Comparison of General Health in the Individuals Committed to Prayer/Meditation with Those Who Are Not

This descriptive-correlational research aims to compare general health and its components in those individuals committed to prayer and/or meditation with those who are not. The research method is causal-comparative and the statistical population was selected from all people in the society regardless of age, gender, and education. The individuals who completed the GHQ28 were put into four groups: committed to prayer, committed to meditation, committed to both, and not committed to any of them. Since there were only 14 participants in the meditation group, some participants in other groups were randomly eliminated so that the groups do not vary in size. The results showed that those individuals “committed to prayer and meditation” and those “committed to prayer” had significantly better conditions in terms of general health and all its components, i.e., physical health, anxiety & sleep disorder, social functioning disorder, as well as depression in comparison to those who were “not committed to these two”; Also, those people who were just meditating had a better condition than those who did not use any method, however only in the overall score of the general health and depression scale. Therefore, it can be concluded that therapists may be able to help people's health by encouraging them to do prayer or teaching them meditation methods.