The Power of Everyday Rituals to Shape and Enhance Our Lives
Episode Stats
Summary
When we think of rituals, we tend to think of big, inherited, more occasional religious or cultural ceremonies like church services, holidays, and funerals. But as my guest observes, we also engage in small, self-made, everyday rituals that help us turn life s more mundane moments into more meaningful ones. In The Ritual Effect, from Habit to Ritual: Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions, psychologist and Harvard Business School professor Michael Norton explores the way our DIY rituals shape and enhance our lives.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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When we think of rituals, we tend to think of big, inherited, more occasional religious
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or cultural ceremonies like church services, holidays, weddings, and funerals.
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But as my guest observes, we also engage in small, self-made, everyday rituals that help
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us turn life's more mundane moments into more meaningful ones.
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In The Ritual Effect, From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions,
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psychologist and Harvard Business School professor Michael Norton explores the way our DIY rituals
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Michael explains the difference between a habit and a ritual and how individuals and families
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create unique ritual signatures, even within more standard rituals like holidays.
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We discuss the different areas of life in which rituals show up and what they do for us, including
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how they help us cope with uncertainty, save our life, and connect to the past.
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We get into the function DIY rituals performed in romantic relationships, from deepening intimacy
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to facilitating a breakup, the role that kinkeepers play in keeping a family together, the tricky
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business of combining family traditions when people get married, how to know when a family
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After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash everyday rituals.
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All right, Michael Norton, welcome to the show.
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So you are a psychologist who has researched and written about the power of rituals in our
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lives, but you started off your career as a ritual skeptic.
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What did you think about rituals before you started researching them?
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I think when I talk to scientists, including myself, I guess, scientists often think of
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rituals as something like people in robes with candles chanting something or other, but
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And I think, or maybe new agey millennials in Santa Fe with crystals or, you know, that's
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And I think I was a little, I mean, I was studying rituals because I thought they were
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so fascinating just as a psychologist, but I was a little removed from them as a kind
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of, yeah, I bet they do things, but not so much for me.
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And then I had my, of course, epiphany moment, which many people have had, which is I had a
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daughter and brought her home from the hospital.
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And if that's ever happened to you, you realize you're responsible for this person for the next
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80 years or however many years, it's a little stressful and they don't seem to want to sleep.
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And what we started to do naturally was we did this book and then we did this song and
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then we had these two stuffies and then we needed this special blanket.
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Oh my God, I've completely developed a very elaborate, specific, repeated ritual that we
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do every single night in exactly the same way in order to help her to sleep.
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And then I said, I've been a little bit of a hypocrite because I, I like many, many people
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have turned to ritual to try to help me with a problem.
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And with that bedtime ritual with kids, if you've had them, you know, if you switch anything,
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if you switch the order, they're like, no, that's not how we do it.
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I still got that book memorized and it's been 10 years since I read it.
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So as a psychologist, how do you define a ritual?
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I think one of the distinctions that comes to mind for lots of people is because they are
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quite similar is the distinction between a habit and a ritual.
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Ritual has this feeling of something more than just a habit.
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We should all have better habits and exercise and eat healthy and all the other things we'd
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They're sort of things that we do in order to get them done.
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Like I'm eating the food in order to be healthy.
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But if you had a 40-year stretch of perfect habits, I'm not sure that we'd look back and
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say, what an interesting, fulfilling life I had.
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We'd be really, really healthy, like great cholesterol.
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But I'm not sure we'd say like, that was really a fantastic and engaging life.
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And I think sometimes that's what rituals help us do is they take otherwise boring, mundane
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things, including something like going to bed or helping someone go to bed.
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All you technically need to do is put the baby in a crib.
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And I think they tend to enrich our lives a little bit.
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You still remember the words from this book that you used 10 years later.
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That's something deeper and more meaningful than just a habit.
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So a habit or routine, I think you can swap those synonymously.
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I think you said in the book, it focuses on the what.
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And it doesn't particularly matter, you know, the order I do it or how I do it.
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A routine or a habit can become a ritual if the focus shifts to the how.
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And even with these seemingly trivial behaviors, like I've asked lots of people, you know,
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when you're getting ready for bed or getting ready in the morning, do you brush your teeth
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And what's your answer, by the way, out of curiosity?
