الذكر لعلاج القلق والهم
Remembrance of Allah (dhikr) described in the Qur'an itself as the source of the heart's rest — treated by Ibn al-Qayyim as medicine for the heart, alongside physical remedies for the body.
أَلَا بِذِكْرِ اللَّهِ تَطْمَئِنُّ الْقُلُوبُ
“Verily, in the remembrance of Allah do hearts find rest.” (meaning, not a literal translation)
Compare Sahih al-Bukhari 6407: 'The example of the one who remembers his Lord and the one who does not is that of the living and the dead' — a hadith commentators read alongside this verse as reinforcing dhikr's centrality, not as a separate independent claim.
In Al-Wabil al-Sayyib, Ibn al-Qayyim writes at length on dhikr's effect specifically on grief, loneliness, and anxiety — treating it as a parallel discipline to his physical-medicine writing, aimed at the heart rather than the body. He describes specific categories of distress (fear of the future, regret over the past, loneliness) and discusses how sustained remembrance addresses each, treating this as genuinely medicinal in function even though its mechanism is spiritual rather than physical.
Contemplative and meditative practices across many traditions have been studied in modern psychology for stress-reduction effects, though dhikr specifically as a devotional practice is a matter of faith rather than something modern research validates or invalidates on its own terms.