Effect of Spirituality on Health and Physical Wellbeing in Chinese Young Adults

Health is a state of physical, mental, social, and spiritual wellbeing of an individual and not merely absence of disease. The role of spirituality in health and wellness has been long understood by the humans. However, the scientific understanding of its relevance has started to gain importance from the scientific world. Spirituality is largely differed in definition by the culture and country of the individual. Despite the cultural definitions, it is being established that spirituality mediates several psychological, social and psychological factors. This pilot study was aimed at understanding the correlation between spirituality and incident physical symptoms in Chinese healthy population. Healthy volunteers, both males and females of age between 18 and 30 years were recruited from a Chinese University. Subjects diagnosed with any clinical illness were not included in the study. A digital survey was administered to 133 volunteers for the Chinese versions of physical symptom checklist and psychomartix spirituality inventory. Our results indicate that females are more prone to physical manifestation of symptoms on exposure of stressors. Even though there are no correlations that exist amongst the symptoms and spirituality indicators in the other group, we speculate that the effects of non-mindfulness might take a longer time for physical manifestation of a disease condition.