Prayer is the act of communicating with God, whether to seek His help or express gratitude for various blessings. It serves as a psychologically uplifting practice, offering significant comfort and calming a troubled mind. However, reports suggest that scientists have done little research on the health benefits of prayer mainly because of a lack of funding for finding more observations in this field. Many academicians are of the belief that science includes studying of observable relations, processes and mechanisms whereas prayer include the association of an unobservable and spiritual higher being which is something outside the boundaries of natural phenomenon. For this reason, scientists show little interest in doing research on prayer.
However, it cannot be denied that every person feels a sort of relaxation after connecting with the Almighty through prayer. A special form of meditation, prayer provides psychological, emotional and health benefits to a person.
Rekindles Hope
One of the biggest benefits of praying is that it evokes a sense of faith that there is someone with us who can help us to sort our problems thereby filling our mind with positivity. Although getting hope doesn’t mean that things will turn out exactly as we want it to be, it will encourage us to look for other ways to overcome our obstacles and accept the situations of the past strongly.
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Improves Our Attitude
When we pray to God before starting our day, we get a kind of mental strength to tackle the situations of the day with a positive outlook. Praying gives us a sense of hope, calmness and confidence which is essential for carrying out our daily tasks with concentration and caution.
Strong Mindset
Prayer is like a soothing balm for a troubled mind so the process of doing this holy activity daily can lessen our pains and grief to some extent and helps in setting up our minds more strongly to face and conquer the upcoming situations in life. Therefore, when we feel that sometimes situations become uncontrollable, seeking relief by praying can help us in enduring our pain a lot.
Perfect Means of Understanding the Self
As praying helps in alleviating our grief, it provides us with a clearer path of reflecting on our choices and actions and thereby choose our next step of undertaking wisely. Therefore, prayer can also be defined as a good path that leads us in discovering our skills and weakness.
A Feeling of Protection
People staying alone often says that praying helps them in being feel protected by an unknown powerful force. Although there is no kind of physical protection being seen, prayer do gives us a feeling that there is some selfless and a higher being on whom we can rely when we need to find some solace and comfort in private from the harsh situations in life.
Gives Satisfaction and a Presence of Being Healed
Although prayer does not heal our physical sufferings or wounds, it brings us in connection with a higher power whose presence can help us in healing internally. Prayers can also help us in feeling satisfied when we express a sense of gratitude towards God. Moreover, when we repent in front of God, it helps us in forgiving ourselves. Thus, it can be said that prayer brings us closer to God which can give us happiness that is difficult to describe.
Good Way of Relaxation
It is quite true that religious chants or songs helps us in relaxing our mind as we concentrate on its soothing tunes to focus our mind on a higher being. When we share our problems with anyone, we feel a sense of relaxation as we have shared our burdens and hope that we can get some fruitful advice from someone or be consoled by them. Similarly, when we pray and describe our pain to God, a feeling of relaxation also occurs.
Increases Lifespan
Some studies have shown that people who attends religious places regularly generally tends to have a longer lifespan. As praying helps in reducing stress and increases hope and positivity, it helps in maintaining good mental health due to which a person can remain happy and become stronger from within. For this reason, praying regularly can help a person to live longer.
Stress Reliever
The best thing about praying is that it can help us in relieving stress greatly as we can continue to cry out our pains to God uninterruptedly as long as we want. With no one to judge us or criticize us, prayer is one of the wonderful ways of relieving our stress as there cannot be any other being than God to listen calmly and thoroughly about our pain.
Excellent Therapy for Mental Health
With hope, faith and positivity increasing whenever we resort to praying regularly, therefore, it can be a good way to boost our mental health. The best thing about praying is that we can speak to a companion who is invisible and free from any kind of judgments. Thus, we can share our worries freely with Him alone and get a sense of calmness which is the best therapy for our mental health.
With every religious scripture in the world narrating stories on how people sacrificed their material comforts to attain eternal happiness by praying or how they overcome the obstacles in life by communicating with God, it is indeed true that the power of prayer is great and a wonderful therapy for living a healthy life.
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