Today, there are between 10,000 and 20,000 mental health apps. In the U.S. alone, there are 1.2 million mental health providers. And Mental Health Awareness Month began 75 years ago. It’s safe to say we’ve never been more aware of mental health. And yet, some fear that as awareness of mental health has gone up, the state of our mental health has gone down.

A 2023 study found that one out of every two people in the world will develop a mental health disorder in their lifetime. The situation with young people is even worse. “The youth mental health crisis is very real,” Dr. Harold Koplewicz, founding President and Medical Director of the Child Mind Institute, tells me. “The most common disorders of childhood and adolescence are not infectious diseases but mental health disorders. Every 30 seconds a child or adolescent with suicidal ideation or an attempt comes to an ER.”

There are many reasons why these are particularly challenging times: Natural disasters are intensifying, chronic diseases continue to climb, and AI is driving fear and anxiety about all aspects of life. People are afraid they will lose their jobs to AI, that their kids will be negatively impacted by AI, and that AI’s constantly accelerating development will evolve beyond human control.

But beyond the circumstances of the times we’re living in lies a more complicated existential crisis.

As the French priest and philosopher Teilhard de Chardin once said, “we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” When we give up on the spiritual part of human nature, we also give up on a supportive framework which can help us handle the anxieties of this historic moment of disruption.

Many answer this need for spirituality through organized religion, but as Columbia psychology professor Lisa Miller explains, there are many ways for people to embrace their spirituality. “The moments of intense spiritual awareness were biologically identical whether or not they were explicitly religious, physiologically the same whether the experience occurred in a house of worship or on a forest hike in the ‘cathedral of nature,’” she writes. “Every single one of us has a spiritual part of the brain that we can engage anywhere, at any time.”

The exact practices we engage in that lead to spiritual states of mystery, awe, grace, and wonder doesn’t matter. What does matter is that we don’t amputate them from our lives.

The famed psychologist Abraham Maslow placed self-actualization at the top of his hierarchy of needs—above physiological needs, safety, and belonging. But in the last years of his life, he realized that self-actualization did not fully encompass what it means to be human and added “transcendence” to the top of the pyramid.

As Maslow put it, “The spiritual life is part of the human essence. It is a defining characteristic of human nature, without which human nature is not fully human.” It’s this drive for spirituality that takes us beyond self-centeredness and allows us to resist despair and meaninglessness. This ability to find meaning in our struggles has helped humans navigate times of stress, turmoil, and crisis throughout history—and it is now validated by the latest science.

“When it comes to finding ways to help people deal with issues surrounding birth and death, morality and meaning, grief and loss, it would be strange if thousands of years of religious thought didn’t have something to offer,” writes David DeSteno, author of How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion.

Spirituality can help us not just weather times of crisis but even emerge stronger than before. A 2024 study on frontline healthcare workers in Poland during the pandemic found that higher levels of spirituality were connected to positive psychological change as the result of struggling with life challenges, known as post-traumatic growth.