The Hidden Cost of Doubt: How Questioning Our Faith Affects Our Health

By Dr. Tanya Paynter

There is an unacknowledged threat within Christian communities that believers are often reluctant to address outright. At one time or another, all of us have struggled with unanswered questions and doubts about God and our faith. Questions we often leave unsaid because we feel ashamed or disloyal to God to admit them, even to ourselves. 

Doubts are viewed as something to keep private so others don’t see our “weak faith” or, even worse, cause others to doubt their own faith. We tend to think of these doubts as primarily a spiritual issue, something that may impact our faith but has no effect on our physical or emotional well-being.

However, a growing body of research shows that this isn’t the case. We’re beginning to see that religious doubt has measurable consequences on the physical health of the body. In my clinical work and academic research, I have seen unaddressed religious doubt act as an unacknowledged but persistent form of stress. It increases cortisol levels, contributes to anxiety, can cause sleep and mood disruptions, and intensifies symptoms that women often attribute to hormones, diet, or “just being overwhelmed.” Yet beneath these symptoms may lie a spiritual tension not fully acknowledged.

This article summarizes key findings on how religious doubt affects physical health and why it matters for Christian women today.

Why Religious Doubt Affects the Whole Person

While it may seem that doubt has little to do with our physical health, nothing could be further from the truth. Our faith is not just an abstract idea. It is the framework through which we make sense of the world around us. It helps us to understand our purpose, gives us our identity, and helps us make sense of suffering. 

When this framework is unstable, when our core beliefs are threatened or uncertain, it creates a tension that triggers a physical stress response. For Christians, doubts about God’s goodness, his justice, or his accessibility are not small uncertainties. They hit the foundation of the Christian worldview. As a result, the body responds as though something essential is in danger and reacts as it was made to, with an elevated stress response.¹ 

When this stress response is ongoing, it contributes to emotional and physical symptoms such as fatigue, insomnia, anxiety, and inflammation, symptoms often only associated with physiological imbalances. But even though there can be physical causes to an elevated stress response, unanswered religious doubts can contribute significantly to an imbalanced nervous system.

The Physiology of Doubt: What Happens Inside the Body

A growing body of research shows how regular religious activity (defined as regular prayer, worship, Scripture study, and/or regular church attendance) improves health outcomes across the board, significantly improving quality of life and, in many cases, extending the life span.²

On the other hand, unresolved religious questions have been shown to activate the body’s stress pathways and leads to health issues such as:

• Increased sympathetic (“fight-or-flight”) activation and elevated cortisol levels³
• Heightened physiological reactivity to religious stimuli⁴
• Flattened or dysregulated diurnal cortisol curves⁵
• Increased inflammation and immune disturbance⁶ 
• Elevated blood pressure and heart-rate reactivity under stress⁷

These symptoms all indicate the body experiences increased stress, inflammation, and a hyperactive stress response. Cortisol is the main physiological marker used to monitor stress since it is the body’s major stress hormone. Individuals who reported religious doubt or spiritual unrest showed higher cortisol levels and more irregular cortisol patterns. These patterns are associated with chronic stress and worse long-term health outcomes.⁸

So why, exactly, does this happen? To answer that, let’s take a look at what the term “religious struggle” means. There are many sources of religious struggles, including religious trauma, hypocrisy, negative interactions within the church, a poor teaching of theology/doctrine, questions about the nature of God, and the stigmatization of doubt. These forms of religious struggle can produce a worldview that places our religious beliefs (what we understand about God and how things should be) in conflict with our lived experiences (how things actually happen in a world containing other humans).⁹

This internal tension, also known as cognitive dissonance, creates chronic psychological stress. It constantly requires our brain to work around unresolved issues in an attempt to reconcile the differences between our beliefs and our experiences. These patterns of subconscious thought are associated with psychological stress. Let’s examine a few examples of what this might look like and how it causes stress.

Scenario 1

Many women faithfully pray for something for years, believing that God is good and attentive to the prayers of his children as Matthew 7:11 tells us. Yet when years continue to go by with only silence for an answer, we can’t help but feel that either we’ve done something wrong, we aren’t really saved, or that God doesn’t hear us. 

Our lived experience seems to contradict the belief that God hears and answers our prayers, and the tension created by that contradiction dwells in the back of our mind constantly. 

Subconsciously, we must continue to reconcile this contradiction, which creates stress over time.

Scenario 2

Another common scenario, unfortunately, relates to the church community. As believers, we are taught that the church and fellow Christians are safe—a place of grace, truth, and integrity. But so many of us have experienced hypocrisy or hurt within this community. 

When the actions of an individual contradict scriptural expectations, or when we experience a moral failure within church leadership that conflicts with our understanding of who followers of Christ should be, we may suppress our hurt to avoid conflict or avoid asking questions that we may feel unsafe expressing. 

Internally, this forces us to continually reconcile our understanding of the church, fellow Christians, forgiveness, and ultimately, the nature of Christ with our personal experiences. We can’t help but subconsciously ask, “What if I don’t actually understand the nature of God if Christians act like that? And if I’m wrong about that, what if I’m wrong about salvation or my relationship with Christ?”

In both of these situations, the unresolved tension between what we believe and what we’ve experienced forces our brain to constantly monitor, suppress, or control our thoughts and emotions. This creates a picture of ongoing, low-level chronic stress that compounds over time. 

