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Living alone and being lonely are two different things. Plenty of people live by themselves and are perfectly content. Plenty of people are surrounded by family and still feel invisible.
Even so, the research keeps landing somewhere uncomfortable. Across a lot of studies, living alone tends to track with worse mental and physical health. A study of 184,619 people in 22 countries went looking for what makes the difference — and found that believing in God helped a little, while feeling loved by God cut the link roughly in half. Those turn out not to be the same thing at all.
What the study actually asked
The paper was published in Scientific Reports in October 2025 by Alexandra Wormley, Carley Vornlocher, Chayce Baldwin and Micaela Rodriguez. The data came from the first wave of the Global Flourishing Study, a five-year survey running from 2021 to 2026, with that first wave released in April 2024.
The sample covered 22 countries on six continents and five groups: Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and people with no religion at all. Hindu participants were left out of this particular analysis, because only 0.63% of them lived alone — too few to compare fairly.
Then the researchers used two questions that sound similar and are not.
The first asked about belief: do you believe in one God, more than one god, an impersonal spiritual force, or none of these?
The second asked about something you cannot get at by asking what a person thinks. Participants were asked whether they agreed with this statement — that they feel loved or cared for by God, the main god they worship, or the spiritual force that guides their life.
One question asks what is in your head. The other asks what it feels like to be you.
What they found
A quick note on the numbers, because they are not percentages. The study reports regression slopes. Think of each one as the size of the link between living alone and worse health, measured on the study’s own scale. A number closer to zero means a weaker link.
Among people who did not believe in God, living alone tracked with worse mental health at a slope of −0.284. Among people who believed in one God, the same link measured −0.187. Weaker, and significantly so.
So belief did something. That is worth saying plainly, because the more striking result is easy to oversell.
Then the researchers looked only at believers, and split them by the second question — whether they actually felt loved. Among believers who did not feel loved by a higher power, living alone tracked with worse mental health at −0.306. Among believers who did feel loved, it was −0.153. Almost exactly half.
Physical health followed the same shape: −0.171 for believers who did not feel loved, −0.060 for those who did. Self-reported loneliness did too: 0.821 against 0.598.
Both things helped. But feeling loved was the one that cut the association roughly in half, and the authors themselves describe it as the stronger of the two.
The result almost nobody quotes
There is one outcome where feeling loved by a higher power did nothing at all.
Anxiety.
The buffering showed up for mental health. It showed up for physical health, for depression, and for loneliness. It did not show up for the link between living alone and anxiety. The researchers state that flatly rather than tucking it away.
That single result is, oddly, a reason to take the rest of it more seriously. A study where every outcome cooperates is a study worth squinting at. This one has a hole in it, and the authors point at the hole themselves.
It also matters for anyone reading this hoping for something specific. If you live alone and your nights are anxious, this research is not promising that feeling loved by God will settle that. It did not, here, across 184,619 people. Whatever anxiety is running on, it appears to run on a different track.
Living alone does not mean the same thing everywhere
Here is the part the headlines skipped entirely.
The strength of the link between living alone and feeling lonely varied enormously between groups. Among Muslim participants it was the weakest in the whole study — a slope of 0.34. Among Jewish participants it was the strongest, at 1.72, roughly five times larger.
How many people lived alone varied too. Among the nonreligious participants, 24.9% did. Christians, 22.3%. Buddhists, 20.2%. Jews, 15.0%. Muslims, 10.7%.
Read those two sets of numbers together and something shows up that the study did not set out to find. Solitude is not a fixed quantity. In some communities, living alone is an ordinary arrangement sitting inside a dense web of daily contact — neighbours in and out, meals shared, nobody unaccounted for. In others, the front door closing is the last thing that happens all day. Same living situation on a form. Completely different experience of it.
Which is also a reminder that most advice about living alone is written from inside one country’s assumptions. If you live alone by choice and it genuinely suits you, none of this is a scolding — the calm that comes with it is real. The question this study raises is not whether you live alone. It is whether you feel held while you do.
What this study cannot tell you
It cannot tell you that feeling loved by God causes better health. The authors are careful about this, and they list their own limits without being asked:
- The design is correlational, which they say rules out drawing any causal conclusion from it.
- Everything is self-reported, and on a survey about religion, people may drift toward answers that sound good.
- “Living alone” is a blunt measure. It misses the person who lives alone but spends the whole day inside a busy community.
