Deeds to Habit
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Fight Ramadan Fatigue with Istighfar
Feeling Ramadan fatigue? You may know that istighfar, the act of requesting forgiveness, helps rid us of sins and brings us closer to Allah, but did you know it also gives us strength? Najwa Awad describes the added benefits of making istighfar to benefit us spiritually, mentally, and physically.
Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh. My name is Majwa Awad. I am a psychotherapist and also a fellow at the Yaqeen Institute. And today for our Deeds to Habits series, I'm going to be talking about istighfar. So whether it's in my office where I see a lot of people with depression, anxiety, trauma, or just in my day to day life with family and friends, I feel that people are just chronically fatigued. They're just feeling tired all the time and not being able to get the things that they want to get done, done. And this can be from a physical exhaustion, working a really demanding job or chasing after one's kids all day, or it can be an emotional exhaustion from chronically worrying or feeling sad. And subhanAllah, all these factors, they really take a toll on us day after day and really decrease our momentum and our energy. And when we think about increasing our energy and our strength, usually we think about going to sleep earlier, maybe changing our eating habits or even making lists of things that we need to get done to help us stay on track and focus. And all these things are really good tools for us to be able to use, things that we should do inshAllah. However, I feel like there is an ayah in the Quran that is underutilized in terms of us having more strength. And this is in, I believe it's 1152, and it says, and oh my people, ask forgiveness of your Lord and then repent to him. He will send rain from the sky upon you in showers and increase you in strength added to your strength and do not turn away being criminals. And here subhanAllah, we see that one of the
added benefits of making istighfar is that it increases us in strength. So we already know the importance of istighfar. We know it's something that the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam would do frequently throughout the day. It's a way to get rid of our sins, to get closer to Allah and to inshAllah get closer to our goal of Jannah. However, here we also see that it increases us in strength. And so there is not just spiritual benefits to it, but we can also see that there are benefits to our well-being. And subhanAllah, there have been a few studies that have looked at istighfar and mental health, and they have found that istighfar decreases anxiety. I don't think there's anything out there that talks about istighfar and depression, but I would not be surprised if it lowered feelings of sadness. Either way, we know that it has benefits, it increases us in strength because Allah said so. So this is something that we can again use for our spiritual benefit, but also for our general well-being. And subhanAllah, one of the things I really like about this deed is that it's just so easy to implement it. Most of us are already doing istighfar after salah for just a few seconds, so it really doesn't take much to be able to go from a couple seconds to maybe 30 seconds or a minute. If you have it in you, you can learn the dua that you can say in the morning or in the evening. Or it's just something that you can incorporate throughout your day, something that you might be able to do at work or while you're driving during downtime. So it's something that is so easy, something that has so much benefit, and that we can be using inshaAllah to get us closer to Allah,
but also to increase us in strength, especially during Ramadan when we're already feeling really tired and fatigued anyway. So may Allah make it easy for us to turn our good deeds into habits and for us to make all these things as a way to get closer to Him inshaAllah. As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh.
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