Study Shows Prayers and Church Attendance Helps You Sleep Better
A recent study has found that those who attend church services and pray regularly tend to sleep better than those who don’t.
According to the study conducted by the University of Texas, San Antonio, and published in Sleep Health: Journal of the National Sleep Foundation, data from a large nationwide survey of U.S. adults shows that religious attendance and frequency of prayers are positively associated with overall sleep quality.
The study also acknowledges that religion could “decrease psychological distress, substance abuse, and stress exposure, which are all associated with sleep outcomes.”
Christopher Ellison from the UTSA Department of Sociology, one of the researchers involved in the study, stated that “this research is relatively unchartered territory that allows us to better understand the way in which religion and spirituality affect a person’s health and overall quality of life.”
Another study titled “Religion and Health: A Synthesis” conducted in 2016 by Tyler J. VanderWeele, professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, suggests that married couples who attend church services together are more likely to live longer, are less likely to be depressed, and less likely to get divorced.
The study also asserted that married couples who attend religious service are 30 to 50 times less likely to get divorced than those who do not, adding that such couples are also nearly 30 percent less likely to be depressed, with significantly lower risk of dying.
A separate study, published in JAMA Psychiatry the same year, found that American women who attend a church service once a week or more are five times less likely to commit suicide compared with those who never go to a religious gathering.
In the conclusion, the authors wrote: “Our results do not imply that health care providers should prescribe attendance at religious services. However, for patients who are already religious, service attendance might be encouraged as a form of meaningful social participation. Religion and spirituality may be an underappreciated resource that psychiatrists and clinicians could explore with their patients, as appropriate.”
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