Tranquility’s Powers: How to Find Peace in Modern Times

When people ask me what tranquility is, I am always tempted to answer: “It is the name of my sailboat.”

It is a factually correct answer, but the concept itself proves hard to grasp and handle. Is tranquility an emotion or a mood? Does it describe an absence of feeling, or a state where emotions exist in quiet balance? Is it a physical relaxation of the body, or the presence of peaceful thoughts?

Since I am quite fond of the name of my boat (and people who know me believe it suits my general demeanor) I spent considerable time researching the topic through books and papers and I am always fascinated by

In my psychological practice, the question is rarely academic, but it touches concrete daily issues. A client recently told me she needed a heavy dose of it to survive the relentless demands of her work and family. Another walked into a session, sat down, and sighed: “Dottore, non c’è mai un attimo di tranquillità!” (There is never an instant of tranquility, Doc!)

The temptation is always to reframe it as a personal choice, to suggest exercises aimed at modifying internal mental representations, cognitive processing, and emotional regulation. Practice more mindfulness, limit screen time or bathe in gratitude. In many cases, such strategies constitute the most sensible thing to do, as it’s impossible from the consultation stage to influence the subject’s own social environments and constraints.

Therapists often operate under this implicit assumption: the idea that mental well-being is achieved purely by managing our inner world, our thoughts, representations, and emotional reactions. Psychological distress stems from faulty internal representations, cognitive distortions, and irrational schemas, or it arises from structural conflicts between intrapsychic agencies and unconscious defense mechanisms.

When we fail to find peace, when tranquility eludes us, we assume our self control is flawed or we are not making the right choices.

Historical Roots of Tranquility

Over the ages humans interrogated each other on the nature of Tranquility. Stoicism is probably the school of thought that tackled the issue more directly.

The Stoic sage, according to the work of Seneca, and in less measure Marco Aurelio, possessed peace of mind (ataraxia) which springs directly from understanding the world. True peace of mind is an act of finding the right middle ground between work and rest, solitude and social life, and tight self-control and an occasional breather, all while keeping a watchful eye on a mind that constantly wants to wander.

Tranquility in this sense equates with the cessation of internal conflict, and can be associated with the idea of contentment.

Along those lines, the Vedic tradition anchors peace in Purnata, an ontological fullness that recognizes the self as inherently complete, rendering the addition or subtraction of external objects irrelevant.

Jungian psychology defines stability not as the suppression of dark impulses, but as the integration of opposites (coincidentia oppositorum), where the psyche expands to contain its own shadow without breaking.

Gestalt theory frames it as structural closure, an equilibrium reached when the mind completes its open cognitive loops and resolves internal tension into a unified whole.

It looks like, at least historically, Tranquility is the resolution of conflict and tension, within ourselves and with the environment, usually achieved by suppressing background distraction, managing internal anxiety, and forcing focus. But again the shift to find its seat within the individual person stands in contrast with the fact that whats surrounds us in everyday life show everything but the signature of tranquility.

Today, to fight background distraction and forcing focus appears to be way more difficult than it used to be. Most of the environments we dwell in hit us with a constant stream of noise: the endless hum of air conditioning, phone alerts engineered to pull your attention away, and harsh overhead lighting. To stay focused on a single task, your brain must work continuously to block out these surroundings.

The average office worker experiences an interruption every three to five minutes, leaving a mental hangover of trapped focus with every interruption. While we are more or less able to control our sight and can redirect our thinking, the human ear is an omnidirectional receiver with no physical shutter. It works by constantly monitoring the space around us to pick up what could constitute a danger or a fruitful opportunity. As the soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause points out, tranquility is largely an acoustic reality. It depends heavily on where we choose to place ourselves.

