When it comes to health and wellbeing, once a week works – this appears to be the rhythm of human life and we think it could form the basis of a new national preventative health service.
In this new paper, State of Life measured the health and wellbeing benefits of weekly religious attendance and physical activity alongside previous work on volunteering.
Key Findings:
● Attending church every week has the same wellbeing benefit as playing sport and physical activity.
● If you are both physically active and attend church in the same week, you get double the benefit.
● If you also volunteer, you have three times the wellbeing benefit. And volunteering is integral to the provision of both sport and church.
● The optimum way to invest your time to benefit your wellbeing is to go to church, play sport, and volunteer once a week – faith, hoops and charity.
● If an individual did all three of these activities, every week, it would be the equivalent in wellbeing terms of an unemployed person finding a job or self-employed work.
