The surprise key to stress management.

Research shows your spiritual life is a potent prescription for achieving long-term health.

Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard University refers to it as the "faith factor." And it's turned out to be the biggest surprise in stress-management research. From the start of stress-management studies, researchers suspected a connection between stress and the practices of relaxation, exercise, and time management. But in the past several decades of research a new resource has emerged to center stage--the spiritual component.

Researchers now have surprising evidence that people who believe in God as a heavenly parent who loves and cares for them, and who actively cultivate that faith, have one of the most effective resources available for managing stress in a crisis and achieving long-term health. The following story a friend shared with me illustrates this same concept in very familiar human terms.

Dan took a backpacking trip with his three young sons that taught him a profound lesson in managing stress. After a daylong hike to a secluded lake they set up a base camp. Michael and Andrew, 10 and 7 years old, respectively, pitched their tent far enough away from Dan and his youngest son, Marcus, 5, to give them a feeling of independence. In the middle of the night Dan woke to the chilling sound of a bloodcurdling scream he recognized as Andrew's voice. Shining his flashlight through the trees, he could see their tent moving. Within a matter of seconds he arrived and shone his light on the terror-stricken face of little Andrew, who apparently, upon awakening, had been frightened by the pitch-black darkness, sat up to orient himself, hit his head on the top of his tent, and panicked.

His father suddenly realized that shining the flashlight into the face of his son wasn't helping a bit. Because Andrew was screaming so loudly, he couldn't hear his dad's consoling words. So he quickly turned the light back onto his own face, and the miracle happened. Glimpsing his father's face, Andrew immediately stopped screaming and said softly, "Oh, Daddy!" Within 30 seconds he had fallen back into a peaceful sleep.

Caring Relationships

In speaking about the experience later, Dan said, "I was struck by the power that the mere snapshotlike glimpse of my own face had had to produce an immediate and deep peace in my traumatized little boy." The resolution to that severe, acute stress had been instant, empowered by a caring relationship that had been cultivated between father and son over a period of time.

* Dr. Kenneth F. Ferraro, Purdue medical sociologist, examined 1,473 people to determine how their religious practice, or lack of it, had affected their health. Those who regularly prayed, read religious literature, attended church or synagogue, and considered themselves strong and active in their religious faith reported only half the health problems as nonpracticing people.

* Numerous studies have found lower rates of depression and anxiety-related illness among the religiously committed. Nonchurchgoers have been found to have a suicide rate four times higher than church regulars.

* A study of 232 patients at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center found that those who professed a strong religious faith had only one third the death rate of those who did not.

* Other studies have shown that men and women who attend church regularly have half the risk of dying from coronary-artery disease as those who rarely go to church.

Theories abound as to exactly why a strong spiritual faith promotes health and relieves stress. In their book Managing Stress, Ifor Capel and John Gurnsey suggest that religion can provide support and comfort in time of need and also alleviate the stressors of uncertainty and insecurity. The "grandfather" of jogging for fitness, cardiologist George Sheehan, credits religion with an almost unequaled power to relieve stress by providing an inner sense of calm and tranquillity, a sense that no defeat is final, and a person's deriving a sense of lasting security from making connection with a higher power.

The Faith Factor Works

But by whatever mechanism it works, the one thing studies are repeatedly demonstrating is that a personal religious experience has worked and worked powerfully in the lives of many.

"In his Stress: Beyond Coping" seminar, which includes biblical principles for stress management, Skip MacCarty tells of a time when five major stressors converged on him at the same time, resulting in sleepless nights. One night as he took a long walk he practiced a key principle from his seminar: he talked over each problem thoroughly with God, then released them to God one by one. He reports going back home that night and sleeping peacefully for the first time in weeks.

MacCarty tells audiences, "The next time you are overwhelmed with multiple anxieties, try letting them go into the hands of One who cares about you and is more than qualified to handle them."

During his three years as a prisoner of war at Auschwitz, Jewish psychiatrist Victor Frankl encountered a scriptural stress-management principle in action. He found that if he could help fellow prisoners believe that their experience--horrendous though it be--nevertheless had some meaning, he could help them maintain the will to survive. He would later write in his classic book of reflections on that experience, Man's Search for Meaning: "There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions, as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one's life .... Suffering ceases to be suffering in some way at the moment it finds a meaning (Rom. 8:28)."

In his book Stress/Unstress: How You Can Control Stress at Home and on the Job, Dr. Keith Sehnert advocates finding a quiet time each day for prayer and reading the Bible or other devotional literature as a vital component of a well-rounded stress-management program.

Highly respected author and psychiatrist Paul Tournier said that he used to live a restless life, always racing the clock. But he reported that once he began to devote an hour a day to quiet reflection, devotional meditation, and prayer, he has been happier, healthier, and better able to distinguish between priorities, and has actually accomplished more.

Dwight K. Nelson is the featured speaker for The Next Millennium, an international satellite seminar (Oct. 9-Nov. 14). For the seminar location nearest you, call 1-888-253-3001, or check the Website: www.net98.org.