Life can be chaotic, unpredictable and dangerous. There are no guarantees and frequently no warnings. Breakups happen, jobs end, relocation becomes necessary. Fortunes rise and fall. Sickness. Poverty. Death. It is a survival skill to learn how to protect your peace.

More Than a Feeling

The first step is to realize that protecting your peace is a priority, not a luxury. Peace is the ability to find calm in the psychological storm. To “get it together,” and “keep it together,” and “pull yourself together.” The “it” is your sanity, and it is more fragile than you think.

These cliches all recommend keeping your sanity “together,” because when you lose your sense of peace, you become fragmented. Unless stabilized, the fragmentation of your mental health will soon adversely affect your relationships, your livelihood, your ability to live independently.

And peace is more than just a psychological concept or a state of mind; peace is a physical concept.

Have you ever been forced to stay someplace that felt unsafe? Someplace that it was difficult to find food or water or shelter? If not, you can do your best to imagine it. Peace is also a safe place, an environment that assures your basic needs are met.

Relationships contribute to peace. Psychological bullying and emotional abuse are destabilizing even when everything else is “OK.” And the threat of physical abuse is one of the fastest ways to spiral into fear and despair and self-loathing and anger. Violence of any sort is the antithesis of peace.

And the loss of peace brings devastating consequences.

To Your Health

In its most generic sense, peace is the absence of stress, physically, mentally and emotionally. When your sense of peace decreases, your stress increases.

Stress starts a cascade of mental and physiological responses (the hypothalamic-pituitary-axis, or “HPA”) that is adaptive when dealing with a short-lived stress, like fighting a mugger or running from a tiger (good luck with that), but deadly when the stress is long-term. Like dealing with daily life.

Here’s a short list of things you can expect when you have constant, run-away stress: Anxiety, depression, even schizophrenia, if you are epigenetically predisposed. Heart attack, stroke, irritable bowel syndrome including Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis are more likely to make themselves a part of your life. Stress plays a part in the development of dementia, including Alzheimer’s. Liver disease, Parkinson’s disease, diabetes and cancer; the list goes on.

The National Institutes of Health estimates that stress - lack of peace - is the common factor in 75%-90% of all disease, including those responsible for the leading causes of death. (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/209083)

In fact, stress is a major factor in “all-cause” mortality, in a dose-responsive manner. Which means the more stress you experience, the more likely you are to die prematurely. And that includes the worsening epidemic of suicide.

To make matters worse, many people will begin to self-medicate to try to deal with stress. Alcohol and other drugs - legal and illegal, street and prescription - are popular because they “take the edge off,” they help us “unwind.” Unfortunately, they do nothing to ameliorate the cause of the problem;  weekend drinking just makes Monday’s reality that much more difficult.

And when you inevitably become dependent upon the chemical crutches, you are on the downward slide to a terrible - and possibly irreversible - crash.

Here’s The Hard Part

The best way to deal with distress (the bad kind of stress; there is a good stress that helps us adapt to life changes, we call it eustress) is to remove yourself from the things that disrupt your peace.

Some of these changes are relatively easy, like losing your sedentary lifestyle or your terrible diet choices. Maybe you should give up partying/doomscrolling/gaming in lieu of normal sleep. Choices like this are an inconvenience, but minor in the grand scheme of things.

Many are considerably more difficult to achieve. You might have to take a break from college or find a job with a less toxic environment. You may have to find peace by taking a position that pays less, but preserves your sanity. It may behoove you to - at least temporarily - pause your dreams of entrepreneurship to gain a stable income that keeps food on the table and a roof over your head.

And here’s the truly hard part: Sometimes you have to lose things that you never imagined you could live without.

To protect your peace, you may find it necessary to change your career field altogether, as was the case for a friend of mine who spent 30 years in college to become a trauma surgeon, then quit to be a drummer in a band.

Perhaps it becomes necessary to move to a different part of the country - or a different country - brave the unknown and craft a peaceful life. One of my students thought he was intellectually insufficient and afflicted by an “addictive personality” until he left California and moved permanently to Thailand, where he now thrives and is addiction- and (relatively) stress-free.

More often that I would like to admit, the only way to protect your peace is to leave behind loved ones, including family. This should always be a last resort, but if it is the only way to survive, you have to do what you have to do.

The pain may be immense, but it will get better - trust me - and in every case is better than shooting yourself.

Give Peace a Chance

It is, of course, impossible to be alive and completely stress-free. Stress is the constant companion of consciousness. But the changes listed above should deal with the long-term, debilitating kinds of stress.

For the rest of it, work diligently to stress-proof yourself. The good news here is that you already know how: exercise (possibly the number one remedy), eat better, stay away from alcohol and other drugs (including excessive caffeine and other “energy drinks”), hydrate, get regular and sufficient sleep.

Yes, there is a cost to finding peace, but you must find a way - at all costs.

There is no shortage of professional help available as well, but putting your mindset* right is not negotiable; it is not optional.

Protect Your Peace

Peace is more important than whatever you are chasing that disrupts it. Without it, everything else becomes more difficult or impossible.

I have every confidence that you can find a way to protect that which is most important to your life and the lives of those around you.

Peace be with you.



*Click HERE to get my FREE training, Five Steps to Elevate Your Mindset!


To learn more about how to use these concepts or to inquire about working with me, you can contact me on the Hardcore Happiness website, the comments section on my Substack or Medium accounts or the Hardcore Happiness blog page. If you have found value in this article, follow my Instagram account for daily insights, or my X account for occasional tweets. To support this community, you can Buy Me A Coffee or donate through my Patreon account.

- JWW