Nir Eyal

So it turns out you can get a lot of the same benefits.

And this is what I discovered.

By using prayer with ritual almost as a placebo, maybe you stop questioning even as I did, whether I need it to be an absolute fact that everything I'm saying is actually true the way that the religious leader would say it, and rather just go about the actual rituals that have been around for thousands and thousands of years.

And so that's part of what I discovered on this journey as well.

I think that it loses the fundamental tenets of what religion gives us.

So the story that I went on, the journey that I went on, I should say, was that I went to, well, let me back up a second.

Let me tell you about the study that inspired this.

So I read this study.

that showed that they called people into the lab and they had a group that was religious and spiritual, people who had a faith practice that believed in some kind of higher power, some kind of supernatural.

And they also had a group of people who were not spiritual at all, didn't have any faith tradition.

And then they had a control group.

And they taught the people who didn't have a faith tradition how to pray.

And the control group, they said, do whatever you want.

They brought those people later on into a lab later on.

And they asked all three groups to put their hand inside very cold water.

Now, this is kind of a standard assessment.

It's a pain tolerance test.

And we see how long you can last in that very, very, very cold, almost freezing water.

And they also measure facial grimaces and different expressions.

And if you say anything about the pain, so they're measuring your pain tolerance and how long you can finally stay in the water.