Dark Night of the Soul: Meaning, Signs, and When It Is Depression

By the Awaken Library Editorial TeamEditorial Team · Updated October 20, 2026Oct 20, 2026 · How we write

The dark night of the soul is a period when prayer or meditation stops bringing comfort and familiar beliefs stop holding. The phrase comes from St. John of the Cross, a 16th-century Spanish friar, who described it as a stage of the path to God. Today it names almost any deep inner crisis, and it can look like depression.

Short on time? What helps during a dark night · Dark night or depression: the table · When to see a doctor

What the dark night of the soul means

The dark night of the soul is the time when whatever held a person up stops working. Prayer or meditation no longer warms. Old goals look hollow. A new understanding hasn’t arrived. In the original, Christian sense, it is a stage in which God takes away the comforts of prayer so that a person looks for God rather than for the comfort. In today’s everyday sense, it is any long, dark stretch that changes a person: a lost faith, a lost marriage, a breakdown of meaning.

The phrase carries three meanings, and mixing them up causes most of the confusion online:

• The original: a religious experience described by a 16th-century Carmelite friar, about prayer and God.
• The modern, broader one: a crisis of meaning that can happen to anyone, religious or not, as in Thomas Moore’s book.
• The confusable one: from the outside, a dark night can look a lot like depression, and the two can happen at once. The questions at the top of this page sort the signs into two groups and leave the naming to you and, if needed, a doctor.

Where it comes from: St. John of the Cross

St. John of the Cross (Juan de la Cruz, 1542–1591) was a Spanish Carmelite friar and poet, who helped Teresa of Ávila start the reformed, “discalced” Carmelite friars. He wrote a poem of eight short stanzas, probably between 1577 and 1579, and then a long prose commentary on its first lines, which he left unfinished. The poem has no title in his hand; the phrase “dark night of the soul” is the later name for it and its commentary. The poem opens, in E. Allison Peers’ translation:

On a dark night, Kindled in love with yearnings—oh, happy chance!—
I went forth without being observed, My house being now at rest.

Stanza 1. The “house at rest” is the soul with its desires quieted; the speaker is the soul going out to meet God.

The poem is a love poem: a soul slips out of a sleeping house at night to meet the beloved. The commentary explains why the darkness is “happy”. In Book I, chapter 8, John says there are two nights. The night of sense “is common and comes to many: these are the beginners.” The night of the spirit “is the portion of very few”, and it is far harder. Both are purifications. In the first, God takes away the sweetness people found in prayer, so that they stop loving prayer for the pleasure it gave them.

The three signs John gave

John knew dryness in prayer can come from other things. In Book I, chapter 9, he lists them himself: sin, “weakness and lukewarmness”, or “some bad humour or indisposition of the body”. In his day, melancholy was a humour, roughly what we would now call depression. So he gives three signs to tell the night from these.

1. No pleasure in God, and none in anything else either. If a person still enjoyed other things, the dryness could just be a turn away from prayer. John admits at once that this sign alone is not enough, because the same lack of enjoyment “might proceed from some indisposition or melancholy humour”.
2. Painful concern about failing God. “The memory is ordinarily centred upon God, with painful care and solicitude, thinking that it is not serving God, but is backsliding.” Lukewarmness doesn’t care; the night cares a great deal. Melancholy, John adds, “spends itself in displeasure and ruin of the physical nature” and brings no desire for God.
3. The old way of praying no longer works. The soul “can no longer meditate or reflect in the imaginative sphere of sense as it was wont, however much it may of itself endeavour to do so.” An illness, he notes, “never lasts for long”; when it ends, the old prayer comes back. In the night it does not.

So the man who named the dark night also described how to tell it apart from depression, and the core of his test is short: the night takes away comfort but leaves care; depression tends to take both. It is a 16th-century rule of thumb, which is why the table below sets it next to the WHO description.

Signs people describe today

No research has produced a checked list of dark night symptoms. The lists online mix John’s signs with later books and with personal accounts. These are the ones that come up again and again:

1. Prayer or meditation feels dry and gives nothing back.
2. The usual practice stops working, however you try.
3. You still care about the path and worry you are failing at it.
4. Beliefs and self-images you relied on stop holding.
5. A sense that God, or life, has gone silent or left.
6. It is hard to explain to anyone what is happening.
7. A pull toward quiet and simple tasks.

The first three come straight from John of the Cross. The rest were added by later writers and show up in many kinds of crisis, so on their own they don’t point to a dark night. Claims such as “only chosen souls go through it” or “it always ends in enlightenment” are not in John or in any study we found.

Dark night or depression? How to tell them apart

From the outside the two can look the same: emptiness, little interest in things, wanting to be alone. The table compares John’s description and Gerald May’s observations with the way the WHO (ICD-11) and the US National Institute of Mental Health describe a depressive episode. It is a rough guide. Only a clinician can make a diagnosis. To bring something concrete to that appointment, you can fill in the PHQ-9, the standard depression questionnaire.

May, who worked for years both as a psychiatrist and as a spiritual director, also warned that the dark night and depression “so often coexist” that trying to separate them “is not as helpful as it might first appear.” His advice was to treat depression wherever it is found, whether or not a dark night is part of the picture. If anything in the right-hand column describes you, see a doctor, even if you are sure this is a dark night.

Stages: the night of sense and the night of the spirit

John describes two stages. The night of sense comes early, to many people, often soon after they begin to pray seriously. Dryness comes and goes; at times they can meditate, at times they can’t. The night of the spirit comes, if it comes at all, much later: John says a person may spend “a long time, even years” after the first night before it begins, and he reserves it for few. It is the darker and more painful of the two, and it ends, in his account, in union with God.

Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism (1911) put the dark night fourth in a five-stage map of the mystic way: awakening, purgation, illumination, the dark night, and union. Many modern “stages of the dark night” lists (ego rupture, emptiness, surrender, rebirth) are later inventions and don’t come from John, Underhill or research. They can still be useful as a story people tell about their own experience, as long as nobody treats them as a timetable.

How long does a dark night last?

Neither John nor any study gives a length. John writes that for many people the dryness “is not usually continuous”: “at times they have these aridities; at others they have them not.” The night of the spirit, in his account, is longer and rarer. Figures such as “three months to three years”, repeated across many sites, have no source that we could trace.

A simpler rule works better than a timetable: if a heavy state lasts longer than two weeks and makes it hard to eat, sleep or work, it is time to see a doctor, whatever you call it.

What helps during a dark night

1. Check yourself against the right-hand column of the table first. If you see signs of depression or have thoughts of death, start with a doctor. That doesn’t cancel the spiritual side.
2. Don’t force the old practice back. In Book I, chapter 10, John’s advice is to let the soul “remain in peace and quietness”, content with “a peaceful and loving attentiveness toward God”, even if it feels like doing nothing. In plain terms: sit quietly without trying to feel anything in particular.
3. Find one person who understands. John noticed that people in this night “turn back at such a time if there is none who understands them”. A spiritual director, a therapist, a friend who listens without arguing: any of them will do.
4. Look after the body. Same bedtime, regular meals, daylight, a walk.
5. Put off big decisions. Leaving a community, ending a relationship, moving house: decide when sleep and mood are steadier.
6. Answer the 10 questions again in two weeks. If you saved your answers, you will see what changed. If things are heavier, that is a reason to see a doctor.

What research says

There is not much research on the dark night itself, but a few studies look at how to avoid mistaking it for illness, and illness for it.

• Nuns and sadness. The psychiatrist Glòria Durà-Vilà and colleagues (2010) studied an enclosed community of contemplative nuns in Spain, through observation and long interviews. Distress that might fit a depressive episode on paper was understood by the nuns themselves as a dark night: a time of reflection and growth that their community knew how to support.
• “Spiritual distress” and psychiatry. In a 2009 review, Durà-Vilà and Simon Dein argued that clinicians should ask what meaning a person gives to their suffering before treating everything as a brain chemistry problem, while not missing real depression.
• Hard experiences in meditation. At Brown University, Willoughby Britton’s research on difficult meditation experiences began under the name “Dark Night Project” and became “Varieties of Contemplative Experience”. The 2017 paper by Lindahl and colleagues interviewed 60 Western Buddhist practitioners, chosen because they had had challenging experiences, plus 32 experts. It found 59 kinds of experience in 7 domains. The most common was fear, anxiety, panic or paranoia, reported by 82% of these practitioners. The distress ranged “from minimal and transient to severe and enduring.” Because people were selected for difficulty, the study can’t tell you how often this happens to meditators in general.
• A code in the DSM. Since DSM-IV (1994), the American psychiatric manual has had the code V62.89 (Z65.8 in DSM-5), “Religious or spiritual problem”, for when “the focus of clinical attention is a religious or spiritual problem”, such as a loss or questioning of faith. It is not a mental disorder. It marks a reason for a clinician’s attention.

Across these papers, the authors warn against two mistakes. One is calling depression a dark night and putting off help. The other is a clinician seeing only a symptom in a person’s spiritual life.

How the phrase is used today

Over four centuries the phrase moved far from the monastery. Thomas Moore’s Dark Nights of the Soul (2004) uses the plural on purpose: any ordeal, loss or depression can be a dark night, and he asks readers to see it as a passage rather than something to fix at once. Eckhart Tolle describes it as “a collapse of a perceived meaning in life”, writes that the inner state “in some cases is very close to what is conventionally called depression”, and links it to awakening as “the death of the old self”. That is how the phrase now overlaps with signs of spiritual awakening, and with kundalini in yoga circles.

Some newer pages tie the dark night to “twin flames”, “ascension” or “raising your vibration”. None of that is in John, Underhill, May or the research above, and telling someone in pain to “raise their vibration” is a textbook case of spiritual bypassing. Others link it to Jung; the nearest real idea in his work is the meeting with the shadow, the parts of ourselves we would rather not see.

What this page does not promise. The 10 questions don’t diagnose anything and can’t tell you whether you are in a dark night. Nothing here treats depression or any other condition, and spiritual reading is no substitute for a doctor. We present John of the Cross as a religious writer in his own terms. The page doesn’t argue for or against his faith.

How the 10 questions work

Four statements follow John’s second and third signs in Book I, chapter 9. They cover dryness in practice, care that remains, the old way no longer working, and questions of meaning becoming more important. John’s first sign, no pleasure in anything at all, overlaps with depression and he says so, so the statement about ordinary pleasure sits in the other group. Six statements follow the WHO and NIMH description of a depressive episode: loss of pleasure, low mood most days for two weeks, sleep and appetite, worthlessness and hopelessness, daily life not getting done, and thoughts of death.

“No” scores 0, “sometimes” 1, “often” 2. The doctor group lights up with one “often” or two “sometimes”; the dryness group with half its maximum, 4 of 8. Any answer except “no” to the question about death, or “often” to daily life not getting done, shows help lines immediately, whatever the rest says. The example result above is computed from sample answers when the page is built. Your answers stay in your browser; they are saved on this device only if you press Save.