The Impact Prayer Has on Reducing Anxiety

Anxiety predates the modern world as its history is biblical. Christians have traditionally battled the conditions of anxiety, and it currently adversely impacts people in various ways today. A process used to reduce the effect of anxiety is prayer, and Christians among the Church of God denomination practice its rituals so that God will provide for their requests. This Christian prayer is experienced through different prayer rituals as God recognizes and responds to Christians using them. The results of prayers when experiencing reactions to anxiety are reported in the testimonies of ten research participants who provided three significant themes in the study. The first theme noted that 100% of the participants who prayed to Jesus experienced an unspecified level of satisfaction with anxiety reduction. The second theme noted that 80% of the participants who prayed used the prayer ritual conversation. The third theme found that 90% felt faith and confidence, and 60% felt comfort or peace when praying during anxious moments. The purpose of this consensual phenomenological study is to understand the central phenomenon of the study for ten participants of the Church of God denomination. In this study, the researcher interviews ten participants by asking them ten research questions about their Christian prayers during anxious moments. The researcher collected the participants verbal data using an audio recorder, and the recordings were transcribed in the NVivo qualitative data analysis software. The participants’ transcriptions were analyzed using the NVivo software, which were coded and noded to organized the data into themes