How to pray the daily rosary without falling asleep
- Aimee Boudreaux MacIver
- May 14
- 4 min read
Our Lady has repeatedly invited us to a single practice—the daily rosary—as the countermeasure to wars, suffering, pandemics, and persecution.
For years I had an ongoing conflict: spiritual desire to pray the rosary daily, but such distraction and boredom while doing so that I often just fell immediately asleep or abandoned ship on the habit altogether. And my failure was truly ridiculous. Think about how ridiculous it is.
The Mother of God has come from Heaven to offer a solution for mitigating immense worldwide horrors—a solution that takes fifteen minutes. Only fifteen minutes to mitigate human suffering and save souls, but meh... sorry, Theotokos, I gotta scroll, nap, watch reels, do whatever instead.
There are no excuses that can be made when I am not even willing to dedicate fifteen minutes of the day in order to mitigate horror and advance eternal salvation. There is nothing I can say someday before God to justify why I couldn’t be bothered to spare fifteen minutes a day, even when war and persecution were on the line.
So I have found some strategies to be very helpful in adopting the daily rosary. If you’re in the same place between desire and follow through, give these strategies a try. Unlike thoughts or vibes (nice, but not efficacious), prayer actually changes things. Our Lady has told us over and over exactly what to do. Your rosary changes things; lives and peace depend upon it; the world needs your prayer!
Pray out loud.
I find it impossible to pray the rosary “in my head” and essential to pray along with some spoken audio. Otherwise I’ll get a few beads in and then realize twenty minutes later than I’ve drifted off into mentally constructing a grocery list. I don’t always pray out loud with my own voice, but often with the voices of others via a playlist, podcast, or video.
Pray with partners.
The rosary is designed to be a partner prayer: every prayer is constructed into two parts, lead and response. Whenever you can, invite a partner to pray with you. Someone else may include using myriad social media lives or YouTube videos of the rosary to pray “with” others.
Pray at a regular fixed time.
I generally pray my daily rosary as I walk to the gym every day. The fixed time is crucial for the habit. Knowing exactly when you will do something every day helps clear your mind of the buzzing task list.
Pray in the car.
There is something inherently spiritually rich about driving. You can’t really do anything else that would distract you. The forced focus is a gift for prayer. I often pray a rosary on the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway—it’s perfectly timed and there’s a true reset that happens entering into prayer while sailing over sunlit waters.
Pray while you’re doing something else already in your routine.
Your day surely contains regular repeated duties. Take one of them—walking the dogs, working out, grocery shopping, cleaning the house, carline—and pop on headphones to pray the rosary.
Divide the rosary into decades.
Remember that you can pray the rosary in parts throughout the day. A decade takes about two minutes, so consider praying one decade at a time whenever you have tiny transitions throughout the day.
Pray each decade or bead for a specific intention.
One practice that helps me focus during the rosary is offering each decade for a specific person, or each bead for a certain intention. For example, I often offer the first decade for the world and the Church, intentions of friends, or other needs. I pray the second decade for Colin, the third and fourth for our kids, and the fifth for my godchildren and personal intentions. Sometimes I subdivide it even more and pray each bead for a different intention connected to that person. You'll be surprised how quickly the rosary progresses when you're being intentional about the offering.
If you don’t have rosary beads, pray with something else.
I’ve even used random Mardi Gras beads hanging around my rearview mirror. And God didn’t give you ten fingers for nothing.
Learn more about the rosary itself to increase your own attachment to it.
The Rosary in a Year podcast: From Ascension: “Fr. Mark-Mary Ames, CFR, guides listeners in a step-by-step journey that will change the way you pray—no matter where you are in your spiritual life. By starting small and adding on over time, listeners will find themselves falling more in love with this powerful Marian devotion, becoming a source of grace for the whole world.”
The Rosary in a Year: Superb companion book for the podcast.
Champions of the Rosary: I loved this book by Mariologist Fr Donald Calloway—it helped me build understanding of the rosary’s history and thus a stronger connection to it.
10 Wonders of the Rosary: Another great book by Fr Calloway.
Read St John Paul II’s apostolic letter Rosarium Virginis Mariae, which contains these beautiful insights among others: ‘Mary’s words are more than ever relevant today now that the dark clouds of hate and division seem to present themselves on the horizon of the third millennium. When reciting the Holy Rosary, the faithful do not flee the problems of the world but looks at them with ‘responsible and generous’ eyes confident in divine intervention because only God can touch the hearts of man to give us true peace.”
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