- And the one they flag most honestly: feeling loved by God may be standing in for having more human connection. If the people who feel loved by God also tend to have more people around them, it could be the people doing the work.
That last caveat is the one worth carrying out of here, because it is the caveat the researchers could not rule out. A very large number describes something. It does not explain it. We ran into the same wall covering a seven-year memory study, where the link was real and the decline everyone expected never arrived.
Two questions, separated a long time ago
Still, there is something in the shape of this finding that is hard to walk past.
The two questions these researchers used are the same two questions people have been carefully separating for thousands of years, long before anyone could put a slope on either of them. The old texts are strangely uninterested in whether you have concluded that God exists. Even the ones written for religious people are impatient with that. What they keep returning to is being known, and being loved — the difference between agreeing about God from across the room and being on speaking terms.
The researchers landed on the same distinction from the opposite direction, running regressions on survey data. Their own explanation for why feeling loved outperformed belief is blunt: deciding that God is real does not automatically mean picturing God as loving, caring, or paying any attention to you. A god can be there without being there for you.
Which is, more or less, what the ancient version was saying all along. It just took 184,619 people and 22 countries to say it in numbers.
Where that leaves you
Nowhere prescriptive, honestly. Nobody can tell you to go and feel loved. That is not a thing a person can do on command, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something.
What the study can do is sharpen the question. It did not measure attendance. It did not measure how religious anybody was, or which building they walked into on which day. It compared two things — believing, and feeling loved — and the second one did more.
So if there is anything to take from a spreadsheet holding 184,619 lives, maybe it is this: the question worth sitting with is not only whether you believe. It is whether you feel loved. Those turn out to be different questions, and now there is some evidence they have different answers too. If you have never really pulled the two apart, our free How Close Am I to God? assessment is a quiet way to find out which one you have actually been answering.
Questions people ask about this study
Does believing in God protect against the health effects of living alone?
Partly, according to a 2025 study of 184,619 people in 22 countries published in Scientific Reports. Among people who did not believe in God, living alone was linked to worse mental health at a regression slope of −0.284; among people who believed in one God, that link measured −0.187 — weaker, and statistically significant. But belief was not the strongest factor the study found. Feeling loved by a higher power was.
What is the difference between believing in God and feeling loved by God?
Belief is a conclusion about whether God exists. Feeling loved is an experience of being cared for. The 2025 Scientific Reports study measured them separately and found they behave differently: among believers, those who felt loved by a higher power showed a link between living alone and poor mental health of −0.153, compared with −0.306 for believers who did not feel loved. The researchers’ explanation is that believing God is real does not automatically mean experiencing God as loving or attentive.
Did the study find that faith reduces anxiety?
No. This is one of the study’s clearest null results. Feeling loved by a higher power buffered the link between living alone and mental health, physical health, depression and loneliness — but it did not moderate the link between living alone and anxiety at all. The researchers report this openly rather than omitting it.
Does this study prove that faith causes better health?
No, and its authors say so directly. The design is correlational, which rules out causal conclusions. The measures are all self-reported, “living alone” does not capture people who live alone but stay socially active, and the authors explicitly cannot rule out that feeling loved by God is standing in for having more human connection — in which case the human relationships, not the belief, could be doing the protecting.
How many people were in the study, and where were they from?
184,619 participants across 22 countries on six continents, drawn from the first wave of the Global Flourishing Study, a five-year survey running from 2021 to 2026 whose first wave was released in April 2024. The analysis covered five groups: Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and people with no religious affiliation. Hindu participants were excluded from this analysis because only 0.63% of them lived alone.
What do you think?
The study separated two things most people treat as one: believing something is true, and feeling it is true for you. Where else does that gap show up — in relationships, in work, in family? Tell us in the comments; we read them.
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- 184,619 people, 22 countries. Believing in God helped people living alone. Feeling loved by God cut the link roughly in half. Turns out those were never the same question. https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/bible-resources/bible-and-science/feeling-loved-by-god-vs-believing/
- My favourite thing about this study is the part that didn’t work: feeling loved by God buffered depression, loneliness and physical health — and did nothing at all for anxiety. Researchers who publish the hole in their own finding are the ones I trust. https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/bible-resources/bible-and-science/feeling-loved-by-god-vs-believing/
- A god can be there without being there for you — roughly how the researchers themselves explain it. A survey of 184,619 people in 22 countries accidentally landed on a distinction people have been making for thousands of years. https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/bible-resources/bible-and-science/feeling-loved-by-god-vs-believing/
