“Cease Striving”: Stillness and the Default Mode Network

Many of us learned this verse as “Be still, and know that I am God” (KJV). The NASB renders it “Cease striving,” with a footnote offering “Let go, relax.” In context the psalm is about God’s sovereignty amid war and upheaval: “God is our refuge and strength” (v. 1), the nations rage, and the LORD “makes wars to cease” (v. 9). The command to stop is grounded in who God is, not in a relaxation technique. Even so, it asks for a real human posture: we stop our anxious self-effort and fix our attention on God.

Neuroscience has a name for the brain system most involved in what our minds do when we stop working on a task. It is called the default mode network (DMN). The DMN is a set of connected regions centered on the medial prefrontal cortex (just behind the forehead) and the posterior cingulate cortex (deep along the midline toward the back of the head). These regions become most active when we are not focused on the outside world. The idea began with an unexpected finding. Using PET scans, Raichle and colleagues (2001) noticed that the same group of regions reliably quieted down whenever people started a demanding, goal-directed task. They concluded that the brain has an organized “default” state that it suspends when it gets to work.

Later work clarified what that default state does. Reviewing three decades of imaging, Buckner, Andrews-Hanna, and Schacter (2008) showed that the DMN is active when we recall our own past, imagine the future, and think about what other people are thinking. It is the brain’s simulation engine. It draws on memory to rehearse scenarios that concern me. That is a gift: it is how we plan, reflect, and understand others. But the same engine can run without a driver. When it does, we get mind-wandering and rumination. In depressed adults, Hamilton and colleagues (2011; 17 depressed vs. 17 healthy adults, correlational) found that greater dominance of the DMN over task-focused networks at rest went with more of the brooding, maladaptive kind of rumination. Section 3 reported that people are less happy when their minds wander (Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010). The DMN is a plausible part of the machinery behind that pattern. The man lying awake at 2 a.m., replaying the meeting and rehearsing tomorrow’s disasters, is running his default network hard.

Can practice change how this network behaves? Brewer and colleagues (2011) scanned 12 experienced meditators, who averaged more than 10,000 hours of practice, and 12 matched novices. During three kinds of meditation the experienced group showed relatively less activity in the main DMN hubs. They also showed stronger coupling between the posterior cingulate and regions involved in self-monitoring and cognitive control, both during meditation and at rest, and they reported less mind-wandering. Hasenkamp and colleagues (2012) explained the moment-by-moment mechanism. They asked 14 practitioners to press a button whenever they noticed their minds had wandered. DMN regions were active during the wandering itself. Salience-network regions, which flag “something important is happening,” became active at the moment of noticing. Executive control regions took over as attention was brought back. Stillness, in this picture, is not a blank mind. It is a repeated cycle: you drift, you notice, and you return. The returning is the exercise.

At the level of behavior, the best summary is a Johns Hopkins meta-analysis of 47 randomized trials with active control groups (3,515 participants). Mindfulness programs produced small-to-moderate improvements in anxiety (effect size about 0.38 at 8 weeks), depression (about 0.30), and pain. They were not better than other active treatments such as exercise or therapy (Goyal et al., 2014). That is real but modest evidence, and it is evidence for mindfulness.

That distinction matters. Brewer’s and Goyal’s participants practiced mindfulness, which trains nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment and has no object beyond it. Psalm 46 points stillness at a Person. Does that difference show up in the brain? The best direct evidence comes from Schjoedt and colleagues (2009), who scanned 20 devout Danish Christians. When they recited the Lord’s Prayer, the pattern resembled reciting a nursery rhyme. When they prayed in their own words, regions used in social cognition became active, including the medial prefrontal cortex, the temporo-parietal junction, and the precuneus. These regions are used for thinking about another mind. Making wishes to Santa Claus did not produce the same response. The authors’ interpretation is that believers treat personal prayer as a real conversation with someone who can respond. Notice that several of those areas overlap with the DMN. Christian prayer may not so much silence the self-referential network as reorient it, from “me and my problems” toward “me before You.” That is my inference from one small study, not an established finding.

