. It gives you an optimistic approach to life. Gratitude is being aware of your gifts, acknowledging them intentionally, and enjoying them graciously.

Recognizing and acknowledging even the most minor things might please you and can effectively reduce anxiety. But, more importantly, constantly cultivating gratitude can rewire your mind for joy, optimism, and a growth mindset.

One technique for practicing gratitude is quickly writing or reciting a few things you are grateful for during anxious times. This simple approach can change your focus from negative to positive quickly.

Mindfulness practices allow you to focus on blessings and can calm your turbulent mind. By rewiring your mind for joy and optimism using the power of gratitude, you can recognize hidden gifts in your life easily.

When you look at situations from an optimistic angle, your worries and anxious thoughts will get calmed.

6 — Increase your adversity quotient gradually to become resilient and calm.

The adversity quotient (AQ) refers to mindfully tolerating and turning physical, mental, and emotional obstacles and setbacks into opportunities. A higher AQ allows for better adaptation to the environment and stronger relationships with others.

AQ is a concept that can be turned into a valuable skill through acceptance, reframing setbacks, embracing negative criticism, replacing envy with admiration, and taming the primitive brain.

Life is full of obstacles and setbacks, and no living being is immune to them. Criticisms, setbacks, and rejections are inevitable, and dealing with them requires developing a thick skin consciously and gradually. For example, you might learn to tolerate negative criticism by embracing it and turning boredom into excitement.

It is essential to understand and accept these universal rules. Enhancing AQ can help in this process. AQ can make you more resilient and level-headed in the face of adversity.

Increasing AQ has multiple benefits, such as improved health and well-being, cognitive reserves to deal with aging and neurodegenerative disorders, and enhanced performance and leading to success in life. The previous points in this post all contribute to increasing AQ gradually.

Summary and Conclusions

Anxious thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are part of our survival system. They are akin to natural needs like hunger, thirst, and sleep.

The strategies I introduced in this post are common sense. However, during challenging situations bringing emotional turmoil, we may neglect them.

Unexpected setbacks can catch us off-guard and create tension, anxiety, and fear, cluttering our minds and obscuring our vision.

A mindful approach, such as observing our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, can create a space to deal with setbacks and challenging situations more effectively. In addition, you can use this approach for therapeutic and developmental purposes.

By practicing these approaches, you can turn them into habits and use them as valuable tools when you face unexpected setbacks and challenging situations gracefully.

Key Takeaways from this Article

Start observing your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors through intentional introspection to gain awareness, a growth mindset, and openness toward others.

Use your thinking brain to gain awareness of the situations without catastrophizing them, calm the amygdala, and reduce stress and anxiety.

Look at the big picture, and accept situations and events no matter how intense and disturbing they might be. Embrace everything that comes to your consciousness.

Imagine solutions with optimism, a growth mindset, and acceptance instead of delaying resolution through resistance and denial.

Leverage mindful breathing and gentle exercises to lower mental clutter and calm your mind amidst emotional turmoil, creating a space that leads to serenity and tranquility.

Practice self-compassion, forgive your and others’ mistakes, and approach others with empathy, compassion, and kindness.

Turn envy into admiration, accept people as they are, and act pragmatically, refraining from perfection.

Count and record your blessings, cultivate gratitude with realistic optimism, and stay away from pessimistic thoughts.

Increase your adversity quotient gradually to become resilient and unflappable amidst chaotic situations.

Thank you for reading my perspectives. I wish you a healthy and happy life.

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