Seeking Sanity: How to Cultivate Peace, Happiness, and Wellbeing in a World Gone Mad is a no-nonsense guide that challenges the belief that happiness comes from “getting everything right” and offers practical, fast-acting tools to calm your mind and build lasting inner peace. Author Joseph DeNicholas talks to Book Glow about the book.

In Seeking Sanity, you argue that peace and happiness aren’t acquired externally but cultivated internally. What’s the biggest misconception people have about where happiness actually comes from?

The biggest misconception is that your mind needs anything at all to be peaceful and happy. It doesn’t, but people believe that it does because they don’t know where to look. It doesn’t make sense to claim that a given circumstance causes happiness – because it doesn’t for everyone. It’s more accurate to say that a circumstance shows you the happiness already inside you. Most people don’t know that. As a result, they end up endlessly chasing after circumstances to continue experiencing the happiness that is already inside them, and that approach makes a real mess of this beautiful adventure called life. The whole game changes the moment you realize you’ve been looking in the wrong direction.

You write that many of us have “played the game” and still ended up stressed and exhausted. What are the most damaging modern myths about success and wellbeing that you dismantle in the book?

The most damaging is that you aren’t enough – that you’re unacceptable as you are. This then leads to other myths, such as “busy equals worthy” and “achievement is the solution.” These messages get hammered into us from so many places – parents, the school system, advertising, social media, etc. Once this core belief is installed in your psyche, you’ll never feel fully “OK” in yourself. The result will be seeking external supports that tell you you’re acceptable and fearing any situation that confirms this erroneous belief.

One of the promises of your book is relief starting today — even within 15 minutes. Can you share one practical exercise readers can begin using immediately?

Of course. Take a deep breath, hold it for 5-7 seconds, and then exhale through pursed lips like you’re blowing out a candle. At the bottom of the exhale, hold your breath for a few seconds, freeze your thinking mind and become aware of the space all around you. Notice what it’s like to actually be present where you are, right now, instead of in the soap opera in your head. Doing this every 30 minutes or so will punch holes in the mind’s neurotic tendency to become lost in itself. You’ll be shocked at what a bunch of tiny moments of sanity will do for you over time if you stick with the practice. You’ll feel a little relief initially, but the experience will grow over time. Most people try a technique a few times and then give up far too quickly.

You integrate Tibetan Buddhist psychology with modern neuroscience. For readers unfamiliar with these concepts, what core principle feels most transformative in everyday life?

You’re running a script that’s been given to you – that you’re this scared and fragile being that needs to be protected and that happiness is a set of external circumstances – and that narrative profoundly shapes what you see and experience in the world. This is simply a false narrative, and that claim is backed up by thousands of years of contemplative science. What Buddhist psychology and neuroscience increasingly agree on is that you have the power to radically alter your reality by altering this script. Buddhism refers to this potential as mind training and karma, while neuroscience refers to it as neuroplasticity and Bayesian predictive processing. Your identity and persona, your emotional reactions, as well as how you perceive and relate to the world and other people – all of this can (and should) be radically altered.

Many people feel stuck because they’ve already tried therapy, productivity systems, and self-help “hacks.” What makes your approach fundamentally different?

I think most of what people are doing amounts to partial solutions that don’t get to the heart of the issues. There’s too much symptom treatment going on. Productivity systems just optimize a misdirected life. Self-help trades too much in inspiration, not transformation. Being a former engineer, I’m much less interested in band-aids and much more interested in actual solutions. That’s how I ended up transitioning from technology to mental health – I sought to understand the root cause of what I saw happening all around me and within myself. But far more important than conceptual understanding is the experiential piece – I’ve been doing the work to embody what I understand about humans and reality. Until that happens, knowledge hasn’t become lived wisdom. I don’t think such a person can be very helpful to others because they’re like a ski instructor who’s read lots of books but can’t even get on the lift.

More specifically, therapy and self-help are far too invested in the developmental path – developing a healthier and more mature version of the ego. The fruitional path shows people the place inside themselves that is already good, whole, capable, and has infinite capacity to deal with all that the world throws at us. Doing therapy without fruitional work will be considered malpractice 20 years from now.

Anxiety feels almost normalized in today’s world. What role does the nervous system play in our ongoing stress — and how can readers begin regulating it more effectively?