Other Christian-practice evidence is thinner. In a preliminary SPECT study (a scan that uses a small injected tracer to map blood flow in the brain), Newberg and colleagues (2003) scanned three Franciscan nuns during repetitive, phrase-focused prayer. Compared with each nun’s own resting scan, they found increased blood flow in prefrontal, inferior frontal, and inferior parietal regions. Three participants in a lower-tier journal is a case series, not a verdict. Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann’s work with evangelical congregations (Luhrmann et al., 2010; Luhrmann & Morgain, 2012) suggests that prayer is a learned skill. In a randomized trial, imaginative, Scripture-based prayer sharpened mental imagery and made inner experience feel more vivid and significant. The largest trial of a Christian contemplative practice is sobering. Rohde and colleagues (2024) randomized 702 Christians to 28 days of Centering Prayer with explicitly religious framing, the same practice without religious framing, or simple daily reflection. All three groups improved in well-being, and the groups did not differ. The religious framing did increase measures of daily spiritual experience. If we are honest, the data do not show that contemplative prayer is a superior stress technique. They suggest it is at least as good as secular alternatives and that it carries something the alternatives do not.

The body offers one more convergence. Bernardi and colleagues (2001) had 23 healthy adults recite the rosary’s Ave Maria in Latin. The prayer’s natural rhythm slowed breathing to about six breaths per minute. That pace produced strong, synchronized rhythms in heart rate and blood pressure and increased baroreflex sensitivity, the body’s beat-to-beat blood-pressure stabilizer. A systematic review of slow breathing below ten breaths per minute links it to greater heart rate variability, a marker of vagal (“rest and digest”) activity, and to reports of calm and reduced anxiety (Zaccaro et al., 2018). Unhurried, rhythmic prayer is, among other things, a breathing exercise.

The modest convergence is this. Practiced, focused stillness appears to change how the brain handles self-focused, wandering thought, and slow, rhythmic prayer calms the body’s stress machinery. Neither finding tells us that God is there. Psalm 46 supplies what no scanner can: the reason a man can stop striving is that the LORD of hosts is with us.

Practice

Living it out

Five practices drawn from this passage. Each says how strong the research behind it is. What the labels mean.

1. 1

   The ten-minute “Psalm 46” sit

   Once a day, sit for ten minutes. Read Psalm 46 slowly once, then rest on one phrase (“Cease striving and know that I am God”). When you notice your mind has drifted to the to-do list, don’t scold yourself. Name it, hand it to God, and come back to the phrase. This is the drift, notice, return cycle that Hasenkamp et al. (2012) mapped. Brewer et al. (2011) suggest that long practice changes DMN behavior.

   ModerateModerate for the mental-training mechanism (small imaging studies, consistent with meta-analytic benefits of meditation; Goyal et al., 2014). Weak and indirect for this specifically Christian form; the largest Christian trial found benefits equal to, not greater than, a secular comparison (Rohde et al., 2024).
2. 2

   Pray out loud, in your own words, to Someone

   Don’t let stillness become an empty mind. After the quiet, speak to God the way you would speak to a trusted friend about the thing you were striving over. Schjoedt et al. (2009) found that improvised personal prayer, unlike recited words, engaged the brain’s “other minds” network. That is consistent with Psalm 46’s point that stillness is relational: know that I am God.

   EarlyOne fMRI study of 20 devout Christians. It shows what prayer engages, not that it produces a health benefit.
3. 3

   Slow the breath with the words

   In a stressful moment (in traffic, before a hard conversation), pray a short line on a slow breath: breathe in on “Be still,” breathe out on “and know that I am God.” Aim for about five to six breaths a minute, roughly a five-second inhale and a five-second exhale. Bernardi et al. (2001) found that rhythmic prayer at this pace strengthened cardiovascular rhythms and baroreflex sensitivity, and slow breathing reliably raises heart rate variability (Zaccaro et al., 2018).

   GoodGood for the short-term physiological effect of slow breathing (consistent small experimental studies). Long-term health effects of prayer-paced breathing specifically are untested.
4. 4

   Give the 2 a.m. replay a script

   When you catch yourself rehearsing worst cases at night, recognize it as the default network running without a driver (Hamilton et al., 2011). Interrupt it with a fixed pattern: name the worry, place it before God in one sentence (“Lord, the deal and the kids are Yours”), then return to a memorized verse or a slow breath. Repetitive negative thinking is a known risk factor for anxiety and depression, and meditation training modestly reduces anxiety (Goyal et al., 2014).

