People who are more morning-oriented due to their attitudes towards religion may benefit from better mental health, according to new research. — dpa
FOR ALMOST two millennia, monks and priests have been rising before dawn to chant or sing the Divine Office, a set of prayers marking out the passing of a day.
It is probably is no surprise that being devout, at least in Christianity, usually means getting out of bed early. After all, the Bible’s Psalm 5, usually attributed to King David, contains the promise: “for to thee will I pray, O Lord, in the morning thou shalt hear my voice.”
But David went on in Psalm 127:2 to warn that “it is vain for you to rise before light.” And thousands of years later, responding to ”God’s most deep decree,” poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins famously wrote: “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.”
A University of Warsaw team led by Joanna Gorgol has in turn tried to find out if rolling out of bed early and being a believer makes you happier or even healthier.
Assessing two sample groups of around 1,200 Polish adults, Gorgol and colleagues said “more morning-oriented individuals may benefit from higher psychological well-being thanks to both personality characteristics and attitudes toward religion.”
The results, which were published on May 24 in the journal Plos One, could be linked to “earlier findings that ‘morningness’ was positively associated with both conscientiousness and satisfaction with life,” they said.
In 2009, Christoph Randler of the University of Leipzig published research showing “evening types” as reporting ”psychological and psychosomatic disturbances more frequently and intensively than ’morning types’,” who in general ”have a healthier lifestyle.”
”Prior research has also uncovered associations between being religious and having higher life satisfaction and conscientiousness,” Gorgol and colleagues said.
In 2019, the US-based Pew Research Centre published results from a survey covering over 20 countries. “People who are active in religious congregations tend to be happier and more civically engaged than either religiously unaffiliated adults or inactive members of religious groups,” the Centre found.
In 2016, a Harvard University team had research published in the journal Jama Internal Medicine, which showed women who attend religious services once a week to be ”associated with 33% lower all-cause mortality compared with women who had never attended religious service.”
Perhaps most intriguingly, in 2022 a University of Miami psychologists published research suggesting ”people with HIV who prayed for known others were twice as likely to survive over 17 years compared to those who did not.”
According to Gorgol and colleagues, such findings “might stem, at least in part, from higher religiosity among morning-oriented individuals.” – dpa
