Why Is It So Hard to Pray?
By Dom · · 11 min read
You sit on the edge of the bed with the phone face-down and decide that this morning you will pray. Ninety seconds later you are thinking about an email, or you are saying the same three sentences you said yesterday, or you are saying nothing at all and wondering why it feels like talking to the ceiling. You believe prayer matters. That is what makes it so discouraging.
Prayer is hard for almost everyone at some point, and the Bible is honest about that. But “hard” is not one thing. Below are six different kinds, how to tell which one you are in, and one small first step for each.
Key takeaways
- Scripture admits prayer is hard. The disciples asked, “Lord, teach us to pray” (Luke 11:1), fell asleep in Gethsemane, and Paul writes, “We do not know what we ought to pray for” (Romans 8:26).
- Most churchgoers already pray on the spot. In a Lifeway survey of 2,130 U.S. Protestant churchgoers, 79% pray at the spur of the moment, but only 40% set aside private time with God every day. Often the hard part is the protected time.
- You are in large company. Pew's 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study found 44% of U.S. adults pray at least daily, down from 58% in 2007.
- “Hard” comes in six kinds: no protected time, a wandering mind, nothing to say, emptiness, seemingly unanswered prayer, and the gap after stopping. Each needs a different first step.
- The smallest honest start is to pray from a chapter you have just read, so you are never beginning from a blank.
Prayer is supposed to be hard sometimes (and the Bible says so)
If you have started to wonder whether the problem is you, start here. The people closest to Jesus found prayer hard too.
The disciples watched Jesus pray, and then they asked Him for help. In Luke 11:1 one of them says, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples” (NIV).
On the night before the cross, Jesus took three of them into Gethsemane and asked them to keep watch while He prayed. He came back and found them asleep. His words to them in Matthew 26:41 are not a scolding. They are a diagnosis: “Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” (NIV). Willing and weak, at the same time, in the same people.
And Paul admits in Romans 8:26, “We do not know what we ought to pray for.” He puts himself in that “we.”
Difficulty is not the goal. But it is not proof that something is wrong with you, either.
Most people already pray; what is hard is the set-apart time
The first is from the Pew Research Center's 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study of U.S. adults (all adults, not only Christians). It found 44% say they pray at least once a day, down from 58% in Pew's 2007 study, a drop of 14 points. Pew notes the newer study was run mainly online and on paper, where the earlier ones were done by telephone. Either way, if you are not praying daily right now, you are in large company.
The second is more telling. A Lifeway Research survey of 2,130 U.S. Protestant churchgoers (people who attend at least monthly, surveyed in March 2025) found that 79% say they find themselves praying at the spur of the moment throughout the day. But only 40% say they set aside time every day for private worship, praise or thanksgiving to God. That second measure is broader than prayer alone, so read it as a rough guide, not a precise prayer count.
Most of these churchgoers are already talking to God in the car, at the sink, before a hard phone call. What slips is the protected time. So for a lot of people, “I can't pray” really means “I can't protect the time.” That is a different problem, and it has a different fix.
Six kinds of hard, and which one is yours
Most answers to this question give one cause: the flesh, spiritual warfare, a focus on the act of praying instead of on God. Each of those is true some days. But the trouble a person actually describes is usually more specific, and a single answer sends half of its readers to the wrong fix.
So name the kind first. Find the sentence that sounds most like you this week.
| It sounds like | The kind of hard | A first step today | Go deeper |
|---|---|---|---|
| “I mean to, and then the day is gone.” | No protected time | Tie two minutes to something you already do every day, like the first coffee. | How to pray consistently |
| “Three sentences in, I'm planning lunch.” | A wandering mind | Put the phone in another room, and when you drift, come back without scolding yourself. | Focusing when you pray |
| “I sit down and nothing comes.” | Nothing to say | Read a short passage first, then pray one line of it back to God. | What to pray about |
| “I pray and feel nothing.” | It feels empty | Keep the time anyway, and tell God plainly that it feels empty. | Praying when you don't feel it |
| “I've asked for the same thing for years.” | It seems unanswered | Ask again today, honestly, and say how long it has been. | The widow who kept coming, below |
| “It's been months. Where would I even start?” | The gap after stopping | One sentence today. Nothing to catch up on. | A prayer streak with grace in it |
Three rows need more than a line, so they get their own sections below. For the habit side in full, start with how to pray consistently.
