Andrew Huberman spent years building a reputation on data. He runs a neuroscience lab at Stanford, and his podcast is one of the most listened-to health shows anywhere, built on studies about sunlight, cold exposure, sleep, and dopamine. So it landed differently when he described, on the record, a habit that has nothing to do with any of that: most nights, he gets on his knees at the side of his bed and prays.
He's said he avoided talking about it for years, wary of seeming to push religion on people who came to him for science. What changed wasn't a finding in a journal. It was admitting that certain things about himself, flaws he'd tried to fix through therapy and plain effort, weren't moving. A friend told him prayer was powerful. Huberman asked how. The friend didn't fully know either, only that it let you hand over control and somehow get a different kind of control back.
The practice he settled on is specific. Most nights he kneels by the bed and prays for other people before he prays for himself. Then he goes quiet for a couple of minutes and just listens for whatever surfaces. After that he prays for strength to handle whatever he's working through and for the energy to point his body toward good instead of harm. He closes with whatever he's especially grateful for that night and a word of thanks. If he wakes in the middle of the night, he does the same thing again. He prays before every podcast recording too, hoping less for a good episode and more for the clarity to be useful. He laid out the full ritual on the Shawn Ryan Show.
Huberman frames the mechanism the way a scientist would, then steps past it. He describes the brain as organized around something like darker and lighter impulses, and says he's landed on the view that whatever sits behind that organization isn't only generated inside the skull. He thinks it's received from outside it. He's careful about the claim. It isn't his area of training, and he says so directly, and he isn't asking anyone else to adopt it. He's only describing what convinced him.
The clearest version of why he keeps at it came out plainly in one conversation with Lex Fridman:
"If we don't believe in something bigger than ourselves, we will self-destruct."
Andrew Huberman, on the Lex Fridman Podcast
The habit goes back further than the podcast. Huberman has said he prayed secretly as a kid, mostly when things were going badly, and felt embarrassed about it for reasons he still can't fully explain. The moment he points to happened in college, after a relationship that had defined most of his adolescence started falling apart. He ran down to Sands Beach at UC Santa Barbara and prayed, not for the relationship to survive, but for the nerve to be honest with himself and with her about what was actually happening. He says it's part of why they're still on good terms today.
None of this requires agreeing with Huberman's theology to notice the pattern. The same shape shows up across very different traditions: prayer as the place you go when your own resources run out, not a performance for anyone watching. It also lines up with what the research on prayer and mental health actually finds: the versions of prayer that help most involve real disclosure, not polished language.
Inspired by that shape, we built a new guided prayer inside Prayer Stone: five short movements, others first, then silence, then strength, then whatever's hardest or most worth thanking God for, then a close, with open space in each one to direct your own words toward God instead of following a script line by line. It's live now in the English version of the app.
FAQ
Does Andrew Huberman pray?+
Yes. He's described kneeling by his bed most nights to pray, and praying again before every podcast he records.
Why does Andrew Huberman pray?+
He's said therapy and plain effort couldn't resolve certain things about himself. Prayer, in his account, is where he asks for help removing those flaws instead of fixing them through willpower alone.
What religion is Andrew Huberman?+
He hasn't publicly identified with a specific denomination. He's mentioned studying the Bible with a mentor and treats prayer as a personal practice he's still working out, not a settled religious identity.
How does Andrew Huberman say prayer is different from meditation?+
He draws the line at acknowledging something bigger than himself that he can't control or fully understand, rather than directing his own attention the way meditation does.
Prayer Stone is a daily Christian prayer app for iOS built for exactly the kind of consistency Huberman describes: a short prayer to return to every night, guided instead of freestyled, with a reminder so it survives the nights you're too tired to remember on your own.
Try Prayer Stone