Today, there are between 10,000 and 20,000 mental health apps. In the U.S. alone, there are 1.2 million mental health providers. And Mental Health Awareness Month began 75 years ago. It’s safe to say we’ve never been more aware of mental health. And yet, some fear that as awareness of mental health has gone up, the state of our mental health has gone down.
A 2023 study found that one out of every two people in the world will develop a mental health disorder in their lifetime. The situation with young people is even worse. “The youth mental health crisis is very real,” Dr. Harold Koplewicz, founding President and Medical Director of the Child Mind Institute, tells me. “The most common disorders of childhood and adolescence are not infectious diseases but mental health disorders. Every 30 seconds a child or adolescent with suicidal ideation or an attempt comes to an ER.”
There are many reasons why these are particularly challenging times: Natural disasters are intensifying, chronic diseases continue to climb, and AI is driving fear and anxiety about all aspects of life. People are afraid they will lose their jobs to AI, that their kids will be negatively impacted by AI, and that AI’s constantly accelerating development will evolve beyond human control.
But beyond the circumstances of the times we’re living in lies a more complicated existential crisis.
As the French priest and philosopher Teilhard de Chardin once said, “we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” When we give up on the spiritual part of human nature, we also give up on a supportive framework which can help us handle the anxieties of this historic moment of disruption.
Many answer this need for spirituality through organized religion, but as Columbia psychology professor Lisa Miller explains, there are many ways for people to embrace their spirituality. “The moments of intense spiritual awareness were biologically identical whether or not they were explicitly religious, physiologically the same whether the experience occurred in a house of worship or on a forest hike in the ‘cathedral of nature,’” she writes. “Every single one of us has a spiritual part of the brain that we can engage anywhere, at any time.”
The exact practices we engage in that lead to spiritual states of mystery, awe, grace, and wonder doesn’t matter. What does matter is that we don’t amputate them from our lives.
The famed psychologist Abraham Maslow placed self-actualization at the top of his hierarchy of needs—above physiological needs, safety, and belonging. But in the last years of his life, he realized that self-actualization did not fully encompass what it means to be human and added “transcendence” to the top of the pyramid.
As Maslow put it, “The spiritual life is part of the human essence. It is a defining characteristic of human nature, without which human nature is not fully human.” It’s this drive for spirituality that takes us beyond self-centeredness and allows us to resist despair and meaninglessness. This ability to find meaning in our struggles has helped humans navigate times of stress, turmoil, and crisis throughout history—and it is now validated by the latest science.
“When it comes to finding ways to help people deal with issues surrounding birth and death, morality and meaning, grief and loss, it would be strange if thousands of years of religious thought didn’t have something to offer,” writes David DeSteno, author of How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion.
Spirituality can help us not just weather times of crisis but even emerge stronger than before. A 2024 study on frontline healthcare workers in Poland during the pandemic found that higher levels of spirituality were connected to positive psychological change as the result of struggling with life challenges, known as post-traumatic growth.
According to Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist at Thomas Jefferson University, the focused attention which occurs during spiritual practices like meditation and prayer can increase frontal lobe function, which governs executive control, and down-regulates the limbic system, which is linked to fear and the fight-or-flight response. “When it comes to broader aspects of health, the improvements in brain function associated with spiritual practices that lead to reduced stress and anxiety ultimately can lead to benefits in physical health as well,” Newberg says.
“The practice of religion, as opposed to its theological underpinnings, offers an impressive, time-tested array of psychological technologies that augment our biology,” writes DeSteno. “To ignore that body of knowledge is to slow the progress of science itself and limit its potential benefit to humanity.”
He describes religion first as working similar to how a vaccine works, “boosting the body’s and the mind’s resilience so that they can better confront whatever health challenges come their way.” And second, he uses the metaphor of medicine, healing the body and mind when sickness does hit. He cites a Mayo Clinic review of hundreds of studies in which a clear pattern emerged: “people who regularly took part in religious activities were objectively healthier.”
Even more evidence has been provided by Miller through her work on MRI scans. “The high-spiritual brain was healthier and more robust than the low-spiritual brain,” she writes. “For spiritually aware people across faith traditions, the brain appeared able to protect itself from the long-standing neurological structures of depression.”
In what Miller calls our “achieving awareness,” we’re focused on organizing our lives, thinking about what we want and how to get it. This is how we build careers and get things done. But a life solely defined by achieving is an unbalanced life. In our spiritual or “awakened awareness,” our perception expands. We see ourselves not just as individual achievers but as connected to others. We seek and experience meaning and purpose. This is really the distinction between Maslow’s self-actualization and self-transcendence.
In today’s culture, many see therapy as the only answer to the mental and emotional struggles of modern life.
As psychiatrist Dr. Samantha Boardman writes: “I am not anti-therapy. I am anti-therapy culture. I believe therapy works best when it is targeted and purposeful.” She is echoed by Dr. Richard Friedman, a psychiatrist at Weill Cornell Medicine, who wrote that “excessive self-focus… can increase your anxiety, especially when it substitutes for tangible actions.” Excessive self-focus is exactly the sort of thing that can be mitigated in spiritual experiences connecting to something larger than ourselves.
The everyday behaviors Boardman cites that improve our mental well-being include practicing spirituality, spending time in nature, volunteering, and helping others.
A spiritual element, and an emphasis on helping others, have proven essential to the success of Alcoholics Anonymous. In co-founder Bill Wilson’s book, Alcoholics Anonymous, published in 1939, he wrote that “deep down in every man, woman, and child, is the fundamental idea of God. It may be obscured by calamity, by pomp, by worship of other things, but in some form or other it is there.”
Today, many people are hungry for a sense of spirituality. While religious affiliation has been dropping for decades, the spiritual impulse hasn’t. A recent U.S. Gallup poll found that 82% consider themselves religious, spiritual, or both.
People have had valid reasons for leaving organized religion, but when we reject our innate predisposition for spirituality along with that, we deny ourselves the full, expansive possibilities of our humanity—as well as the tools to navigate the labyrinths of our lives.