Tranquility’s Superpowers

Krause wrote an interesting book about the quality and volume of the sounds that surround human beings. Krause wrote an interesting book about the quality and volume of the sounds that surround human beings, The Power of Tranquility in a Very Noisy World, published in 2021. In it, he documents how the relentless expansion of human-made noise disrupts both natural ecosystems and human neurological health. He argues that genuine tranquility is not a psychological trick to be forced through internal willpower, but an ecological state achieved only when we locate ourselves in environments where natural acoustic signals take precedence over industrial noise.

In detail, he divides the sounds of the world into three distinct categories: 

• Geophony: the non-biological sounds of nature, like wind, waves, and rain
• Biophony (the collective voices of living organisms in a given habitat)
• Anthrophony (all human-generated noise, particularly from electromechanical sources).

Krause argues how Tranquility is rarely the complete absence of sound. Rather, it is an acoustic state where geophony and biophony are allowed to breathe, undisturbed by the harsh intrusions of anthrophony.

Consider some of the examples Krause uses in his book to describe the tax of modern anthrophony on our wellbeing. When a garbage truck violently empties metal bins outside your window at 4:30 in the morning, consider how much physiological energy you expend simply trying to absorb the shock.

When you have to speak louder over the background rumble in a busy restaurant you are tapping into reserve energy that you won’t normally use in a face to face conversation.

Sudden mechanical and electrical noises make us tense up in the shoulders and other parts of the body. We usually carry on, rarely complaining because now we have normalized the disruption. Yet these incoherent electromechanical signals are completely alien to the natural acoustic environments in which our nervous systems evolved. Because they carry no organic structure or meaningful message, the brain must expend continuous energy attempting to filter out ambient noise that offers little to no information.

Getting Far Away from Anthrophony

Last year, I spent the night camping on a plot of abandoned rural land I own in the mountains of Tenerife, right on the border of a natural reserve.Time there is spent clearing walking trails, planting trees, and preparing soil. At sunset, I normally head back down to Tranquility (the boat) where I stayed while visiting with my wife and son. But this time, I stayed past nightfall with a friend and camp out, to get more done early the next morning.

During the day, the land is quiet, though you can still hear the faint drone of cars climbing the steep mountain roads, or the occasional work happening in the nearby fincas. Once night falls, the neighbors leave and the stillness settles in.

Without realizing it at first, my friend and I began to match our behavior to the space. We lowered our voices. We moved more carefully along the moonlit paths. In that depth of silence, small sounds expanded: the campfire “breathing,” the soft rush of wind through the foliage, insects droning in the grass. Because our nervous systems detected no immediate threat, our internal state settled into alignment with the surroundings.

What my friend and I experienced is what environmental psychologists Stephen and Rachel Kaplan term a “restorative environment.” According to ART (Attention Restoration Theory), natural settings soothe us by promoting soft fascination, a quiet form of attention that allows our overworked cognitive mechanisms to rest.

The American Psychological Association (APA) defines a restorative environment as:

“…an environment—often a natural setting—that rejuvenates a person and can help restore depleted attention resources or reduce emotional and psychophysiological stress. Characteristic features of restorative environments include legibility and elements that give rise to contemplation and provide a break from one’s normal routine.” (APA Dictionary of Psychology, 2026)

Modern life places a heavy, continuous tax on our directed attention. We face the relentless demand to suppress ambient distractions and force mental focus. Research confirms that natural settings, rich in geophony and biophony counteract this drain: they reduce stress, lower physiological arousal, and replenish mental energy, validating the deep connection between the natural world and their restorative properties.

Beyond cognitive depletion, the recognition of noise exposure as a prominent environmental determinant of public health has grown substantially. The connection between noise pollution and cardiovascular disease is well documented, while an increasing body of research confirms that chronic exposure to noise—particularly from relentless sources like urban traffic—directly impacts the central nervous system, heightening susceptibility to anxiety, depression, and long-term psychological distress.

I have spent much of my life seeking these conditions at sea. Living aboard a sailboat without an internal combustion engine or the continuous hum of refrigeration removes almost all anthropogenic noise pollution. The outboard noise is completely comprised of the rhythmic interaction of waves and wind plus the squeaks and thuds of the boat making its way through.

