A good night’s sleep is critical to one’s health. Trouble sleeping can amount to heart disorders, mental health problems, increased laziness, issues with family and friends and a decline in academic performance.

Now, researchers have determined that people with higher religious involvement have healthier sleep habits.

“Individuals who are more religious tend to enjoy better overall sleep quality, to fall asleep more easily, sleep more soundly and to use fewer sleep medicines or other sleep aids than their less religious counterparts,” said Christopher Ellison, professor of sociology at the University of Texas San Antonio and lead author of the paper.

Additional authors of the paper include Terrence D. Hill, associate professor of sociology at the University of Arizona and Reed T. Deangelis, a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The study

For a long time, researchers have found interest in the correlation between religion and health, including ties between religion and a higher life expectancy.

Because of the many health risks associated with sleep deprivation, Ellison wanted to look at research that linked spirituality to sleep.

The researchers evaluated several studies regarding the parallel between religious involvement and sleep for this purpose. The studies included people from many different age groups and religious affiliations.

They looked specifically at religious attendance, frequency of prayer and level of importance at which individuals hold their religion.

Despite the diversity of the samples, the researchers found that individuals who attend services more often, pray frequently and assign a great amount of importance to religion in their daily lives sleep more soundly, said Ellison.

The full paper is published in the journal Sleep Health: Journal of the National Sleep Foundation.

Possible explanations

“We suggest several possible explanations,” said Ellison.

“Religious people may have fewer symptoms of depression, anxiety, or psychological distress; greater resilience and coping ability when confronting stressful events and conditions; reduced smoking and alcohol consumption; greater access to supportive social relationships, successful marriages and intimate partnerships, and other social resources; lower levels of allostatic load, or overall cardiovascular, immune, metabolic, and neurological reactivity in the face of chronic stress, among other advantages.”

For now, all of these factors are just speculations, said Ellison.

Additional studies must be conducted before hypotheses like these can be verified.  

What’s next?

Ellison and his team will be presenting new findings on the ties between religion and sleep at the Association for the Sociology of Religion (ASR) meetings in Philadelphia in August 2018.

The data, which support the findings, is from a large, nationwide survey of U.S. adults.

The new work shows that one’s strength of belief that they are going to experience eternal life in heaven, a concept called assurance of spiritual salvation, is closely tied with sleep quality, via several measures.

People who believe in their spiritual salvation experience less sleep deprivation when going through a stressful time.

“Much of this pattern is due to the fact that persons with a strong sense of their own salvation tend to have relatively low levels of anxiety and depression,” said Ellison.

He claims that several future steps are important in the progression of this research.

“First, religion is a complicated phenomenon, and studies should consider a much broader set of aspects of religion and its link with a wide array of sleep outcomes,” he said. “Second, studies should incorporate a richer array of measures of sleep quality.”

Ellison would like to see future studies use biomarker data on sleep experiences and sleep quality.

Currently, he is excited about the future.

“We believe the links between religion and sleep represent an exciting and productive new frontier in our quest to understand better the role of religion and spirituality in the vast area of public health and health care,” he said.