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So then if I ask people, it's about 50-50 on those two orders.
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And then if I say, do you mind switching the order of them tonight or tomorrow morning?
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I mean, I'm just brushing my teeth and showering.
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As soon as the order starts to matter, if there's feeling in it, emotion in it, if you
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That's getting closer to the feeling of a ritual.
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It's how you do it that's creating more meaning for you.
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So if a routine or habit elicits emotion in you, and you can usually tell that if you
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change it, then you might think this is probably more of a ritual, not just a habit.
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So if you said, well, I have to brush my teeth first because my kid has to brush their teeth
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Well, then you're not being rigid because it just matters to you.
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But most people say, I don't actually know why I brush my teeth first and then shower second.
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I didn't do an experiment where I did it one way for a year and the other way for a year.
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I just feel like this is the way I'm going to do it.
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That's when it's getting a bit more toward a ritual.
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You can't quite explain why it's meaningful to do it the way you do it, but it just feels
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So this definition of a ritual that you have, so it's a routine that we do where it elicits
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There's no particular logical reason why we do it, but we feel like we need to do it this
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This broadens what can be incorporated or what we can think of as a ritual.
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But when anthropologists or sociologists study rituals, what kind of rituals are they studying?
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I mean, this is the typical, and in fact, when I started studying rituals as well, this
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is the, what first comes to mind are cultural rituals, religious rituals, often with a long
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So you can think of every religious faith has, of course, you know, rituals of when babies
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are born, when people become adults, when people get married, when people pass away.
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Religions have these sort of standard rituals that have been passed down through time.
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The United States has Thanksgiving, for example, which isn't present in other countries, a little
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bit in Canada, but not in other countries, but it's important to Americans to have Thanksgiving.
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These are the kinds we often think of are these inherited, I guess, is one way to think
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And they can be incredibly important and they play an incredibly valuable role in our lives.
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So when I say that's not the kind I study, it's not because they're not incredibly important
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for our well-being and our connection with other people.
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But I got a little bit more interested in the kind that people are freelancing themselves,
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kind of under the surface, that are littler ones.
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They're even kind of everyday ones, but they're still creating meaning for us.
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Not like as much meaning probably as a 2,000-year history of a religious faith in connecting you
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I don't mean to compare them, but even something as seemingly silly as the order in which you
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brush your teeth and shower, a little tiny bit that's giving you something, a little ritualistic,
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it's giving you something in there that's beyond just merely going through the motions.
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Or it could be a family ritual that you take part in, that just your family does.
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And even when you think about inherited rituals, so Thanksgiving, for example, we're aware
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If you have people write about what happens on Thanksgiving, they can tell you.
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But when you go into families, each family is doing it in their own very specific way.
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Maybe there's turkey, but there's also some pies that are very specific, different kinds
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If you've ever gone with a significant other to their family's Thanksgiving, the number
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one emotion you have is they're doing it all wrong.
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I don't think I can be with this person anymore because their family's insane.
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Well, that tells us that it's not even Thanksgiving, which is a tradition inherited all of those
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features, even their families and individuals are still coming up with their own idiosyncratic
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ways that reflect something specific about their identity.
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Something you talk about in the book is this idea of a ritual signature.
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This is exactly this kind of thing where we do have things that we receive that are given
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A wedding, for example, you can think about is standard.
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Most religions and most cultures have some form of two people love each other.
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There's a ceremony, but only some people would play ACDC as the bride and groom come down
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the aisle because whatever, they met at an ACDC concert.
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Yes, they are using some elements of established ones, but they're also building into these things
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that are very idiosyncratic to them, that have special meaning for them, that other people
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would be horrified to have ACDC playing as they came down the aisle.
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It's what we do that makes us us and not like those other couples.
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And something you talk about in the beginning of the book is there's this idea that we've
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We've talked about Charles Taylor on the podcast.
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We live in a secular age, and because of that, we've become more rational and we're engaging
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But you argue that actually, no, if you look at things, we might be taking part in less of
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those legacy rituals that are associated with church or religion.
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But if you look closely enough, people today, there are just thousands, millions of different
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rituals being performed every day by people who aren't even religious.
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So the biggest counterpoint to the idea that we're losing ritual in society would be something
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There's no kind of specific faith associated with it.