My personal recipe for tranquility and wellbeing was simple: position the vessel as many nautical miles away from noise, crowds, and toxic environments as long as possible for as long as possible.

This drive emerged as an unconscious and natural tendency, as I never associated my behavior with the research of geo and biophonies, which came later as a sort of curiosity. I simply feel better in such environments.

Although I was fortunate enough to spend many years of my life in this conditions, escaping to sea or to a mountain finca is not a universal solution, nor is it always sustainable. Most people must find tranquility within the places they already inhabit, but the goal seems unrealistic. I know it first hand as today I am challenged to achieve the same condition in one of the busiest and noisiest city in the world, Hong Kong.

But are we hopeless?

The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius argued that seeking physical escape was unnecessary:

“People try to get away from it all—to the country, to the beach, to the mountains… Which is idiotic: you can get away from it anytime you like. By going within. Nowhere you can go is more peaceful than your own soul.”

Retreating in the Inner Sanctuary of the Self is a compelling Stoic ideal, but it ignores a basic physiological truth. Imperial Rome, for all its busyness, possessed no electromechanical compressors, no whirring appliances, and no high-frequency traffic noise. Furthermore, an emperor writing his Meditations had also the social power to command silence in the vast hall of his palace simply by raising a hand.

A watered down and decontextualized Stoicism often gets co-opted by modern productivity culture as a demand to withstand toxic, hyper-stimulating environments through toughness and mental control. This reinterpretation of the ancient philosophy put people against an enemy that it is impossible to win, causing greater suffering and damage.

Retreating into one’s soul while embedded in a sensory environment designed for chronic overload is an uphill battle. Tranquility is neither purely internal nor purely external. The division between the two is an artifact of language, and while mental attitudes matter, but so does the physical, acoustic, and social architecture around us.

How to Embrace Tranquility

Tranquility (my boat) is for sale as I can’t take care of her anymore and I am more than ever exposed to the perils and constraints of a noisy world. My strategy to keep sane, and to help other do the same has to change radically.

This brings us back to Krause’s observation: “It’s not what we have to do to reach this state of tranquility. It’s what we don’t do.”

Finding tranquility is rarely about adding another practice, another routine, or another self-improvement task to an already overburdened day. It is rather an act of subtraction.

It means not overcommitting our time out of guilt or habit.

It means not expecting a short annual vacation to heal months of environmental depletion.

It means stepping away from the constant consumption of high-friction media, noise, and artificial stimulation.

It means visiting more often a beach, a rural hillside, or a quiet corner of a city park and adapt our movements to match the natural cadence of the place.

It means not forcing tranquility into existence through mental effort. It is counterproductive.

Often, we simply need to stay away from the noise that disrupts it, allowing our ecology and our attention to settle back into place.

A Tranquil Earth

Escaping to a remote mountain farm or living on an engineless sailboat aren’t realistic solutions for most people. Yet the widespread fascination to these lifestyle escapes reveals something urgent: we are collectively exhausted by modern sensory overload. We cannot all run away to the ocean or the woods, but these extreme cases prove a simple truth: mental health, and fatigue recovery depends directly on the sound, light, and space around you.

Treating mental fatigue as a personal failure—a lack of willpower, poor stress management, or weak focus- completely miss the mark. Trying to force focus in a chaotic environment is a losing battle that rapidly drains your energy and keeps your body on high alert. Tranquility isn’t a mental skill to acquire through sheer grit like adepts of Pop-stoicism may want you to believe. It’s quite the opposite.

The real fix is far more direct: stop trying to tough it out. Seek out quiet natural spaces when you can, shield yourself from constant background noise, and strip away the clutter. As more of us focus simply on removing the noise that disrupts us, a natural stewardship of restorative environments begins. A tranquil nervous system naturally develops a more attuned, protective relationship with the Earth.