In this new, groundbreaking paper, we measured the health and wellbeing benefits of weekly religious attendance and physical activity alongside previous work on volunteering.
We found:
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 - and volunteering is integral to the provision of both sport and church - you enjoy three times the wellbeing benefit.
Therefore the best investment to benefit your wellbeing is 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.