When you do not know what to want: Romans 8:26
“Nothing to say” is usually treated as a vocabulary problem. Better words help, but Paul points deeper.
Here is the whole verse: “In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans” (Romans 8:26, NIV).
In her commentary on this passage for Working Preacher, Mary Hinkle Shore notes that the Spirit “helps us pray when we do not know what to pray.” She draws on the New Testament scholar James Dunn, who points out that Paul's wording defines the problem differently than we usually think. As Dunn puts it, we “do not know what to want,” let alone how to ask for it.
If you sit down and cannot tell what you even want from God, you have not failed at prayer. You are at the exact place Paul says the Spirit meets people.
This is why beginning from a text is easier than beginning from a blank. After a chapter, you are not inventing a starting point; you are answering something. Pray that line back, even if all you can say is “I don't understand this, but I want to.”
If what makes prayer hard is starting from nothing, it helps to have something already in front of you. Connection grows the way anything grows: a little, daily, with grace. BlessUp puts a chapter in front of you each morning, about nine minutes, and reading it is what opens the apps you chose to shield. Then the check-in asks how close to God you feel and offers a written prayer to match, so you can pray from what you just read. Prayer counts toward the same streak as reading, and a grace day covers a missed one. BlessUp is on the App Store, if that would help.
When it seems nobody answers: the widow who kept coming
You have prayed, often and honestly, for the same thing, and nothing seems to move. After a while it is hard to start at all, because starting means feeling the silence again.
Jesus seems to have expected exactly this. Luke introduces one of His parables with its purpose stated up front: “Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up” (Luke 18:1, NIV). You do not tell people not to give up unless you know they will be tempted to.
In her Working Preacher commentary on Luke 18:1-8, Brittany E. Wilson calls it “a parable about the necessity of persistent prayer,” and points out that the widow's persistence is carried by the tense of a verb: “she kept on coming.” Wilson also asks the question honest readers ask: how do followers not lose heart when justice does not arrive on their timetable?
The parable does not explain the silence away. It gives permission to keep coming back with the same request. So ask again today, and tell God how long it has been. That is not a lack of faith. It is what the widow did.
If the silence is tied to grief or a long hardship, carry that to a pastor too. A church can walk with you in ways a page cannot.
Coming back after a long gap
You used to pray. Then life got full, or something hurt, or you drifted, and now it has been months. The longer it goes, the bigger the restart feels, as if you owe an explanation first.
You do not. There is nothing to catch up on. The widow in Luke 18 did not start each visit by apologizing for the last one. She just came.
A few things make the first day back lighter:
- Make it one sentence. “I'm here, and I'm not sure what to say” is a real prayer. Romans 8:26 covers the rest.
- Start from something you read. A psalm, a few verses of a Gospel, the chapter you are on. It gives you words that are not about the gap.
- Pick the same small moment tomorrow. Not a new routine. One moment, repeated.
- Expect a missed day. It will happen. A missed day is a missed day, not the end of the return.
And if the gap was also a gap from church, you do not have to come back to that alone either. Our church finder lists churches by city if you are looking for a place to start.
Prayer was hard for the people closest to Jesus, and He kept teaching them anyway. Whatever kind of hard you are in this week, you are not starting from behind. You are starting from today.
Frequently asked questions
Why do I struggle to pray even though I believe in God?
Believing prayer matters and finding it easy are different things. The disciples followed Jesus daily and still asked Him to teach them to pray, and Paul wrote that we do not know what we ought to pray for. Often the struggle is one specific kind of difficulty, such as no protected time, a wandering mind or nothing to say, and naming it points to the right first step.
Is it normal to find prayer boring or difficult?
Yes. Jesus found His closest friends asleep when He asked them to pray, and He told a parable so His disciples would not give up. Dry stretches are common and are not a sign that your faith is failing. A short, regular time and praying from a passage you have just read can make it less of a blank.
Why do I feel sleepy or distracted when I pray?
Partly because you are human. In Gethsemane Jesus told His sleeping disciples that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Pray at a time of day when you are awake, sit up or walk, put your phone in another room, and when your mind drifts, come back without scolding yourself.
What should I do if I have not prayed in months?
Start with one sentence today, such as telling God you are here and not sure what to say. There is nothing to catch up on. Pick one small moment you can repeat tomorrow, read a few verses first so you have words, and expect the odd missed day. If the gap came with grief or hardship, a pastor can help too.
Every morning, your reading is already waiting. You will never wonder where to start.
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