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A new study suggests that when facing a challenging situation, people who feel punished by or angry with God report feeling more stressed, yet their bodies show a smaller increase in blood pressure than expected. The findings provide evidence that psychological and physical responses to stress do not always match, especially when spiritual struggles are involved. The research was published in Psychology of Religion and Spirituality.
Religious coping refers to how people use their faith to understand and deal with difficult life events. While some individuals rely on positive strategies, such as seeking comfort from a higher power, others experience negative religious coping. This involves spiritual struggles, such as feeling abandoned by God, questioning divine intentions, or viewing hardships as a spiritual punishment. In daily life, this negative coping style is often linked to poorer mental health and a harder time managing emotions.
“Religion is often viewed as a source of comfort and support during stressful times, but not all forms of religious coping are beneficial,” lead author Ailbhe Dempsey, a researcher at the Study of Anxiety, Stress and Health Laboratory in the Department of Psychology at the University of Limerick, told PsyPost. “Negative religious coping, such as feeling punished or abandoned by God or questioning one’s faith, is consistently associated with poorer psychological well-being, yet we know relatively little about how it relates to the body’s response to acute stress.”
When a person faces a sudden psychological challenge, the body’s cardiovascular system naturally responds. Heart rate and blood pressure typically rise to supply the body with energy to meet the demands of the situation. This process is known as cardiovascular stress reactivity. Some research indicates that certain religious behaviors can influence this physical response. For instance, a study covered by PsyPost in 2026 found that frequent private religious practices are associated with smaller spikes in blood pressure during stressful tasks.
While extremely large spikes in blood pressure can increase the risk of heart disease over time, unusually low or blunted responses are not necessarily healthy. A 2011 study indicated that people who report high levels of stress in their daily lives tend to have blunted heart rate reactions to new stressful situations. Similarly, a 2020 study demonstrated that diminished physical stress responses are linked to higher levels of behavioral disengagement, meaning individuals are more likely to give up when faced with a challenge.
Scientists theorize that chronic emotional struggles might exhaust or downregulate the body’s stress systems, leading to these blunted physical reactions. To explore this complex relationship, Dempsey and her colleagues aimed to examine how negative religious coping affects both how stressed someone feels and how their heart and blood vessels physically react during a challenging moment.
“Most previous research has focused on general life stress rather than responses to a standardized stressor in a controlled setting,” Dempsey said. “We therefore wanted to examine both the psychological and cardiovascular responses associated with negative religious coping in young adults.”
To investigate this, the researchers recruited 81 healthy young adults with an average age of 19 from a Christian university in the southern United States. The participants completed questionnaires assessing their typical use of negative religious coping, rating how often they felt abandoned by God or questioned their faith during hard times. They also answered questions about their general religiosity, symptoms of depression, and personality traits.
During the laboratory session, participants sat quietly for a ten-minute resting period to establish a baseline for their heart rate and blood pressure. Then, they completed a stress-inducing task called the Paced Auditory Serial Addition Task. This involved listening to a fast-paced series of numbers and adding consecutive digits together out loud. To make the task more stressful, researchers included elements of social evaluation. Participants were told they were competing against peers on a fictional leaderboard, recorded on video, and asked to look at themselves in a mirror during the test. For every incorrect or missed answer, they were warned that points would be deducted.
Blood pressure and heart rate were continuously monitored while the participants completed the mental math challenge. Immediately after the task was over, the participants rated how stressed they felt on a scale from one to seven. The researchers then analyzed the data to see if typical religious coping styles were associated with the participants’ reactions in the lab.
The mental math task successfully triggered a stress response across the group, raising both average heart rates and blood pressures. However, the researchers found a divergence between the participants’ mental and physical reactions based on their religious coping styles. Individuals who reported higher levels of negative religious coping felt more stressed during the mental math task. Yet, these same individuals displayed a blunted physical response.
Specifically, they had a smaller increase in their diastolic blood pressure, which is the pressure in the arteries when the heart rests between beats. Negative religious coping accounted for an additional eight percent of the variance in this blunted blood pressure response and six percent of the variance in self-reported stress levels. These associations held true even after the researchers accounted for other factors that might influence stress, such as resting blood pressure, biological sex, overall religiosity, neuroticism, and symptoms of depression.
The researchers did not find a statistically significant association between negative religious coping and changes in heart rate or systolic blood pressure, which is the pressure in the arteries when the heart beats. While the physical measures were mixed, the psychological aspect of these results is consistent with research covered by PsyPost in 2022. That study, which examined self-reported mental health during the pandemic rather than immediate responses to a laboratory stress task, similarly found that negative religious coping was linked to heightened psychological distress.
“The main takeaway is that the way people engage with religion during difficult times may matter for how they experience stress,” Dempsey explained. “Importantly, psychological and physiological responses to stress did not necessarily move in the same direction, highlighting that feeling highly stressed does not always mean showing a larger cardiovascular response.”
“These findings add to evidence that struggles involving religion or faith can be an important aspect of how some people experience and cope with stress,” she added.
There are a few things to keep in mind regarding the current study. The research was observational and cross-sectional, meaning it can only highlight associations at a single point in time. “It is important not to interpret these findings as showing that negative religious coping causes blunted cardiovascular responses or greater stress, as the study was observational and cannot establish causation,” Dempsey cautioned. It is possible that individuals prone to heavy stress and emotion regulation difficulties naturally develop both a cynical view of their faith and a fatigued cardiovascular response.
The study also focused on a specific demographic. “In addition, our sample consisted of predominantly female undergraduate students at a private Christian university in the United States, which may limit how broadly the findings generalize,” Dempsey noted. Because religion might be more culturally embedded in this specific environment, struggles with faith could exert a stronger influence on stress than they would in other settings. The results might not perfectly translate to older adults or individuals in more secular or religiously diverse environments.
The researchers also noted that blood pressure was recorded semi-automatically. This required a researcher to push a button at specific times to take a reading, which introduces a slight possibility of human error, even when monitoring a stopwatch. Fully automated equipment might provide more precise measurements in future studies.
“Larger and more diverse studies are needed to better understand the relationship between negative religious coping, stress responses, and health,” Dempsey concluded. Including measures of how well people regulate their emotions could also help explain why spiritual struggles seem to disconnect the mind’s experience of stress from the body’s physical reaction.
The study, “Negative Religious Coping Is Associated With Blunted Cardiovascular Reactivity and Higher Self-Reported Stress in Response to Acute Psychological Stress,” was authored by Ailbhe Dempsey, Thomas A. Fergus, Siobhán Howard, Stephen Gallagher, and Annie T. Ginty.
