The Power of Prayer and Self-Control

 

Praying in a Labyrinth

 The labyrinth is a metaphor for a spiritual journey, with the entrance representing birth and the center symbolizing God or enlightenment. 

 Prayer, whether directed toward a specific deity or more freeform, has been shown to have the power to positively affect our physical and mental health. Prayer has been linked to reduced stress and anxiety, lower blood pressure and heart rate, and even brain chemistry changes that can make a person more empathetic, amicable, and altruistic. Studies into how and why prayer works as a mechanism for overall health improvement have found numerous reasons for its success.

 

One interesting way in which prayer has recently been found to help us is through self-control. A recent study asked participants to watch a funny video and do all they could to suppress their emotions - something that requires a decent amount of self-discipline. After that, the subjects were tasked with a cognitive test - in this case identifying colors and text. The question these researchers wanted to explore was whether prayer could help people replenish their reserves of self-control.

 

Here’s what they found, via Scientific American:

 

“Indeed it did. Participants who were asked to pray about a topic of their choosing for five minutes showed significantly better performance on the task after emotion suppression, compared to participants who were simply asked to think about a topic of their choosing. And this effect held regardless of whether participants identified as religious (70 percent) or not.

 

Why? The authors tested several possible explanations, but found statistical support for only one: people interpret prayer as a social interaction with God, and social interactions are what give us the cognitive resources necessary to avoid temptation. Past research has found that even brief social interactions with others can promote cognitive functioning, and the same seems to hold true for brief social interactions with deities.”

 

It appears that prayer serves as a type of social interaction - only with God. This is what helps people overcome impulses. This is exciting, as it means that the reason prayer can help people with self-control - to overcome temptation and struggle - doesn’t necessarily have to do with religious guilt. The actual act of prayer is what provides the positive benefit.

 

Prayer has also been shown to elicit physical responses in the brain and body, such as slowed breathing and heart rate and lowered blood pressure. Along with committing to a healthy lifestyle, this can have a calming effect, one which allows those who practice prayer to feel decreased stress and anxiety.

 

When you couple a reduction in stress with an ability to heighten one’s self-control, it’s easy to see why prayer can be a powerful tool in helping us regulate our hectic lives.

 

One of the myths about prayer is that you have to be incredibly religious to reap its benefits. This is false. Studies have shown that prayer acts as a form of meditation, and its effects can be traced to the participants’ emotions and feelings concerning their prayer. As the above study showed, even those that didn’t identify as religious saw the cognitive benefits as those who did.

 

One doesn’t have to take religion out of prayer to say that the less religious can still benefit from the practice. In terms of calming oneself, finding strength to persist through a challenging task, and reducing overall anxiety, prayer is another free activity that can have tremendous positive effects. Prayer helps us feel connected to our world - on both an earthly and spiritual plane. Through focusing on prayer, we can improve our overall health and well-being. 

This post was written by guest blogger, Rhonda Underhill.