Religion Can Help Improve Children’s Mental Health, New Study Finds

Surprised to find this story on a national news network in Canada

By Laura Hensley Global News

People who grew up in a religious household reported fewer symptoms of depression. Getty

Children who are raised with religious or spiritual beliefs tend to have better mental health into their adulthood, a new study from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found.

According to the study’s findings, people who attended weekly religious services or prayed or meditated daily in their childhood reported greater life satisfaction in their 20s. People who grew up in a religious household also reported fewer symptoms of depression and lower rates of post-traumatic stress disorder.

On top of the mental health benefits, researchers found that religious subjects weren’t as likely to smoke, use drugs, or contract a sexually transmitted infection compared to people who had a less spiritual upbringing.

The study, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, followed more than 5,000 youths between the ages of eight to 14 years.

Why does religion benefit mental health?

According to Dr. Tyler J. VanderWeele, the study’s senior author and a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, attending religious services, like church, for example, may benefit youth because it’s a shared experience with people who hold similar beliefs and values. Community is thought to be beneficial to well-being.

VanderWeele also said that being involved in a religious community may offer adolescents role models and mentors other than their parents.

When it comes to the positive effects of prayer and meditation, VanderWeele said it’s likely that the practices “give rise to an experience of God or of transcendence so that an adolescent need not turn to drugs or risky sexual behaviours in their search for something more.”

“That experience of God may fundamentally make a person more other-oriented, leading to greater volunteering, forgiveness, and a sense of mission, and these things ultimately make one happier and protect against depression,” he told Global News.

“Adolescence is a particularly critical time of development and self-understanding, and the establishing of these practices may shape health and well-being throughout life.”

Religion also helps people think about their health in a holistic way, where the mind, body and spirit are all connected, said Jane Kuepfer, a specialist in spirituality and aging at Conrad Grebel University College at the University of Waterloo.

“[With religion], when one aspect of ‘who we are’ suffers, the whole suffers. And when one aspect is healthy and vital, ‘all that we are’ benefits,” she said to Global News. “Religion teaches us to value life, and to respect and care for our physical bodies.”

Kuepfer also stressed the importance of belonging and feeling connected to others as a factor contributing to well-being. Social isolation and loneliness are harmful to anyone’s mental health, but particularly to vulnerable populations.

“A sense of belonging is really important, and something we don’t always get in our society in other places,” she said. “[Religion] also gives you a larger perspective and connection across generations.”

Even for those who don’t attend religious services, spirituality benefits health

While attending regular religious services was key to well-being, the study also found that daily meditation and prayer greatly benefited mental health — even in adolescents who didn’t attend service as often.

VanderWeele, the study’s co-author, said that previous studies of adults showed that religious service had the strongest effects on health. But with kids, both service attendance and prayer and/or meditation were strongly associated with well-being.

“For some outcomes, the associations with prayer and mediation were even stronger than for service attendance,” he said. “This is different from adult populations.”

Kuepfer said prayer and meditation are known to be calming and can help people cope with stress. They also offer people a chance to connect with something larger than themselves and work through problems they’re dealing with.

“Religion or belonging to a faith community and participating in spiritual practice helps to slow us down and get perspective,” she said. “We realize that life isn’t all about us, and we don’t have to carry the world on our shoulders. It takes the pressure off.”

There is another aspect that has been completely ignored in this article, and that is that children, or adults, who pray and practice their faith, are living, generally speaking, in obedience to God, that is, 'in His Will'. As such, God may offer extra levels of protection from temptations and from evil. God may also very well bless those people in many various ways and direct their steps if they are listening to Him.

Christian prayer and church attendance are not just healthy exercises; they are ways of connecting to the living God, and preparing for Eternity, which is the real purpose for our existence on this earth.

People’s Egos Get Bigger After Meditation and Yoga, Says a New Study

A study found that meditation doesn't necessarily reduce ego. (Form via Unsplash)

BY Olivia Goldhill

According to Buddhist teaching, the self is an illusion. The religion preaches a fundamentally selfless worldview, encouraging followers to renounce individual desires and distance themselves from self-concern. To advance this perspective, millions of people around the world practice yoga and meditation.

But a recently published psychological study directly contradicts that approach, finding that contemporary meditation and yoga practices can actually inflate your ego.

In the paper, published online by University of Southampton and due to be published in the journal Psychological Science, researchers note that Buddhism’s teachings that a meditation practice helps overcome the ego conflicts with US psychologist William James’s argument that practicing any skill breeds a sense of self-enhancement (the psychological term for inflated self-regard.)

There was already a fair bit of evidence supporting William James’s theory, broadly speaking, but a team of researchers from University Mannheim in Germany decided to test it specifically in the context of yoga and meditation.

They recruited yoga 93 students and, over a period of 15 weeks, regularly evaluated their sense of self-enhancement. They used several measures to do this. First, they assessed participants’ level of self-enhancement by asking how they compared to the average yoga student in their class. (Comparisons to the average is the standard way of measuring self-enhancement.) Second, they had participants complete an inventory that assesses narcissistic tendencies, which asked participants to rate how deeply phrases like “I will be well-known for the good deeds I will have done” applied to them. And finally, they administered a self-esteem scale asking participants whether they agreed with statements like, “At the moment, I have high self-esteem.”

When students were evaluated in the hour after their yoga class, they showed significantly higher self-enhancement, according to all three measures, than when they hadn’t done yoga in the previous 24 hours.

A second study of 162 people who practiced meditation, recruited through Facebook groups devoted to meditation, found that the practice had similar impacts on self-enhancement as yoga. In this study, participants were asked to evaluate themselves based on statements like, “In comparison to the average participant of this study, I am free from bias.” The study found that participants had higher self-enhancement in the hour following meditation, than when they hadn’t meditated for 24 hours.

Researchers also evaluated participants’ well-being using two measures, the satisfaction with life scale and the eudemonic well-being measure, which evaluates satisfaction with autonomy, environmental mastery, personal growth, positive relations with others, purpose in life, and self-acceptance. They found that well-being increased along with self-enhancement, suggesting that self-enhancement is linked with the increased sense of well-being that many get from meditation.

These findings suggest that spiritual Buddhist practices like yoga and meditation may not do what proponents typically say they do, according to the study authors. “Ego-quieting is a central element of yoga philosophy and Buddhism alike. That element, and its presumed implications, require serious rethinking,” they write. “Moreover, ego-quieting is often called upon to explain mind-body practices’ well-being benefits. In contrast, we observed that mind-body practices boost self-enhancement and this boost—in turn—elevates well-being.”

There is an alternative explanation, though. It’s possible the study participants were doing meditation and yoga wrong. All of the participants were based in Germany, and various academics have theorized that western practitioners of Buddhism fail to practice with an eye towards the selflessness that should characterize the goals of these efforts. Though yoga and meditation were originally intended as ways to calm the ego, many non-Buddhist practitioners do these activities with an eye to self-improvement or calming personal anxieties.

Meditation can indeed be narcissistic, notes Buddhist writer Lewis Richmond in The Huffington Post. “The act of sitting in silence, eyes closed or facing a wall, attention focused on the inner landscape of breath, body, and mental activity, could at least be characterized as self-absorbed,” he says. Those who practice meditation with a self-centered perspective will likely become more self-interested, not less.

The notion that yoga can feed rather than diminish the ego won’t be surprising to those who’ve met holier-than-thou yoga devotees clad in designer athlesiure. But the psychological study didn’t examine whether Buddhist teachings themselves influenced this ego boost. Yoga alone may not be enough to dissolve the ego, but one psychological study does not invalidate thousands of years of Buddhist teaching and practice.