Spirituality, the Brain, and Depression
Do you believe in the human spirit? Not grit or stubborn willpower, but some non-material essence that lives inside each of us. Sir Isaac Newton tried to describe it as vibrations, light, and heat, admitting it was something that could not be captured in a few words, nor pinned down with any exact account of the laws by which this electric and elastic spirit operates. For some people, spirituality and religion are pure fiction. For others, faith and mindful practice are stitched into the ordinary hours of a day. Nobody has settled the question of whether a soul survives death. And yet the belief itself, independent of its truth, may hold off a range of mental illnesses, major depression among them.
People reach for spirituality from very different directions. Some keep it apart from religion entirely. Others treat it as a line of connection to a higher being, whether that is God, Allah, Yahweh, the Buddha, or Ganesha. There are those who locate it in the matter around us, in energy and vibration and light, and still others who understand it mostly through experience, personal and shared. One person's version might be Sunday mass. Another's might be a quiet meditation that settles the mind. Either way, the spiritual life tends to lend existence a weight and texture it would otherwise lack.
There is physical evidence too. Holding a spiritual worldview appears to thicken the brain's cortex. A Columbia University study points to religion or spirituality acting as a kind of shield against depression, with the effect strongest in people whose families carry a history of the illness. Researchers looked at MRI scans from 103 adults sorted by their inherited risk. Those who said religion or spirituality mattered to them showed thicker cortices than those who placed little value on it. What makes the finding carry weight is where the thickening showed up: the very regions that run thin in people prone to depression.
Lisa Miller, who led the work and directs both Clinical Psychology and the Spirituality Mind Body Institute at Teachers College, connected her results to earlier research. Those studies had already mapped broad stretches of cortical thinning in specific brain regions among the adult children of high-risk families. Her study ties the large protective benefit of faith to exactly that pattern.
The cerebral cortex, sometimes called the cerebrum, is the brain's outer and wrinkled layer. It runs thought, action, and the higher-order work the brain does. Built from nerve cells, its folds buy extra surface area, which means more room for neurons and quicker communication between them. The neocortex, the largest piece of the cortex and a structure found only in mammals, handles most of our advanced processing. Scientists consider it the most recently evolved region of the brain in the more developed mammals.
Mindfulness sits at the center of most spiritual and religious practice. It is concentration, an awareness held on the present. Meditation is one form of it, a deliberate narrowing of consciousness. People get there through yoga, through eating slowly and with attention, through all sorts of centering exercises. Those who pray are, in their way, meditating. Many are convinced their own deity marks the single true road to salvation, and yet the research keeps pointing elsewhere: whatever the tradition, the act of believing is what seems to lift mental health and well-being.
A University of Missouri study found real benefits in spirituality and religion no matter which tradition a person followed. The researchers suggest faith shapes recovery across a wide spread of conditions, from cancer and strokes to traumatic brain injuries. People who practiced some faith showed better mental health overall, with lower neuroticism and more extraversion. The most surprising result was forgiveness. Treated as a spiritual trait, it predicted mental wellness on its own, apart from any personality measure.
Dan Cohen, an assistant teaching professor of religious studies who led the Missouri study, frames religion and spirituality as a coping tool that can also shift how a person sees the world. With greater spirituality, he noted, people shrink their sense of self and feel a larger oneness, a connection to the rest of the universe. The frequency of attendance was not the deciding factor. What mattered was believing in something bigger than the self.
Cohen also thinks clinicians can use this to steer patients away from the harmful side of belief. Rather than reading a hard experience as a divine curse, a person can lean on the parts of faith that bring peace, the sense of connection that reaches past the self.
Contemplative practice stretches well beyond organized religion. Whoever you are, at risk for depression or already living with its symptoms, mindful habits offer something. Yoga, mindful eating, walking with attention, chanting, keeping a journal, pilgrimage, meditation, and plenty of other practices can buffer the body and the emotions against stress and sickness. Being attuned to yourself, and feeling that you belong among others, adds something to a life. Namaste.