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You're listening to Life Kit from NPR.

Hey, everybody, it's Mariel.

There's a lot that goes into living a healthy life.

And on Life Kit, we talk about these things all the time.

Move your body.

Get enough sleep.

Eat more fiber.

Spend time with the people who love you.

Rest.

But there's something else we rarely talk about that's a huge part of people's lives,

spirituality and religion.

For a lot of us, spirituality brings a sense of purpose and meaning in life.

And research shows that it can improve our mental and physical well-being.

People haven't always thought of it that way.

Oftentimes, spirituality,

you know, throughout history, was overlooked as unimportant. Anna Yusim as a psychiatrist and a clinical

assistant professor at Yale. And there are many people like Freud who looked down at it and saw

spirituality as an infantile, obsessional neuroses. That's something people cling onto when they

are weak or when they're unable to see what we have here in life as sufficient. Growing up,

...