Anxiety has become so normalized we’ve stopped recognizing it as the symptom it is. Physiologically, our threat-detection systems were designed for short bursts — a predator, a physical danger — not the relentless low-grade activation that modern life produces. When the nervous system stays in that state long enough, it stops feeling like alarm and starts feeling like personality. That’s where most people are living, and they don’t even know it.

Anxiety is fear of emotion, so we have to start facing our emotions and working with them far more skillfully, that’s why there’s an entire chapter devoted to this topic. Emotion regulation has to happen on two levels simultaneously. Somatically, you have to give the body concrete tools to shift out of activation — breathwork, muscle relaxation, and radical acceptance of the present moment can move the needle in seconds. But if you only work at the body level, you’re treating the symptom. The cognitive piece is where the real leverage is: investigating the core beliefs that keep the threat system perpetually fired up. Why do you believe you can’t handle life? Why do you need so much control? Why don’t you fundamentally feel okay as you are? Those aren’t rhetorical questions — they point directly at the root. Anxiety is ultimately what happens when a mind that believes it’s small, fragile, and inadequate constantly tries to manage a world that refuses to cooperate.

Regulate the body to create space, then go after the belief system driving the whole thing.

You describe this book as a “no-BS manual.” What kind of spiritual bypassing or surface-level positivity were you intentionally trying to avoid?

Spiritual bypassing is avoidance dressed up in enlightened clothing, and it’s everywhere. The “good vibes only” crowd, the toxic positivity, the reflexive reassurances at a funeral — “I know they’re in a better place” — all of it shares the same flaw: it sidesteps rather than confronts. There is no such thing as a path to wellbeing that doesn’t start with cold, hard honesty. We all have deeply habituated minds and real psychological messes to work through, and pretending otherwise doesn’t make it disappear, it just drives it underground where it does more damage. This book respects that. There’s no quick fix being sold here, no reframe that makes the hard work unnecessary. My approach is to face difficult truths directly — about who you think you are, why you suffer, and what it’s actually going to take to change — because I know we have the capacity to do so. And here’s what makes that bearable: you don’t need to manufacture anything or believe anything on faith. Conscious human life, approached skillfully, is already astonishing. You don’t need a story on top of it. You just need to learn how to actually show up for it.

Your work has included guiding individuals navigating incarceration. How has that experience shaped your understanding of resilience and inner freedom?

Working with incarcerated individuals strips away every excuse the comfortable mind hides behind. These are often among the most traumatized people in our society, living in conditions of profound external restriction, and yet the inner freedom the book describes is genuinely available to them — and some of them find it. That experience clarified something important: inner freedom has no prerequisites. It doesn’t require a good childhood, a stable environment, or favorable circumstances. It’s not something the world grants you or withholds from you. Which brings me back to the central argument of the book — and frankly, to a question I’d invite every reader to sit with: if people navigating that level of trauma and external constraint can access genuine peace and freedom, what excuses do the rest of us really have?

For readers who feel overwhelmed, skeptical, or simply tired of trying — what would you say to them directly?

First, I hear you — and I want you to know that the exhaustion and skepticism you’re feeling aren’t signs that something is wrong with you. They’re actually signs that you’ve been working hard with the wrong tools. So let me ask you something directly: what has all that struggle led you to believe about yourself? Because if the answer is that your mind is somehow fundamentally broken — that lasting peace and happiness are available to everyone except you — that belief is itself a symptom of the problem, not an accurate diagnosis. Your mind isn’t defective. It’s undertrained and misdirected, which is an entirely different thing, and entirely fixable. The only question worth asking is whether you’re open to the possibility that everything you’ve tried so far was simply incomplete. If the answer is even a tentative yes, that’s enough. That’s where this path begins.

If someone finishes Seeking Sanity and truly applies your teachings, what lasting shift do you hope they experience six months from now?

Six months in, the most important shift isn’t a destination reached — it’s the certainty that the path is real and that they’re on it. They’ll know, from direct experience rather than belief, that peace and happiness aren’t dependent on what the world does or doesn’t deliver. They’ll have tools that actually work, a clearer sense of who they really are beneath all the noise, and most importantly, momentum. From that point forward, every year of their life will be better than the one before it — not because circumstances will always cooperate, but because they’ve stopped outsourcing their wellbeing to circumstances in the first place. That’s not a promise I make lightly. It’s what genuine inner work actually delivers.

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