Prayer probably does help, even if there is no God. Just assume that it does work. After all, if it helps a believer to pray, and you can acknowledge that there was nobody else in the room while they were praying, you've got to wonder: how does it work? The only person it could possibly have an influence on is the person praying. And since the activity of prayer requires a focus of some sort, I think the real audience of the prayer is the subconscious.

After all, if you trust yourself to do something, if you trust your subconscious, shouldn't you be able to tell it just once what it needs to do, then not worry about it?

Anyhow that's what I was thinking a couple days ago.