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Hi, everybody. Welcome again to calm your caveman. We're going to focus on an important question today, and that is the relationship between religion and anxiety. Religion has been used as a tool for violence, for abuse, for discrimination, for prodding people toward irrational behavior. But like any powerful tool or technology what you do with it depends on how you use it, depends on the intentions of the person using it. Just like the internet, for example, which is another powerful tool, a powerful technology. If a tool's been used badly, it's not exactly the most rational thing to just throw the tool away. But a smarter thing is to learn to use it well, to put it to good use. Imagine if we threw away all the tools in the world, all the technologies that have been used badly at some point, We would have to throw them all out, including the technology of fire. So let's be smart. Let's learn how to use our tools and technologies well. Let's learn from mistakes of the past. Let's throw out bad uses of technologies, not the technologies themselves.
Now specifically about using the technology of religion, Dave DeSteno who is a professor of psychology at Northeastern university published a recent volume called How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion, in 2021 . He talks about how we always have strived to develop technologies that give us some kind of control or a sense of control over the challenges that life throws at us. And that biological adaptation hasn't solved all of our problems. And so we also ended up developing psychological technologies. And one example of this type of psychological technology is psychology. But Dr. DeSteno also talks about how religion in a sense is also a psychological technology, which is meant to augment our capacity to deal with the challenges of life. There is a huge volume, it's about three inches thick, which I read. It's called Religion and Health. It is a meta analysis of all of the studies that analyze any kind of intersection between religion and health, any aspect of health, physical, mental, et cetera. And by the way, I'll have links to all of these different resources in the show notes so that you can look at, look them up, and find out more about them. And what this volume found was that, by and large, the majority of studies showed a positive relationship between Physical health and religion and also mental health and religion. So in other words, those who are involved in religious practice tend to be healthier and live longer and they also tend to have better mental health. And specifically in the area of mental health, religious people tend to have greater wellbeing, greater hope and optimism, greater sense of purpose and meaning, better self esteem, better adaptation to bereavement and loss, better social support, less loneliness, less depression, fewer suicides, less anxiety, fewer psychosis, less alcohol and drug abuse, less delinquency and crime, and greater marital stability .
Now of course, these are generalities. There are exceptions to the rule. You can always find a study which shows something contrary to this majority. Every individual can be different. And of course there are studies even showing a negative relationship between religion and health. However, as these meta analyses show, who have looked at the whole body of studies, what they show is that, although there are outliers, there are exceptions, the vast majority of studies show this strong, positive relationship between mental health, physical health and religion. Which may be surprising to some people. I think that some of us have a concept of religion as detrimental, which is based on, perhaps related to what I talked about before, when we were talking about how religion has been used in the past as a tool for harm in many cases. But we have to also look at the ways in which this tool has been used for good in order to better understand the tool and what it can do. So we're going to talk a little bit more about how this tool can be used in beneficial ways. And why it is that in general the vast majority of people benefit from the use of religious technologies.
So what are the different technologies that religion uses to help people with anxiety? Well, they are rituals, they are customs, they are ways of thinking, they're beliefs, they're symbols, they're actions, they're group behaviors. We're going to talk now about how religious technologies can help with anxiety specifically, and we're going to examine how they help buffer against one particular problem, modern day problem. It's always been a problem, but it's even worse for us in our present day, and that is the problem of loneliness, which contributes to a great increase in anxiety in our society. So loneliness, researchers have found, is actually as dangerous as smoking in terms of its potential to shorten people's lives. It actually impairs our immunity, it worsens inflammation, and it increases our blood pressure. People are, in our current day, more lonely than, than we've ever been. Loneliness is reported more often than it has ever been in the past. We're also less religious than we've ever been. Loneliness, you know, this epidemic, has a lot of different causes, and probably the biggest one is this breakdown of community. But religion can offer a type of community and as I mentioned, a moment ago, studies show that religion does really help people to feel less lonely. So I just want to give you a few examples of how different technologies from my own religion have helped to buffer me against loneliness and thus insulate me from different anxiety triggers that come from loneliness.
So I grew up in Provo, Utah USA, a religious community. My parents were active in the local congregation. And many of the members of the local congregation were also my neighbors. And so I knew all of them quite well, not just because we met together at church, but because we were constantly involved in each other's lives. And I had the sense that I had a network, growing up, of many people, besides my parents, who I knew cared about me. And I felt like I could go to any number of people's houses if I were in trouble and that they would help me if I needed it. So I felt like I had a network of support that was much bigger than just my immediate family. And the reason why I felt this security, and felt sure that these people would help me, is because they had been involved in my life for as long as I could remember. And they had been teaching me to do things. They had been preparing individual church lessons for me and the other kids who are exactly my age. They had been teaching me how to make donuts, and taking me on camping activities. They had been teaching me music. I had been involved in children's choirs and mixed children and adult choirs. I had been part of parties that they had organized, and activities, and dinners. And so we had socialized a lot together. But besides the social aspect of our interactions, there was something additional. There was a sense of shared purpose. We talked, about six months ago, about the importance of finding your sense of purpose and how much this helps you to reduce anxiety in your life in general. But just imagine when you have a group of people With a shared purpose, and how all of these buffers against anxiety which come with an individual sense of purpose can be magnified when you have a whole group of people who have a shared sense of purpose, and who are working together for the same thing. So it was a sense of caring about each other, socializing with each other, but also working for something important that we all believed in together.
