“Prayer improves mental health.”
Prayer is linked with modestly better mental health for many people who pray, and small trials of prayer sessions and faith-based programs found less anxiety and depression.
If prayer is part of your life, the research fits with it being a real, modest source of support. Faith and mental health care work well together; one does not replace the other. If you do not pray, you are not missing a needed treatment.
If prayer matters to you, keep it as part of how you cope. If you are struggling, add support from a counselor or doctor, and if your faith is important to you, you can ask for care that respects it.
Safety note: Prayer can accompany mental-health care if it fits your beliefs. Do not use it to delay assessment or replace needed treatment.
Talk to a healthcare professional if: low mood, worry or stress lasts, gets worse or makes daily life hard. If you have any thoughts of harming yourself, get help right away.
Studies that follow people over time and small trials of prayer sessions and faith-based programs point the same way, toward a modest mental-health benefit for people who pray. Confidence is limited because most of the evidence is observational or comes from small, unblinded trials of programs that mix prayer with other support, so the effect of prayer itself is hard to separate.
Prayer is linked with modestly better mental health for many people who pray, and small trials of prayer sessions and faith-based programs found less anxiety and depression. The benefit looks modest: therapy that includes a person's faith works about as well as standard therapy, not better, and trials of being prayed for by strangers at a distance found no clear health effect.
Studies that follow people over time cannot fully separate prayer from things that often come with it, such as community, hope, daily habits and health to begin with. In a large US study that followed teens into young adulthood, praying or meditating daily was linked with more positive feelings later, while the link with fewer depression symptoms was weaker and not certain. In a review of 97 studies, the most careful comparisons found that therapy adapted to a person's faith worked as well as standard therapy for reducing distress and added more spiritual well-being.
Research looks at different things. Praying yourself is linked with modest benefits in observational studies. Being prayed with in person was tested in one small trial: six weekly one-hour sessions lowered depression and anxiety scores compared with no sessions. Being prayed for at a distance was tested in 10 randomized trials with about 7,600 patients, and a Cochrane review found no clear effect on health outcomes.
- Boelens PA, Reeves RR, Replogle WH, Koenig HG. A randomized trial of the effect of prayer on depression and anxiety. International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine. 2009;39(4):377-392. DOI: 10.2190/PM.39.4.c. PMID: 20391859
- Gonçalves JPB, Lucchetti G, Menezes PR, Vallada H. Religious and spiritual interventions in mental health care: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled clinical trials. Psychological Medicine. 2015;45(14):2937-2949. DOI: 10.1017/S0033291715001166. PMID: 26200715
- Captari LE, Hook JN, Hoyt W, Davis DE, McElroy-Heltzel SE, Worthington EL. Integrating clients' religion and spirituality within psychotherapy: a comprehensive meta-analysis. Journal of Clinical Psychology. 2018;74(11):1938-1951. DOI: 10.1002/jclp.22681. PMID: 30221353
- Chen Y, VanderWeele TJ. Associations of religious upbringing with subsequent health and well-being from adolescence to young adulthood: an outcome-wide analysis. American Journal of Epidemiology. 2018;187(11):2355-2364. DOI: 10.1093/aje/kwy142. PMID: 30215663
- Roberts L, Ahmed I, Hall S, Davison A. Intercessory prayer for the alleviation of ill health. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. 2009;(2):CD000368. DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD000368.pub3. PMID: 19370557