Religion is one way of regulating your emotional well being and keeping your life in balance. It can offer a unique cultural community with life guidelines, a social structure and feel good factor. Overreacting instead of responding to a situation when overwhelmed by emotion can tip your life off-balance, make you unhappy and stressed. Religion can offer emotional comfort.
How many religions are there?
Religion can be seen as a unique cultural system that feeds the soul and keeps your mind and body healthy and happy. There are approximately 4,300 religions across 195 countries in our world. There is a lot to choose from and finding emotional wellbeing and life balance through faith can really depend on culture, upbringing and your own belief systems. According to the World Population Review, the third largest population across the globe have non religious or atheist beliefs.
So, for example in a country like Sweden, where religion is not a strong part of cultural upbringing, deep religious beliefs may not be as helpful to the health of mind, body and soul as in another country. In case you are curious, the biggest religious world population is Christianity, followed by Islam, then Hinduism and after that Buddhism.
Religion’s World Population
- Christianity – 2.38 billion
- Islam – 1.91 billion
- Hinduism – 1.16 billion
- Buddhism – 507 million
- Folk Religions – 430 million
- Other – 61 million
- Unaffiliated – 1.19 billion
Source 2021: World Population Review
1) Religion offers a unique cultural system and that can make you happy.
If you take most popular Yale course ever, given by Laura Santos on the Science of wellbeing you will hear that being and feeling connected to others is important for happiness. In both a study of 64 countries conducted in German University and recent research by the Pew Research centre, the conclusion is that religious people tend to be happier. One of the happiness boosts comes from the social joy of being part of a service, enjoying the sense of connection with others with shared values, regardless of which religion it is.
2.) The gratitude promoted in religion enhances a sense of well being.
Gratitude is a positive emotional state in which one recognizes and appreciates what one has in life. The essence of most religious practices is gratitude, whether it is saying grace in the Christian faith or meditating in Buddhism. It has a universal across all countries. In social science and psychology, it has been proven that a few moments of gratitude daily can improve happiness and wellbeing.
3.) Religion offers a reassuring map to life
Emotions are like bits of data or pathway signals. We can’t suppress them and they tend to express themselves more or less strongly, depending on our past experiences, personal chemistry and belief systems.
It is how we decide to act on them that keeps our life on or off balance, happy or unhappy. The moral pathways and guidelines offered in religions can help you make decisions. You could be so angry, you want to kill or so attracted to a lifestyle, like stealing or promiscuous sex that in the short term it can give you great pleasure but will come crashing down around you, and make you unhappy later. Religions’ guidelines can be used.
4.) Soothes in times of anxiety or sadness
Sometimes events in life are emotionally overwhelming or incomprehensible. Unexplainable tragedy hits, an early death, disease, an accident, a world pandemic, divorce, a series of difficult events in every aspect of life over a period of time. These events can be outside your control. Turning to religion not only helps you with a support system in a community of caring people but faith and prayer can soothe the anxiety.
Fear and sadness are instinctive, basic and universal emotions that don’t feel good, and after sustained periods of time, the hormones secreted in your body can be damaging to health. Also the chanting, singing and repetition of words in prayer offer momentary distraction and relief from concerns. Various scientific studies, looking at brain pathways through MRI scans suggest that religious chanting activates the brain in a positive way.
One study shows that practicing religious chanting may structurally lateralize a network of brain areas involved in biased memory formation. These functional and structural results suggest that religious chanting helps to form a positive schema to counterbalance negative emotions.
5.) A way to reach joy and ecstasy
Anyone who has been on holiday to Turkey may have come across the whirling dervishes, a practice of dancing into religious ecstasy. The practice originated in the 13th century with followers of the poet and Sufi Muslim mystic, Rumi. Sufism is the mystical branch of Islam which emphasizes universal love, peace, acceptance of various spiritual paths and a mystical union with the divine.
Many people experience joy while singing in a group, some call the sense of euphoria ‘ a singers high’. The combination of movement, clapping and singing of gospel choirs can bring great joy to many people. Dancing and singing is good for soul, mind and body and so many religions around the world have wonderful rituals for this.
6.) Find the sense of awe and wonder of your inner child in religion
There are some fairly special things in our world that inspire awe. Humans have an amazing capacity to create beauty and nature, if you take a moment to appreciate it is awe inspiring. Throughout the ages, great visual art and music has been created through religious institutions. 
The Sistine Chapel, the temples of ancient Rome, statues of Shiva or Buddha, the cube of Mecca, the icons of Byzantium or the ancient medieval relics of the Christian church are all wonders of the world. Originally, art in Christian churches was created to tell the stories of the Bible to the illiterate.
Today, we look at the works of Michelangelo as awe-inspiring wonders of human creation. Or even, if you do not find art and music, the inspiration of nature, particularly in Buddhism go home to nature and let nature heal you – Thich Nhat Hanh
7.) Religion encourages doing good for others which does good for your life balance.
We all want to be happy. Yale’s Science of wellbeing course is one of many that tells us, based on research, that one step to feeling happy and reaching emotional wellbeing is by doing acts of kindness to others. This is a very large part of most religious communities and can be a path to take. Doing good for someone makes them feel good which makes you feel good. Of course, as with most decisions in life, getting the right balance is important. Too much such as over giving can be exhausting and tip the balance into unhappiness.