One example of how this network of support worked in practice was, uh, when my mother-in-law passed away a few years ago. We were in Brazil, of course, because that's where we live, but we were able to go back to the funeral. And the family, of course, the children, were all trying to figure out how to deal with arranging the funeral and the burial arrangements and, and all of the million things that you have to figure out when you lose someone. So we got through the funeral, we got through the burial and then here's this big group of us. Many of us had come from really far away. And nobody had eaten for a really long time, but there's no way anybody had any brain space to think about food. But what happened was that my mother-in-law had belonged to a church community who had banded together and they had made a great banquet for us, just for the family. And there was one member of this congregation who was a retired doctor and had a great big basement and had opened up, um, their basement for us and invited our huge extended family into their basement. And they had filled it, with the help of the church congregation, with different soups and fruit plates and salads and desserts and rolls. And and we, as a family had an insulated period of time there, given to us by this church congregation that didn't really know us, we weren't a part of this congregation, this was my mother-in-law's congregation. But even though she had passed on, they were committed to the idea of helping her children to deal with this transition and to grieve with a sense of support. And so we ended up having this insulated space of time in this person's basement, with food abundantly provided, so that we could continue to talk to each other and process our loss of this wonderful woman. And having this, the sense of support from a whole bunch of people that we didn't really know, but that we knew cared about what we were going through was a tremendous balm and really helped us to feel like there were people around us supporting us in this difficult time.
Another way that my religion has helped to buffer me against loneliness has been with my immediate family. So I talked first about my community growing up, but now I want to talk about helping to keep my immediate family as a coherent group. And as I mentioned before, one of the effects on mental health in that list that I read off earlier was, in addition to less loneliness and less anxiety was greater marital stability. And so I want to talk about the way, ways in which my religion has helped with marital stability. Marriage in my religion and my church is an especially sacred ceremony. It doesn't happen in our regular church, but it happens in an especially sacred space, which we call the temple. There's a lot of ritual involved in approaching the temple. And so that magnifies a sense of sacredness, a sense of being set apart. And so it really makes you feel like having a wedding is something that is of a different order, and it's especially special. And so as part of the ceremonies and the rituals and the sacred space that surrounded my wedding ceremony, I was really struck with this feeling of the sacredness of what I was doing, and the sense of purpose of what it meant to get married. And a sense of the sacredness of this other person that I was marrying. And not only that. In our temples, there's a lot of, um, emphasis on the idea of linking the generations to each other. So linking children to parents, to grandparents, to great grandparents and so on. And so you get the sense of your place in the family tree. I ended up having a feeling that it wasn't just about me and my husband getting married in that moment, but it was about our role as the link between our ancestors and our descendants, our place and our connection to all of the generations that came before and thus our connection to the whole human family, our place in the whole human family, and our role as providers for those who would come after us. So a real sense of something more important than just what we could see in that moment was going on.
Now I have been married for 30 years. And people change a lot in 30 years. There's really no way that my husband and I could have known who each other would be 30 years from that point. And so it's a difficult thing to commit to. It's the kind of thing where you need this sense of greater purpose in order to get you through all of the bumps that'll happen and changes that'll happen in the road. In these 30 years, we have lived in multiple countries, and we have gone through various job transitions and we've raised five kids. So there's a lot of change, a lot of, um, challenge that we've been through. But this sense of sacredness and purpose and meaning that the ceremonies and the rituals and the sacred space associated with our marriage gave us really helped to lend us reasons to work on our relationship, even in those moments when it is inevitably hard, and reasons to stay together, reasons to forgive when we hurt each other. We found these reasons through having the sense of purpose and a higher ideal to work for that was afforded or communicated or packaged to us through these religious technologies.
So I just wanted to give you a couple of examples of, although we know,
although many of us are aware of examples of how religion can and has been used for evil, just to help us to be aware also of the ways that it is used for good, and that it is used for adaptive and healthy purposes. And to suggest that we don't need to throw away a technology or a tool just because it hasn't always been used in a good way. Instead, we need to learn how to be smart with our tools. We don't through throw them out when they've been used badly, but we learn how to put them to good use instead of bad. And of course, as the studies show in general, these tools are beneficial for people. So I just want to suggest to you the ways in which you might Consider taking advantage of the ways that religion can help with both physical and mental health. So that's it for today and thanks for listening.
And don't forget to stay tuned for our kindness narrative, your nearly effortless gratitude practice for this week.
Hi, I am Sarah. I am a senior in college and about two semesters ago I had this one teacher for a chemistry class that I had to take for one of my required classes for my program. And, the class was very intense. We, we had to be there four days a week. Lots of lab work, lots of lecture time.
It's kind of intense. But the teacher himself, he was actually one of the best teachers I've ever had in college. He was so good. His lectures were, were really comprehensive. They were uh, easy to understand and they were actually fun. Even though it was like an auditorium full of people, he always found a way to make it fun. He was just a really great professor. He made a class that I normally would've hated into something manageable and enjoyable at times even. Um, but it was still a pretty intense class. Over the course of the semester, there were four tests, and towards the end of the semester we were approaching the third semi-final of the class. I realized that I wasn't gonna be in town for that semi-final because I had to go to my brother's graduation. My whole family was gonna be there. I couldn't miss it. Um, and I hadn't realized this, until then. So I was freaking out. I went over to him and I let him know, I'm so sorry. I am actually gonna be out of town during this semi-final. And I was really worried about it, but he just looked at me and said, uh, just email me the flight details, proving that you're gonna be out of town during that time, and I will take that test off from your overall grade. And I was like, really? Okay. And so I did. All I did was send him the email and right away he was like. I'm voiding this, test from your overall grade. It didn't affect my grade at all. I ended up getting an A in that class and because I worked hard for the other tests, but that was just so nice of him for him to b that easygoing about it and, that gracious with me because it could have been, a problem if he hadn't.
So, yeah, I'm very grateful for that.