Given that chronic stress is considered “a major contributing factor to the six leading causes of death in the United States,” how our spiritual beliefs affect our physical health is a significant consideration. To learn more about this and how to begin addressing chronic stress, spiritual health, and physical symptoms, see this article.¹⁰

Because stress physiology influences nearly every body system, the effects of unaddressed doubt impacts physical health in ways most of us never associate as spiritual in nature. This isn’t to claim symptoms are necessarily due to spiritual oppression, require deliverance, or that all of our stress and anxiety come from spiritual issues, but it does speak to the importance of becoming clear on what you believe about God and the Christian faith, and why.

Why Avoiding Doubt Makes Its Effects Worse

Within many Christian communities, there is an unspoken pressure to avoid asking questions or call out inconsistencies in theological teachings. This environment encourages avoidance and minimizes doubt which, as mentioned above, has measurable health consequences such as increased cortisol, higher reported levels of stress, increased inflammation levels, insomnia, hormone imbalance, lowered immunity, and worse overall health outcomes.¹¹

Simply put, our doubt becomes more deeply ingrained when we avoid addressing our questions or deny them to begin with. Over time, this begins to undermine our relationship with God. Ignoring doubt does not strengthen our faith; it doesn’t prove that we’re good Christians or have it all figured out. Quite the opposite, not acknowledging our doubt inhibits our spiritual growth and interferes with our health by exposing us to unresolved chronic stress.

As a result, we may begin to experience physical symptoms associated with long-term religious doubt. They can vary widely and include symptoms such as:

• Fatigue or chronic exhaustion
• Insomnia or restless sleep
• Muscle and joint pain/tension
• Headaches or migraines
• Digestive disturbances
• Hormonal irregularities
• Heart palpitations or high blood pressure
• Increased anxiety or depression

These symptoms are often treated as isolated medical problems, but they may have spiritual underpinnings—particularly when they worsen during periods of spiritual struggle.

Moving Toward Healing: Addressing Doubt as Part of Whole-Person Health

Because of our hope in Christ, doubt does not have to remain a source of stress. 

When acknowledged and explored through Scripture, conversation, apologetics, pastoral guidance, or personal study, the physiological impact of our doubt decreases. When we address our religious struggles head on, stress markers improve, emotional symptoms lessen, and we become more resilient when subjected to stress in other areas of our life.¹² 

This means that addressing doubt is not only spiritually important but also physically protective. 

Now to be clear, this is not an argument that medical ailments should be addressed only by faith-strengthening practices. Rather, it is to show that the body physically responds to spiritual attention. We are complex creatures with a clear connection between our physical and spiritual health. To fully heal physically, we must diligently search for uncertainty within our faith and learn how to admit, understand, and answer our questions as they relate to our beliefs.

The Christian life is one of continual growth. Scripture provides abundant examples of deeply faithful individuals struggling with doubt. Abraham, David, the apostle Thomas, John the Baptist—they all show us that God understands our doubts and does not judge us for them. 

Rather, he applauds and commends those who come to him seeking answers. Through his Word, he shows us that doubt is not a sign of spiritual failure as long as we honestly and diligently seek to satisfy those doubts. 

There is a freedom in boldly acknowledging our questions, especially when we begin to recognize how not doing so may be negatively affecting our health. As we seek clarity through Scripture, sound teaching, and faithful community, the stress that once simmered below the surface begins to loosen its grip. 

To our surprise, we may see our bodies respond, revealing just how deeply spiritual healing can support physical restoration.

Notes

1. Tatjana Schnell et al., “Worldview Under Stress: Preliminary Findings on Cardiovascular and Cortisol Stress Responses Predicted by Secularity, Religiosity, Spirituality, and Existential Search,” Journal of Religion and Health 59, no. 6 (March 27, 2020), 2969.
   
2. Harold G. Koenig wrote a book reviewing the studies pertaining to these outcomes called  Handbook of Religion and Health (Oxford University Press, 2012).
   
3. Margaret F. Bockrath et al., “Religious and Spiritual Struggles and Their Links to Psychological Adjustment: A Meta-Analysis of Longitudinal Studies,” Psychology of Religion and Spirituality 14, no. 3 (2022), 283–299.
   
4. Kéri Szabolcs, “Stress Responses Among Individuals with Spiritual Struggles in Hungary: An Experimental Study,” Journal of Religion and Health 63, no. 1 (February 1, 2024), 185–201.
   
5. Erin T. Tobin and Richard B. Slatcher, “Religious Participation Predicts Diurnal Cortisol Profiles 10 Years via Lower Levels of Religious Struggle,” Health psychology : official journal of the Division of Health Psychology, American Psychological Association 35, no. 12 (December 2016), 1356–1363.
   
6. Again, see Koenig, Handbook of Religion and Health.
   
7. Tatjana Schnell et al., “Worldview Under Stress,” 2969–2989.
   
8. Tatjana Schnell et al., “Worldview Under Stress,” 2969–2989.
   
9. Neal Krause and Christopher G. Ellison, “The Doubting Process: A Longitudinal Study of the Precipitants and Consequences of Religious Doubt in Older Adults,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 48, no. 2 (2009): 293–312. See also Kelcie D. Willis, Tamara Nelson, and Oswaldo Moreno, “Death Anxiety, Religious Doubt, and Depressive Symptoms across Race in Older Adults,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 16, no. 19 (September 28, 2019), 3645.
   
10. Michelle Pugle, “Is Stress The Number One Killer?,” Psych Central, June 30, 2022, https://psychcentral.com/stress/is-stress-the-number-one-killer.
    
11. Koenig, Handbook of Religion and Health.
    
12. Bockrath et al., “Religious and Spiritual Struggles,” 283–299; Tobin and Slatcher, “Religious Participation Predicts Diurnal Cortisol Profiles,” 1356–1363.