Health

Common Issues That Impact Spiritual Health

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February 4, 2026

On February 4, 2026

Spiritual health is one of those things most people don’t think about until something feels deeply off. Not physically off. Not even emotionally off in the usual sense. It’s more like a hollowness a feeling that the gears of your life are turning, but nothing meaningful is coming out of it.

While physical and mental health dominate public conversation, spiritual health quietly shapes how you experience meaning, connection, resilience, and inner peace. When it breaks down, the effects ripple into every other part of your wellbeing.

Thousands of empirical studies consistently link spirituality with better psychological outcomes including lower rates of depression, reduced anxiety, and stronger coping under pressure (Moreira-Almeida, Koenig & Lucchetti, “Clinical Implications of Spirituality to Mental Health: Review of Evidence and Practical Guidelines,” Revista Brasileira de Psiquiatria, 2014).

Loss of Meaning and Purpose

When you lose your sense of why you’re here what you’re working toward, or what your suffering means everything else starts to unravel. Motivation fades. Relationships feel transactional. Days blur into one another.

This isn’t philosophical hand-wringing. It’s clinically measurable.

A comprehensive meta-analysis covering over 66,000 participants found that higher purpose in life strongly correlates with lower depression (r = −0.49) and lower anxiety (r = −0.36) (Boreham & Schutte, “The Relationship Between Purpose in Life and Depression and Anxiety: A Meta-Analysis,” Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Making Caring Common project made it even more concrete. Their nationally representative survey found:

Nearly 3 in 5 young adults (58%) said they lacked meaning or purpose in their lives in the previous month.
Half said “not knowing what to do with my life” negatively impacted their mental health.
36% of young adults reported anxiety compared to 18% of teens.
29% of young adults reported depression compared to 15% of teens.

(Weissbourd et al., “On Edge: Understanding and Preventing Young Adults’ Mental Health Challenges,” Making Caring Common, Harvard Graduate School of Education, 2023).

Purpose is the oxygen of the inner life. When you disconnect from it, spiritual health doesn’t just decline it starts to atrophy.

Chronic Unforgiveness and Resentment

Holding on to grudges feels like self-protection. In reality, it’s more like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to get sick.

Unforgiveness isn’t just a spiritual or moral concept it’s a measurable stress response. When you stay in that state, you carry sustained feelings of resentment, bitterness, and hostility that keep your body’s stress systems firing nonstop.

The physical toll includes:

Elevated cortisol levels.
Increased blood pressure.
Disrupted cardiovascular function.
Weakened immune response over time.

A five-week longitudinal study of 332 adults found that when forgiveness increased, perceived stress dropped and that drop in stress led to fewer mental health symptoms. The relationship worked both ways: as mental health improved, stress went down, and forgiveness went up (Toussaint et al., “Forgiveness, Stress, and Health: A 5-Week Dynamic Parallel Process Study,” Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 2016).

A Harvard-led study confirmed that forgiveness lowers anxiety and depression, while unforgiveness raises blood pressure and puts chronic strain on heart health (Harvard Health Publishing, “Forgiveness: Not Just Good for the Soul,” 2024).

Resentment doesn’t just sit in your mind. It occupies your spirit. It distorts how you see yourself, others, and the world and it builds invisible walls where there should be bridges.

Forgiveness doesn’t mean excusing what happened. It means choosing not to let someone else’s actions keep defining your inner landscape.

It’s because we, as humans, are wired for connection not just social connection but spiritual connection. That unnameable sense of being in a bigger thing than just yourself.

In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness and social isolation as a public health epidemic, ranking it alongside smoking and obesity – “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community” (U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on Loneliness & Social Isolation, 2023).

But there is a deeply spiritual dimension to this. Isolation not only shrinks your social world it shrinks your inner world. You lose the rituals that people do together, shared meaning-making and accountability that enable you to continue doing spiritual practice.

Spirituality, religiosity, and religious participation mitigated the associations between loneliness and life satisfaction among Indian older adults (25). Put another way, spiritual participation works as a barrier against suffering from the psychological effects of aloneness (Srivastava et al., “The Association Between Loneliness and Life Satisfaction: Examining Spirituality, Religiosity, and Religious Participation as Moderators,” BMC Geriatrics, 2023).