   ModerateModerate that attention training helps rumination in general. No trial has tested this exact bedtime practice. Persistent insomnia or depression calls for a doctor, not just a technique.
5. 5

   Learn it like a skill, and expect it to take time

   Commit to the practice for 30 days before you judge it, and expect the first weeks to feel awkward. Luhrmann’s research found that prayer is a trainable skill. People who practiced imaginative, Scripture-based prayer reported more vivid and significant inner experience (Luhrmann & Morgain, 2012), and time spent in prayer tracked with more vivid experiences of God (Luhrmann et al., 2010).

   ModerateModerate that prayer practice changes how prayer is experienced (one randomized trial plus ethnographic and correlational work). It does not show health outcomes.

Studies cited on this page14

1. ↗ Bernardi, L., Sleight, P., Bandinelli, G., Cencetti, S., Fattorini, L., Wdowczyc-Szulc, J., & Lagi, A. (2001). Effect of rosary prayer and yoga mantras on autonomic cardiovascular rhythms: Comparative study. BMJ, 323(7327), 1446–1449. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.323.7327.1446
2. ↗ Brewer, J. A., Worhunsky, P. D., Gray, J. R., Tang, Y.-Y., Weber, J., & Kober, H. (2011). Meditation experience is associated with differences in default mode network activity and connectivity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(50), 20254–20259. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1112029108
3. ↗ Buckner, R. L., Andrews-Hanna, J. R., & Schacter, D. L. (2008). The brain’s default network: Anatomy, function, and relevance to disease. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1124, 1–38. https://doi.org/10.1196/annals.1440.011
4. ↗ Goyal, M., Singh, S., Sibinga, E. M. S., Gould, N. F., Rowland-Seymour, A., Sharma, R., Berger, Z., Sleicher, D., Maron, D. D., Shihab, H. M., Ranasinghe, P. D., Linn, S., Saha, S., Bass, E. B., & Haythornthwaite, J. A. (2014). Meditation programs for psychological stress and well-being: A systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA Internal Medicine, 174(3), 357–368. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2013.13018
5. ↗ Hamilton, J. P., Furman, D. J., Chang, C., Thomason, M. E., Dennis, E., & Gotlib, I. H. (2011). Default-mode and task-positive network activity in major depressive disorder: Implications for adaptive and maladaptive rumination. Biological Psychiatry, 70(4), 327–333. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2011.02.003
6. ↗ Hasenkamp, W., Wilson-Mendenhall, C. D., Duncan, E., & Barsalou, L. W. (2012). Mind wandering and attention during focused meditation: A fine-grained temporal analysis of fluctuating cognitive states. NeuroImage, 59(1), 750–760. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.07.008
7. ↗ Killingsworth, M. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science, 330(6006), 932. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1192439
8. ↗ Luhrmann, T. M., & Morgain, R. (2012). Prayer as inner sense cultivation: An attentional learning theory of spiritual experience. Ethos, 40(4), 359–389. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1352.2012.01266.x
9. ↗ Luhrmann, T. M., Nusbaum, H., & Thisted, R. (2010). The absorption hypothesis: Learning to hear God in evangelical Christianity. American Anthropologist, 112(1), 66–78. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2009.01197.x
10. ↗ Newberg, A., Pourdehnad, M., Alavi, A., & d’Aquili, E. G. (2003). Cerebral blood flow during meditative prayer: Preliminary findings and methodological issues. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 97(2), 625–630. https://doi.org/10.2466/pms.2003.97.2.625
11. ↗ Raichle, M. E., MacLeod, A. M., Snyder, A. Z., Powers, W. J., Gusnard, D. A., & Shulman, G. L. (2001). A default mode of brain function. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(2), 676–682. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.98.2.676
12. ↗ Rohde, J. S., Goldy, S., Graziosi, M., Ferguson, M. A., Thrul, J., & Yaden, D. B. (2024). Centering and flourishing: An online intervention study assessing the effects of a Christian contemplative practice on stress-reduction and human flourishing. BMC Psychology, 12(1), 373. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-024-01836-0
13. ↗ Schjoedt, U., Stødkilde-Jørgensen, H., Geertz, A. W., & Roepstorff, A. (2009). Highly religious participants recruit areas of social cognition in personal prayer. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 4(2), 199–207. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsn050
14. ↗ Zaccaro, A., Piarulli, A., Laurino, M., Garbella, E., Menicucci, D., Neri, B., & Gemignani, A. (2018). How breath-control can change your life: A systematic review on psycho-physiological correlates of slow breathing. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 12, 353. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00353