How Can Spiritual Psychology Improve Your Mental Health?
HOW CAN SPIRITUAL PSYCHOLOGY IMPROVE YOUR MENTAL HEALTH?
I don’t need to tell you we’re in a mental health crisis. We all know people that are struggling. But what many people don’t realise is how spirituality can support them in their crisis.
Spiritual Psychology is the study of the effects of spirituality on our psyche and mental health. Over the last couple of decades mounting research suggests that spirituality is the secret sauce to a happier life.
For most people, since the decline of Sunday morning worship, spirituality has been neglected. Science replaced religion and social media replaced our religious practices. But spirituality and religion are not synonymous, and we threw the baby out with the bathwater.
Maybe, it's time to rethink how we’re living and give spirituality a chance again. This time, science-backed spirituality.
Psychological spirituality or transpersonal psychology encompasses the intersection of psychology and spirituality. It offers a profound understanding of the human experience, its intrinsic connection to the transcendent realm, and a route out of this meaningless chaos into inner peace and flourishing.
Let's dive into the world of spiritual psychology today and see what it's got to offer every single one of us, whether we think we're spiritual or not.
We will discover the holistic nature of wellness and mental health by delving into the interplay between spiritual beliefs, mental well-being, and personal growth. Further down, I'll offer practical strategies for cultivating psychological spirituality in everyday life that are easy and accessible.
But first, a bit of background about how psychology and spirituality became besties. I'm going to dip into some history here, so if you're not interested, you can skip past it and head on down to the practical stuff further down.
Image by John Hain from Pixabay
CONVENTIONAL PSYCHOLOGY
In 1879, Wilhelm Wundt established the first psychology laboratory, marking the beginning of psychology as a formal scientific discipline. He's commonly referred to as the father of psychology.
While Wundt invented experimental psychology, he was more interested in studying consciousness through introspection. Sadly, in the name of credibility within this fledgling discipline, his students dropped the study of consciousness, meaning, and spirituality in favor of experimental psychology.
Over the next 100 years, the discipline of psychology rooted itself firmly in the realms of positivistic psychology, while consciousness and spirituality were mostly abandoned. Until a few pioneers in psychology began to see the value in our lived experience, introspection, and what makes us tick. Humanistic psychology was born.
HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGY
Finally, a field of psychology that focused on what it meant to be a human being. This new discipline emphasized individual potential, self-actualization, and personal growth, viewing humans as inherently motivated to pursue meaning and fulfillment. It focused on subjective experiences, free will, and the importance of self-awareness and individual agency in shaping behavior and well-being.
TRANSPERSONAL PSYCHOLOGY
Further developing the aspects of human experience that are hard to study experimentally, transpersonal psychology incorporates humanistic psychology and adds to it self-transcendence, altered states of consciousness, and our wider connections with nature, ecology, each other, spiritual traditions, our ancestors and descendants and something far greater than ourselves.
PSYCHOLOGICAL SPIRITUALITY
With humanistic and transpersonal psychology opening the doors to an alternative epistemology to conventional psychology, we could begin to explore spirituality through the lens of psychology. And we've never looked back. It turns out spirituality has everything to do with our psychology and well-being.
SPIRITUALITY'S CONTRIBUTION TO MENTAL HEALTH
The more we study human spirituality through psychological methodology, the more we discover just how important spirituality is to us as human beings. Numerous meta-analyses and reviews have shown that spirituality positively impacts our mental and physical health, resilience, coping abilities, and general well-being.
I noticed this during the COVID era. All my more spiritually inclined friends coped much better than my friends who aren't. I noticed that my spiritually inclined friends experienced less fear, less anxiety, more emotional stability, more enjoyment in lockdowns, and more personal autonomy and agency.
CONVENTIONAL PSYCHOLOGY VS SPIRITUAL PSYCHOLOGY
While conventional psychology has many areas of interest, an enduring focus has been to help people improve mental health. Despite this, more people today experience anxiety, fear, depression, and mental health problems in daily life than ever before.
Perhaps an over-focus on our emotional world and mental well-being has contributed to our mental health crisis. Psychology squarely places any problems within a person's life on the individual and encourages us to focus on ourselves, our problems, our traumas, and our behavior.
In contrast, spirituality reminds us to see ourselves as part of something greater than ourselves. Spiritual practices encourage us to develop qualities such as gratitude, awe, acceptance, connection, love, presence, and service.
HIGHER-ORDER VIRTUES LEAD TO BETTER MENTAL HEALTH
These attributes are often referred to as higher-order virtues because they represent qualities that transcend individual interests and contribute to the greater good of humanity or spiritual growth. In other words, they move our focus from self-oriented to other-oriented.
These virtues are often emphasized in spiritual or philosophical traditions as fundamental aspects of human flourishing and well-being. Western psychology has reached the same conclusion recently, with mounting evidence that spirituality can improve psychological well-being and life satisfaction and increase resilience. When we practice spirituality, we also experience less depression, anxiety, and stress.