Springtide Research Institute’s surveys on young people revealed something important:

Simply attending a religious or spiritual group didn’t significantly reduce loneliness.
But genuinely engaging with spirituality and forming real connections did make a meaningful difference.
The key factor wasn’t membership but authentic connection to others and to a sense of the sacred.

(Springtide Research Institute, “Lonely? Religion and Spirituality Can Help,” 2023).

Spiritual health doesn’t run on membership cards. It runs on authentic connection.

Excessive Materialism

There is nothing wrong with comfortably enjoying material wealth. But when purchasing and possessing come to be the predominant way you know your life, spiritual well-being suffers.

A large-scale meta-analysis of 753 effect sizes from 259 independent samples has reported a consistent negative association between materialistic values and personal well-being (Dittmar, Bond, Hurst & Kasser, “The Relationship Between Materialism and Personal Well-Being: A Meta-Analysis,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2014).

The key findings tell a clear story:

Materialism consistently correlates with lower wellbeing across all major measures.
The strongest negative effects show up in self-appraisals and risky health behaviors.
The link partly comes down to unmet psychological needs autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
The relationship holds across different ages, genders, and cultures.

Now imagine what this means spiritually. Materialism locks out the needs that spiritual practices typically address like belonging, purpose, and feeling good enough without outside validation. If what you are is things, then there’s no space for your spiritual self to breathe.

High scorers on materialism have been shown to have weaker friendship ties, report more compulsive buying and be more depression- and anxiety-prone. They claim lower life satisfaction: that quiet, nagging dissatisfaction that no purchase ever seems to cure.

This has been the stuff of spiritual traditions across cultures for thousands of years. The data of modern science just validates what contemplatives always knew, that we can’t buy our way to inner peace.

Guilt, Shame, and Moral Injury

Guilt says, “I did something bad.” Shame says, “I am bad.” Both when you leave them unresolved can devastate spiritual health.

Moral injury describes the deep spiritual and psychological distress that hits when someone does, fails to prevent, or witnesses something that violates their core moral beliefs (Litz et al., “Moral Injury and Moral Repair in War Veterans: A Preliminary Model and Intervention Strategy,” Clinical Psychology Review, 2009).

The symptoms of moral injury include:

Persistent guilt and shame
Loss of trust in yourself, others, or a higher power
Self-condemnation and self-sabotaging behavior
Difficulty forgiving yourself or others
Spiritual and existential conflict
Questioning beliefs you once held firmly

The United States Department of Veterans Affairs defines moral injury as encompassing not only psychological but spiritual suffering. It may lead individuals to doubt their relationship with a higher power and cause them to suffer profound fragmentation of who they are (U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, National Center for PTSD, “Moral Injury and PTSD”).

And moral injury is not something that affects only veterans. Health care workers in the pandemic, first responders who watched suffering they were unable to stop, abuse survivors who carry misplaced self-blame — all are undergoing the same spiritual rupture.

The spiritual fallout here is not the same as clinical depression or anxiety. It is a wound to the soul, a tear in our relationship with meaning and good and sacred. Healing it typically requires more than just therapy. It entails spiritual disciplines like confession, self-forgiveness, making amends and returning to community.

Chronic Stress and Spiritual Burnout

Everyone talks about stress in physical and mental health contexts. But its spiritual impact hits just as hard.

When you feel chronically overwhelmed whether by work, caregiving, financial pressure or the simply ferocious pace of life today spiritual practices are often the first thing to go. Meditation gets skipped. Prayer becomes mechanical. Reflection gets lost in the shadow of the next deadline.

A 2022 study of patients with chronic condition found a strong and significant negative relationship between the spiritual dimension of health and stress, anxiety, depression. BoadiCounted and colleagues found that “participants with a higher spiritual health had significantly lower scores on all of the screening tools, individually” (Relationship Between Spiritual Health with Stress, Anxiety and Depression in Patients With Chronic Diseases,” Heliyon, 2022).

