A few weeks ago we listened to an episode of Modern Wisdom that stopped us both cold. Nir Eyal, the author and behavioral researcher behind the new book Beyond Belief, was talking with host Chris Williamson about the science of belief change. The conversation covered a lot of ground, but one section hit differently than the rest. Nir, a self-described data-driven rationalist, explained that he had recently started praying. Not because he had found God. Not because he had resolved any theological questions. Because the research was that compelling.
For most listeners, that is interesting. For people who grew up with a prayer life that was intimate, personal, and deeply relational, and who then had to set it down at some point, that is something else entirely. It is the research equivalent of someone handing back something you gave away.
The moment Nir described consulting a rabbi, an imam, a priest, a monk, and a swami to ask them how to pray when you have doubts, more than a few of us in this particular community had a complicated reaction. Some of us prayed our way through callings and missions and temple covenants and divorces and faith crises and sleepless nights when God felt very far away or not entirely there at all. Some stopped praying because it felt fraudulent. Some because the prayers about their marriages went unanswered in ways they could not make peace with. Some because the practice felt too entangled with a framework they were no longer sure they believed.
Scott and Laurie heard this episode and wanted to weigh in.
What Left When the Practice Did
Scott
If you grew up the way most of us did, prayer was not a habit. It was a relationship. Morning and evening. Before meals. Before decisions. Kneeling at the side of the bed long after childhood because it still felt like the right thing to do. You talked directly to God, or Heavenly Father, in the specific language you had been taught from the time you were small. That is a particular kind of intimacy, and it is also a particular kind of anchor.
When the marriage ended, or the faith cracked, or the community fell away, a lot of people set down that anchor along with everything else. Not because they wanted to. Because the prayer started to feel like a lie, or a performance, or a haunted version of something that used to feel safe. And whatever psychological and neurological work that practice had been doing for you for decades quietly stopped.
Here is what I want to say plainly: that was a real loss. Not a theological one. A functional one. And you did not have to lose it.
What the Research Actually Found
Laurie
Nir described a study in this episode that I keep returning to. Researchers brought three groups into a lab. One group had an established faith-based prayer practice. One group had no faith tradition at all. And then there was a third group: people with no religious background who were taught how to pray before the study, and who were given permission to substitute their own words for God. The universe. The sum of all forces. Mother nature. Whatever was meaningful to them.
All three groups were asked to hold their hands in near-freezing water as long as they could bear it, a standard pain tolerance test.
The group with an established prayer practice stayed in the water longest. That part is not surprising. But here is what stopped me: the group with no faith background, who had simply been taught to pray and given permission to use their own language, also showed higher pain tolerance than the control group. Significantly higher. The mechanism was not theology. It was the practice itself.
Nir also talked about Japan, where people do the rituals at the shrines and the temples but report very little actual supernatural belief. Religious but not spiritual. And they get the benefits. Meanwhile in the States, about thirty percent of Americans now identify as unaffiliated with any religion, and many of them call themselves spiritual but not religious. That group, according to the research Nir cites, has the highest rates of anxiety and depression across all the categories. Including people who simply identify as freethinkers or agnostics.
It is not the theology doing the protective work. It is the ritual, the intention, and the community.
The Prayer You Were Actually Running
Scott
Mr. A was a man enrolled in a clinical trial for depression medication. After a difficult breakup he decided to end his life, swallowed every pill in his trial bottle, and then immediately changed his mind. His neighbor rushed him to the emergency room. His heart rate was crashing. His blood pressure was dropping. All the physiological signs of a serious overdose were present.
The hospital called the trial coordinator to identify the drug. The coordinator said: he took placebos. He was in the control group. There was no active ingredient.
Within fifteen minutes of hearing that, Mr. A was completely revived. Heart rate normal. Blood pressure normal. Ready to walk out of the ER.
The body believed what it was told. The belief produced the exact physiological response you would expect from the thing it believed had happened.
Now think about prayer as it was often practiced inside purity culture. The posture of unworthiness. Please help me be enough. Please help me finally be worthy of a companion. Please help me understand what is wrong with me. That is not a neutral ritual. That is a daily practice that reinforces, at the level of the body, the belief that you are not yet sufficient. Run that for ten or twenty years and you have done something real to yourself. Not because God ignored the prayer. Because the belief underneath the prayer was the actual message your nervous system received.
The practice was never the problem. The posture was.
What It Looks Like When You Take It Back
Scott
Nir is clear about what changed in his own practice. He stopped treating prayer like what he calls a cosmic slot machine. No longer asking for outcomes, for things to go a certain way, for life to get easier. What he prays for now are qualities he wants to cultivate: patience, gratitude, tolerance, a clearer awareness of how fortunate he is to be alive and conscious in this particular moment. That is a different kind of prayer. Less petition. More orientation.
He also described mantras that function similarly, phrases he repeats to reset himself in moments of fear or spiral. The one he shared for insomnia: the body gets what the body needs, if you let it. Deep breath in. Deep breath out. That is prayer. Whatever you call it. And you already know how to do it.
Laurie
The Catholic priest Nir consulted told him something I have not stopped thinking about. He said that people come to mass with all kinds of requests. Help my daughter. Help my business. Help me find the relationship I am looking for. What they do not realize, the priest said, is that many times the way those prayers are answered is with the people sitting next to you in the pew.
That landed differently for me than I expected it to.
The practice works in part because of community. Because it draws you to a space where other people are also showing up, also hoping, also doing the work of keeping themselves open to something. The community is not a side effect of the ritual. In many ways, it is the answer.
For those of us who feel spiritually homeless right now, that is worth sitting with. The practice does not have to be attached to any institution you are no longer sure you trust. It can be your own. It can use whatever language feels honest. It just has to be real, and regular, and pointed toward something larger than the loop in your own head.
The Conversation That Does Not Have to Stop
Laurie
If you have been carrying the weight of what you lost, not just in the marriage or the relationship but in the sense of who you were and what you believed, this kind of reflection can feel like a lot all at once. We know that. If the anger and rumination about what happened is part of what is keeping you stuck right now, we go deeper into that in the companion piece we published alongside this column. And if the beliefs you carry about your own chances are the thing quietly running your dating life, we look at that directly in the inventory we put together as the third piece in this series.
But here, right now, this is what we want to leave you with: the conversation you used to have with God, or Heavenly Father, or the universe, or whoever you directed it toward, was doing real work. The research says so. The people who had no faith background and were simply taught how to pray said so with their bodies in that cold water.
You do not have to have resolved the theology to take the practice back. You just have to be willing to show up to it, quietly, even alone, even without being entirely sure who is on the other end.
And when you are ready to go deeper, we will be here.
— Scott & Laurie
Weighing in from the lowest tier of the Celestial Kingdom, where we decided to stop arguing about who was on the other end of the line and just keep the conversation going.