EVIDENCE-BASED SPIRITUAL PRACTICES TO IMPROVE WELL-BEING
While we've been taught to seek out mental health professionals like clinical psychologists to help with our mental health, it turns out that spiritual psychology, spiritual development, and spiritual practices may be more beneficial for the majority of us.
Over the last few decades, spiritual psychology and positive psychology have produced hundreds of studies that help us identify the best spiritual practices for mental well-being.
Mindfulness meditation
Gratitude journaling
Meta-meditation or loving-kindness meditation
Self-reflection
Nature bathing
Volunteering, community engagement, and acts of kindness
PSYCHE AND SOUL FOR PERSONAL GROWTH AND TRANSFORMATION
Don't get me wrong. It's not that I don't appreciate the benefits of delving into my subconscious, my traumas, my shadows, my patterns, and my beliefs. But, as Wellwood advocated, an overemphasis on psychological investigation can lead to an unbalanced narcissistic focus at the expense of everything else.
Instead, I advocate for a more balanced approach as a transpersonal psychologist. Don't over-emphasize your ego at the expense of your spirit, and don't over-emphasize your spirit at the expense of your ego. It's not ego versus spirit. It's ego and spirit. We need both to survive and thrive.
So, if you're looking for an easily accessible way to develop both ego and spirit with a balance of working on your psyche and spirit, get on a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Course. This is a perfect example of psychology and spirituality meeting to improve your mental health.
PERSONAL AND SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT
The willingness to develop personally and spiritually is based on a growth mindset. This means that you believe you can develop as a person. You can learn from your mistakes and past, develop and harness new skills and abilities, and evolve as you move through and reflect on life's ups and downs.
Research suggests that having a growth mindset is good for our mental health. With a growth mindset, we can view challenges as opportunities to grow and evolve. What's more, we tend to have more resilience against mental illness, depression, substance abuse, and non-suicidal self-injury.
Maybe you have a growth mindset but haven't thought about how spirituality plays into your well-being. And you might not relate to spirituality at all. Both spirituality and religion have gotten themselves a bad name, but as the saying goes, don't throw the baby out with the bath water.
Adopting one of the evidence-based spiritual practices above can help improve mental health and well-being.
SPIRITUAL AWAKENING
Whether you have spiritual beliefs or practices or not, and whether you identify as spiritual or not, we all have a spiritual dimension. We're not just egos bobbing around in the world. There is something more profound and more fundamental about us.
Most of us have even experienced spiritual transcendence at some point. That moment of awe you felt at the top of a mountain or the foot of a magnificent tree that had the power to pull you out of all your thoughts and bring you to a state of inner peace and stillness - your spiritual dimension.
We are spiritual beings. In that stillness behind our busy mental chatter and business of life, we exist. We just are. And nature has the uncanny power to pull us out of our busy egoic lives and remind us of another dimension of our being.
MYSTICAL EXPERIENCES AND WELL-BEING
These experiences are often fleeting but give us a glimpse of something far greater than ourselves. The more we engage in spiritual practices, the more likely we are to have spiritual experiences or mystical experiences.
These life-changing experiences often happen in nature. However, thanks to a mounting body of research, we know more about mystical experiences engendered by psychedelics than nature. For more about the differences between psychedelic and non-psychedelic mystical experiences, read this article or my peer-reviewed research.
Evidence suggests that mystical experiences can improve well-being and mental health in several ways;
Increased well-being
Increased positive feelings
Improvement of behavior and attitudes
Increased interconnection
Decreased fear of dying
Decreases in anxiety and depression
Addiction recovery
Psychological healing
Enhanced sense of meaning and purpose
Increases in life satisfaction
Mystical experiences, awakening experiences, or enlightening experiences are so powerfully transformative that they have been referred to in psychology literature as quantum change experiences.
INSIGHT HIGHLIGHT
While you'd be forgiven for thinking spirituality is airy fairy, spiritual psychology has shown us otherwise. Evidence suggests that engaging in spiritual practices builds resilience and improves mental health. What's more, it also opens the door for mystical and awakening experiences that have the power to transform our lives and mental health for the better.
You don't have to be spiritual to benefit from spiritual psychology. Evidence-based practices like mindfulness, nature bathing, volunteering, and gratitude journaling can help you improve your mental health and well-being.
Thanks for reading, and as always, keep striving for growth and well-being, and never settle for less!
How I Can Help
I hope you found this blog post helpful and inspiring. As a transpersonal psychologist I’m an expert at applying spiritual psychology for well-being. If you have any questions or need further guidance, please don't hesitate to reach out. I offer services designed to help you cultivate a life you love. Whether through one-on-one coaching, workshops, or online resources, I’m here to support your journey towards well-being.
Here’s to your growth and success!
Head over to the services section on my website for more information on how we can work together to achieve your goals or contact me on WhatsApp using the widget. I work online and face to face on the Côte d’Azur, in France.