Here’s how the cycle works:

Stress eats away at your spiritual practice
Without spiritual practice, your resilience drops
Lower resilience makes you more vulnerable to stress
The spiral deepens into full-blown spiritual burnout

There’s also a physical dimension that many people overlook. Poor physical health, chronic pain, sleep deprivation, and neglecting your body can directly undermine your capacity for spiritual engagement. When your body runs on fumes, your spirit has nothing left to draw from.

Breaking this cycle usually doesn’t require dramatic overhauls. Five minutes of quiet reflection. A single prayer. A walk in nature without your phone. Spiritual health like physical fitness responds better to daily discipline than occasional intensity.

Negative Religious or Spiritual Experiences

Not all spiritual engagement helps. This is an important nuance and research consistently backs it up.

Others bear spiritual scars from the religious context: places that were too intense, required perfection or only shamed, situations with leaders who manipulated them with spiritual authority. These experiences don’t just sour your relationship with a particular institution they can eat away at your entire capacity for spiritual engagement.

Negative religious coping is proposed as an independent risk factor for poorer mental health outcomes. And a net is then cast, Pargament believes -a net composed of notions that we are being punished or abandoned by the divine; suffering as punishment from God; or having our spiritual doubt be denied expression with no healthy way to struggle through it (Pargament, “The Psychology of Religion and Copiig: Theory, Research, Practice,” Guilford Press, 1997).

A University of Missouri study involving nearly 200 individuals found that those who held negative spiritual beliefs reported significantly worse outcomes:

Higher perceptions of pain
Worse physical health
Worse mental health
Lower engagement in religious practices
Lower levels of forgiveness

Even people with generally positive beliefs suffered negative effects if they carried any degree of negative spiritual belief (Johnstone et al., “Relationships Between Negative Spiritual Beliefs and Health Outcomes for Individuals With Heterogeneous Medical Conditions,” Journal of Spirituality in Mental Health, 2015).

National surveys indicate that about one in three adults have struggled with some aspect of religion or spirituality in the previous few months- and these struggles correspond with higher rates of depression, anxiety, and even suicide in clinical populations (Wilt, Grubbs, Pargament & Exline as cited by American Psychological Association “Religious and Spiritual Struggles,” 2020).

Forgiveness for such negative spiritual experiences usually involves disentangling the institution of institutional religion, which has done them harm from the deeper spiritual impulse it failed to serve. Many who leave toxic religious environments don’t lose their spirituality they simply need time, safety and sometimes professional support in which to reclaim it on their own terms.

Digital Overload and the Erosion of Inner Stillness

Almost no one talks about this in the context of spiritual health but it might be one of the most damaging forces of our time.

Spiritual health requires some degree of inner stillness. The capacity to be present, reflective, and attentive to what’s happening beneath the surface of your daily life. Every spiritual tradition whether it emphasizes meditation, prayer, contemplation, or mindfulness depends on your ability to slow down and turn inward.

Constant digital stimulation works directly against this.

When you fill every moment of silence with scrolling, plug every quiet gap with content, and soothe every restless feeling with a screen your capacity for spiritual depth erodes.

A randomized controlled trial involving 164 adults found that cutting recreational screen use to less than three hours per week led to significantly improved self-reported wellbeing and mood compared to the control group (Pedersen et al., “Effects of Limiting Digital Screen Use on Well-Being, Mood, and Biomarkers of Stress in Adults,” npj Mental Health Research, 2022).

The spiritual cost of digital overload includes:

Loss of the capacity for sustained reflection or prayer
Shortened attention spans that make contemplative practice feel impossible
Replacement of inner dialogue with external noise
Reduced presence in face-to-face relationships
Constant comparison through social media eroding gratitude and contentment

The phone isn’t the enemy. The absence of any phone-free moments is.

Even small interventions help. A daily period without devices. A morning routine that starts with silence rather than notifications. A commitment to being fully present during meals or conversations. These aren’t dramatic acts of renunciation they’re practical choices that protect the inner conditions your spiritual health depends on.

Unresolved Grief and Loss

Grief is a natural response to loss. But when it stays unprocessed, unspoken, or complicated by circumstances it becomes one of the most potent threats to spiritual health.

Loss disrupts the spiritual framework you rely on to make sense of life. The death of a loved one, the end of a significant relationship, the loss of health, identity, career, or community any of these can trigger questions that go far beyond emotional pain.

