Thank God! Women More Likely than Men to Pray Away Holiday Stress

This story is part of a new Yahoo Travel series, #StressFreeTravel, dedicated to making travel better in every way possible.

Never underestimate the power of prayer, especially during times of severe holiday stress.

A new study conducted by Yahoo Travel of 1,000 Americans who will be traveling over the next month has found that women are more likely than men to use prayer as a way to alleviate the stress caused by traveling during the holidays.

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Need relief from the stress of holiday travel? You might want to give prayer a try. (Photo: Stocksy)

In fact 28% of women, compared with 20% of men surveyed said that they turned to prayer when traveling gets stressful. Prayer even trumped other stress relievers like alcohol (20%), playing games on a smart phone (24%), meditating (10%), taking pills (7%) and having a romantic evening with one’s spouse (17%).

Women are also significantly more likely than men to deal with holiday stress by reading. 36% of women said they would tune out stressors with a book compared to only 25% of men.

Related: How to Survive Stressful Holiday Travel

Finding ways to tune out is important when dealing with the hectic holiday travel season. Yet, only 1 in 4 people surveyed said they plan on drinking to take the edge off, and just under 1 in 10 planned on taking pills.

Individuals with higher education levels (post-graduate) were actually more likely to drink to take the edge off of holiday stress (32%) than people without a college education (15%).

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Some people say their spouse drives them crazy, but singles are more likely than married people to drink their way through holiday stress. (Photo: Thinkstock)

Contrary to popular belief, having a spouse may actually make you less likely to drink to deal with holiday stress. More single people (27%) said they were likely to use alcohol as a crutch this holiday season, than married folks (19%).

How do you deal with holiday stress? We want to hear from you. Talk to us in the comments or tweet us @YahooTravel.

All figures, unless otherwise stated, are from YouGov Plc. Total sample size was 2,760 adults, of which 1,000 will be traveling for the December holidays. Fieldwork was undertaken between December 2 - 4, 2015. The survey was carried out online. The figures have been weighted and are representative of all US adults (aged 18+).

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