How to Pray When You Don't Feel Like It

Most writing about prayer assumes you want to pray. The harder and more common situation is the season where it feels like talking to a ceiling: nothing comes back, the words sound hollow, and the whole exercise seems slightly embarrassing. That stretch is not a sign you are doing it wrong. Nearly everyone who has prayed for a long time has been there, usually more than once.

Check the Ordinary Causes First

Before treating dryness as a spiritual problem, rule out the mundane explanations, because they are frequently the actual answer.

Exhaustion flattens everything. So does a stretch of poor sleep, or overwork, or a season with a newborn. If nothing in your life currently has much feeling in it, prayer is not the outlier.

Depression is worth naming specifically. It removes the capacity to feel things, including things you genuinely believe. People in it often conclude they have drifted from God when what has actually happened is a medical problem that deserves treatment.

Grief does something similar and can last much longer than people expect.

None of this is a reason to stop praying. It is a reason not to add self-condemnation on top of a load that is already heavy.

Feeling Is Not the Measure

The assumption underneath most of this distress is that a prayer accompanied by feeling is real and one without it is not.

That assumption is worth examining, because nothing in Scripture teaches it.

Jesus in Gethsemane is in anguish, and that prayer counts. The Psalmist in Psalm 88 ends in unrelieved darkness, and that prayer is in the Bible. Habakkuk opens by asking how long he has to call for help before God listens.

Prayer offered while feeling nothing is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy would be performing a feeling you do not have. Showing up empty and saying so is the opposite of that.

Borrow Words

When you have nothing of your own, use someone else's. This is the oldest solution there is and it works.

The Psalms. They cover the entire emotional range, including states people assume are not allowed. Psalm 13 asks how long God will forget him. Psalm 42 addresses his own downcast soul. Psalm 88 has no resolution at all, which is precisely why it helps on the worst days.

Pray one aloud, slowly. The words are already there and they are often more honest than anything you would have produced.

The Lord's Prayer. Short, complete, and requiring no inspiration. Our piece on the Lord's Prayer explained walks through it line by line, which makes praying it slowly considerably richer.

Written prayers. There is a long tradition of these and no shame in using them. A person too tired to compose a prayer can still mean one.

Say the Actual Thing

A great deal of dry prayer is dry because it is being edited.

People arrive with a real complaint and produce a polite summary instead. Then the prayer feels false, which it partly is, and they conclude prayer does not work.

Try saying the true version. "I do not want to be here. I have not felt anything in months and I am not sure you are listening." That is a legitimate prayer, and it has ample precedent.

Job argues at length and is never rebuked for arguing. Jeremiah accuses God of deceiving him. The Psalms contain sustained complaint.

What tends to end prayer is not anger; it is unspoken anger. Anger that gets said keeps the conversation open, which is the entire point.

Make It Small

The practical move, and the one that gets people through a long stretch.

A daily practice that requires motivation will not survive a season without motivation. That is close to a definition. So reduce it until motivation is irrelevant.

Sixty seconds. One sentence. The Lord's Prayer once. Naming three things you are grateful for while the coffee brews.

Attach it to something that already happens without fail: the drive, the first cup, the moment before you get out of the car, lights out. Our piece on morning prayer for busy parents is built on this principle.

Consistency at a small size beats intensity that collapses. And a habit that survives a dry season is still running when the season ends.

Change the Form

Sometimes the problem is the format rather than the practice.

Write it. For a lot of people, writing accesses something speaking does not. Our guide on prayer journaling for beginners covers this.

Walk. Praying while moving suits people who cannot sit still and feel like failures for it.

Pray Scripture. Reading a passage and turning it back into prayer as you go removes the blank-page problem entirely. Our piece on praying through Scripture covers the method.

Pray for other people. When your own situation is too heavy to look at directly, praying for someone else is often the only door that opens.

Sit without words. Silence counts. Being present without saying anything is a real form of prayer and always has been.

Let Someone Else Carry It

The part people skip because it requires admitting the situation to another human being.

Ask someone to pray for you, and be honest about why. Scripture assumes this. James instructs believers to pray for one another. Romans 8 says the Spirit intercedes when you cannot manage words at all.

There are stretches where the honest description is that you are being carried. That is not failure. It is what a church is for, and most people who have been through a long dry season were held up by somebody during it.

Family Discussion Questions

• Is there something we have not said honestly to God because it felt disrespectful?
• What is the smallest prayer practice that could survive our worst week?
• Who could we ask to pray for us right now?

The Bottom Line

Check the ordinary causes first: exhaustion, depression, and grief flatten everything, and prayer is not a special case.

Feeling is not the measure. Scripture is full of prayers offered from anguish and prayers that end unresolved.

Borrow words from the Psalms when you have none, and say the real thing rather than the edited version, including the anger. Shrink the practice until motivation is not required, and attach it to something that already happens.

Change the form if the form is the problem. And ask someone to carry it for a while.

Frequently Asked Questions