Questions like:

Why did this happen?
Where is the fairness in this?
What kind of universe allows this?
Is there any point to anything?

These are spiritual questions even when they don’t use spiritual language. And when they go unanswered, what you get is spiritual distress.

Crossroads Hospice identifies the key symptoms of spiritual distress as:

Feelings of anger or hopelessness
Questioning the meaning of life or suffering
Sudden doubt in spiritual or religious beliefs
Feeling abandoned by God
Difficulty sleeping
Seeking spiritual help or guidance

Nearly all of these symptoms get triggered or intensified by unresolved grief.

The connection between grief and spiritual crisis hits hardest in people who once relied on faith to make sense of suffering. When loss feels arbitrary or cruel, the very belief system that once gave comfort can start to feel like a betrayal. That’s not a failure of faith it’s a predictable human response.

What makes grief especially damaging to spiritual health is the cultural pressure to “move on.” Most people get a few weeks of social permission to mourn before the world expects them back to normal. But grief doesn’t work on a schedule and spiritual wounds from loss can last years if no one gives them proper space.

Healing from grief-related spiritual distress often requires meaning reconstruction the process of rebuilding a worldview that can hold the loss without collapsing. This might involve conversations with spiritual mentors, grief support communities, journaling, ritual, or simply the patience to sit with uncertainty until new understanding emerges.

Final Thought

Spiritual health isn’t something reserved for monks, priests, or people who meditate two hours a day. It belongs to everyone who has ever searched for meaning, craved connection, or wondered whether their life adds up to something that matters. The nine issues in this article from purposelessness and unforgiveness to digital overload and unresolved grief aren’t rare afflictions. They’re ordinary human struggles that quietly eat away at the inner life when you leave them unattended. None of them require perfection to address. They require honesty, small consistent steps, and the willingness to treat your spiritual wellbeing with the same seriousness you’d give your physical health. Because at the end of the day, a life without spiritual health isn’t really a life lived it’s a life endured.

References

Moreira-Almeida, Koenig & Lucchetti, “Clinical Implications of Spiri+tuality to Mental Health: Review of Evidence and Practical Guidelines,” Revista Brasileira de Psiquiatria, 2014.
Boreham & Schutte, “The Relationship Between Purpose in Life and Depression and Anxiety: A Meta-Analysis,” Journal of Clinical Psychology, 2023.
Weissbourd et al., “On Edge: Understanding and Preventing Young Adults’ Mental Health Challenges,” Making Caring Common, Harvard Graduate School of Education, 2023
Toussaint et al., “Forgiveness, Stress, and Health: A 5-Week Dynamic Parallel Process Study,” Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 2016
Harvard Health Publishing, “Forgiveness: Not Just Good for the Soul,” 2024
U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory, “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation,” 2023
Srivastava et al., “The Association Between Loneliness and Life Satisfaction: Examining Spirituality, Religiosity, and Religious Participation as Moderators,” BMC Geriatrics, 2023
Springtide Research Institute, “Lonely? Religion and Spirituality Can Help,” 2023
Dittmar, Bond, Hurst & Kasser, “The Relationship Between Materialism and Personal Well-Being: A Meta-Analysis,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2014
Litz et al., “Moral Injury and Moral Repair in War Veterans: A Preliminary Model and Intervention Strategy,” Clinical Psychology Review, 2009
U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, National Center for PTSD, “Moral Injury and PTSD”
Counted et al., “Relationship Between Spiritual Health with Stress, Anxiety and Depression in Patients with Chronic Diseases,” Heliyon, 2022
Pargament, “The Psychology of Religion and Coping: Theory, Research, Practice,” Guilford Press, 1997
Johnstone et al., “Relationships Between Negative Spiritual Beliefs and Health Outcomes for Individuals With Heterogeneous Medical Conditions,” Journal of Spirituality in Mental Health, 2015
American Psychological Association, “Religious and Spiritual Struggles,” 2020
Pedersen et al., “Effects of Limiting Digital Screen Use on Well-Being, Mood, and Biomarkers of Stress in Adults,” npj Mental Health Research, 2022
Crossroads Hospice & Palliative Care, “Signs and Symptoms of Spiritual Distress,” 2018