A new study suggests that engaging in personal religious activities, such as praying and reading scripture, tends to reduce the spikes in blood pressure during stressful situations. The results of this study indicate that while an individual’s religious practices may provide a protective buffer against the physical harm of acute stress, general spiritual feelings are unlikely to confer similar physical benefits. This study was recently published in the journal religion, brain, behavior.
Cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death worldwide. Psychological stress is recognized as a risk factor for developing heart disease, comparable to physical factors such as smoking, obesity, and lack of exercise. When people experience sudden stress, they respond by increasing their heart rate and blood pressure. This biological change is known as cardiovascular reactivity.
Excessive or prolonged physical responses to temporary stress can ultimately damage the heart and blood vessels. Scientists suggest that finding ways to manage these bodily responses may help protect long-term heart health. Previous research has shown that religious and spiritual people often have better physical health and lower rates of heart disease.
Despite this observed association, past scientific research has frequently conflated the concepts of religion and spirituality. Religions usually include basic principles, rituals, and practices centered around a higher power or a particular tradition. Spirituality tends to be a broader concept and refers to a personal search for meaning, peace of mind, or a sense of connection to the world at large.
In modern society, more and more people identify as spiritual but not religious, so the author wanted to separate these two ideas. They aimed to find out whether it is specific religious behaviors or general spiritual feelings that actually help the body cope with sudden stress.
“I’ve always been interested in psychosocial factors and how they affect health, particularly stress responses and the development of cardiovascular disease,” says Ailv Dempsey, a research fellow in the Department of Psychology at the University of Limerick in Ireland. “Through my reading, I realized that religiosity and spirituality are often confused in literature and used interchangeably.”
“With the social decline of traditional religion and the rise of a more individualized spirituality, I became interested in how these concepts differentially relate to health outcomes,” Dempsey explained. “I quickly realized that the literature in this area was limited and mixed, especially because of the insufficient distinction between religiosity and spirituality.”
“This sparked my interest in the topic and ultimately led me to explore it further in my doctoral research,” Dempsey said. Dempsey is affiliated with both the university’s Anxiety, Stress, and Health Research Institute and the Institute for Health Research.
To examine these relationships, researchers used data from a large national project known as the U.S. Midlife Development Study. The final sample included exactly 628 middle-aged adults between the ages of 35 and 85. This group was primarily white and identified primarily with the Christian tradition.
Participants visited a clinical research center to undergo a standardized stress testing procedure. The researchers monitored three specific body functions throughout the experiment. They tracked systolic blood pressure, which measures the pressure in blood vessels as the heart beats. It also tracked overall heart rate, as well as diastolic blood pressure, which measures the pressure in the blood vessels when the heart is resting between beats.
The test protocol lasted approximately one and a half hours and included three different phases. First, participants sat quietly for 11 minutes so researchers could record baseline measurements during rest. After this rest period, participants completed two difficult mental tasks designed to induce acute psychological stress.
The first stressor was a mental arithmetic task that required participants to solve complex mathematical problems under time pressure. The second stressor was a cognitive test in which participants quickly identified font colors that did not match the written word, such as the word “red” printed in blue ink. After completing these two 6-min stressful tasks, participants sat down for a 6-min recovery period.
To measure private religious practices, the researchers used a survey that asked participants how often they privately prayed, meditated, chanted, and read religious literature. Higher scores on this three-item questionnaire indicate more frequent personal religious activities. Another five-item survey measured daily spiritual experiences, asking participants how often they felt a deep sense of inner peace, connection to all life, or deep gratitude for the world.
This spiritual scale did not refer to God or any particular religion in order to separate it from formal theology. The stress task was successful in inducing a physical response throughout the sample. On average, participants reported feeling significantly more stressed during mental tasks compared to at rest.
When researchers analyzed the data, they found a specific link between folk religious practices and the body’s response to stress. Participants who reported higher levels of personal religious practices experienced significantly lower spikes in systolic blood pressure during stressful tasks.
“The findings of this study suggest that personal religious practices, such as personal prayer, may help some people respond to stress more healthily by reducing physiological stress responses, particularly blood pressure reactivity (results held even after adjusting for baseline cardiovascular measurements, age, gender, race, BMI, smoking, or prescription drug use),” Dempsey said. BMI is a standard measure of body fat based on height and weight.
Interestingly, the researchers did not find any association between daily spiritual experiences and cardiovascular measurements. Common feelings of peace of mind and connection to nature do not seem to dampen physical stress responses.
“In contrast, spirituality alone does not appear to influence these physiological measures,” Dempsey added. “This study highlights the importance of distinguishing between religiosity and spirituality, as these can influence health and stress responses in different ways.”
The authors suggest that deeply internalized religious beliefs are practiced regularly in private life and may provide a structured framework for dealing with life’s challenges. Engaging in personal religious practices can help you reframe stressful events and make them feel less threatening. This mental change may be the reason why the body reacts less severely and the strain on the cardiovascular system decreases over time.
Religious practices can lead to frequent experiences of emotions such as gratitude and joy by fostering positive meaning in life. Psychological theory suggests that these positive emotional experiences can increase a person’s cognitive flexibility. This helps individuals develop lasting resources such as resilience, which tend to counteract the negative effects of everyday stressors on the body.
Although the study provides nuanced insights, the researchers acknowledge that their study has some limitations. Because the data was collected at a single point in time, scientists cannot prove direct cause-and-effect relationships. People with naturally calm physical stress responses may simply be drawn to personal religious practices rather than the practices themselves that induce physiological calm.
“An important caveat is that this result is specific to systolic blood pressure (SBP) reactivity, as folk religious practices were not associated with diastolic blood pressure or heart rate responses to stress,” Professor Dempsey explained. The abbreviation SBP specifically refers to the top blood pressure reading that showed the only significant physiological change in the model.
The diversity of the sample was also somewhat limited. Most of the participants are white and come from Christian backgrounds where practices such as private prayer and reading the Bible are very common.
“Furthermore, the sample was predominantly Christian, which may have influenced the observed associations,” Dempsey cautioned. “Because religiosity may vary across cultural and social contexts, these findings may not be generalizable to more religiously diverse or less religious populations. Therefore, future research should examine these relationships across different cultural and religious groups.”
Additionally, there is a possibility that there may be misunderstandings regarding the survey contents. The measure of folk religious practices also included meditation, a practice utilized in religious contexts as well as secular and spiritual contexts. Future research will need to separate meditation from explicitly religious practices to understand specifically what dampens the stress response.
Additionally, although low cardiovascular reactivity is generally considered healthy, an abnormally slowed physical response to stress may have negative health effects, such as depression or behavioral disturbances. Scientists suggest that further research is needed to fully understand when suppressed stress responses are adaptive and when they may be harmful.
Looking forward, researchers hope to build on these findings to better understand the unique physical effects of faith. “Regarding this field of research, I would like to conduct longitudinal research that explores various aspects of religiosity and spirituality, both positive and negative, across diverse cultural groups and age groups,” Dempsey said.
The study “examines the association between folk religious practices, daily spiritual experiences, and cardiovascular stress reactivity” and was authored by Ailbhe Dempsey, Siobhán Howard, and Stephen Gallagher. This research was supported by Taighde Éiriann and the National Institute on Aging.
