As Americans navigate significant societal division and stress, mental health experts are offering practical strategies to cultivate peace during turbulent times. According to the American Psychological Association, 62% of adults report that societal division is a significant source of stress in their lives, leading to feelings of loneliness, emotional disconnection, and isolation with tangible health effects including nervousness, anxiety, fatigue, and headaches.
Elizabeth Hamilton-Guarino, co-author of “The Peace Guidebook: How to Cultivate Hope, Healing and Harmony for the Good of Humankind” and co-founder of Best Ever You Network, emphasizes that peace is an internal practice before an external condition. “Peace starts within us and then radiates outward,” she said. Hamilton-Guarino and co-author Dr. Katie Eastman, a Seattle-based licensed mental health provider with more than 40 years of experience, wrote the guidebook to help reframe stress and overwhelm not as problems to escape but as moments where peace can be consciously practiced.
Practical Peace Practices
The guidebook offers three core tools accessible to anyone, anytime. First, pause before reacting to anything to avoid knee-jerk responses. Second, breathe to reset the body—taking several breaths before reacting makes a significant difference. Third, choose responses with intention; by pausing and breathing, one can respond more peacefully and keep stress lower. The experts also note it is acceptable to have no response at all, countering the tendency to always offer opinions that increase stress. As Marcus Aurelius said, “You always have the option of having no opinion.”
Dr. Eastman emphasized that “in order to have peace no matter what is going on in the world, we have to have healthy ways to cope and center ourselves.” The Percolate Peace Project is inviting one million people to share a moment of peace, a peace promise, or a random act of kindness through a 30-day peace challenge using the hashtags #PeacePromise, #PercolatePeace, and #BestEverYou, demonstrating that peace grows through everyday actions and that no act is too small to create lasting change.
This article is an AI-assisted summary. All facts and figures are drawn from the original report: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/stressed-burned-out-overwhelmed-wheres-the-peaceexperts-share-real-solutions-for-stress-relationships-and-everyday-life-302766914.html