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But if you kind of abstract away, you've got people going on a pilgrimage to a desert for
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There are substances that change how you're thinking and feeling about the world.
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At the end, we have a gigantic figure that we burn in a ritualistic way, and then we all
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Yes, technically, because we don't have a faith associated with it.
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But it's an incredibly ritualistic activity that we engage in.
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I think people can look at maybe religious rituals and think, well, you know, there's a
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reason it's about tradition and showing piety to God.
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But if you don't believe in a higher power, why do we still have this drive to engage in
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It's one of the reasons I became most interested in studying rituals, honestly, is that across
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so many domains of life, one of the things that humans turn to is ritual.
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You know, funerals and weddings, we use them for grieving and also for love.
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We use rituals to get amped up, and we use rituals sometimes to calm ourselves down.
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I mean, we're using them for incredibly different purposes in these different domains of life.
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And we use many other strategies and things as well.
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But the fact that we see them across so many domains of life says to me that there is something
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really fundamental in humans that ritual is doing something for us.
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They do lots of things for us, but one underlying thing that I think we see is that we use them
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And in particular, when we have uncertainty or stress, or we're faced with something that's
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hard to cope with, that's when we often see humans turning to ritual as a way to try to
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And the problem, of course, as you know, with being human is everything is completely uncertain.
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We can try to convince ourselves that it's not, but the fact is, of course, that's the way
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And so it's not surprising that we've developed practices to try to help us in some way or
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another cope with that level of uncertainty and feel a little bit more sense of control
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so that we're not constantly just all over the place and wondering, is anything I'm doing
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And you talk about, we see the connection of ritualistic behavior and uncertainty very viscerally
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What can sports tell us about the connection between uncertainty and ritualistic behavior?
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A super fun way to waste an afternoon is to type in the name of any athlete or any celebrity
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and then the word ritual and just click search.
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And you'll find not every athlete and not every celebrity has rituals.
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But it's kind of shocking how often they do have something very idiosyncratic and often
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And the question is, well, why them and not the rest of us?
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And of course, if you think about, so Rafael Nadal is famous for his pre-serve ritual, which
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is very, very elaborate, takes a very long time.
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It includes him picking his wedgie, which I find extremely amusing.
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And my daughter actually finds very amusing that he does that.
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So why is he engaged in these seemingly unusual behaviors that aren't really related to serving?
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And it's, of course, because he's got to do something that's as hard a physical action
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Or when Beyonce is about to go out on stage in front of 50, 100,000 people, the stress
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of that is, we can't even imagine, right, how stressful that is.
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And I think we can see, you know, that we turn to them because we're trying to get ready
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and solve the problem of, oh my God, I have to do this enormous thing coming up.
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But the rest of us don't have the liberty to do those kinds.
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So if I, before I taught a class, if I started to do Rafael's, you know, pre-serve ritual,
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people would say, come on, this isn't that hard.
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So we allow celebrities to do these things in a way that we don't allow ourselves.
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But if we ask people, what do you do before, when you're nervous about something, like
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a meeting at work that's important, people say, oh no, I do them.
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It's just that what I do is I do them in private.
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We're not Serena Williams, but we are doing these very similar things to deal with our
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When stress is there, humans seem to have always wanted to bring ritual as a possible solution.
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Oh, I want to talk more about how rituals can help our performance.
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But going back to the connection between uncertainty and ritualistic behavior, you pointed out this
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really interesting study when they look at baseball.
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When they compare hitters and fielders, hitters engage in more ritualistic behavior than fielders
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And it's probably because hitting a baseball, it's, there's more uncertainty there.
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Hitting a baseball that's going 95 miles an hour, sometimes a hundred miles an hour.
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They've got their, you know, before they get in the batter's box, they got their thing
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You don't see that so much with fielders because there's less uncertainty, you know,
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well, if the ball's coming away, I'm going to get it.
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And then I'm going to throw it to first or second.
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There's a study I love that they filmed baseball players and then they coded at a micro level,
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how many movements they made before each at bat.
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And the average number was 83, which is a lot of movements to make before every single
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If you think about, even if you just think about this base rate of success, the very best
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Like it is incredible to be successful one out of every three times as a hitter in the field,
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the success rates like 98 or 99% at most positions.
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So if you, if you purely just think about the uncertainty, you can see how, if you're
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in the situation where my gosh, it's probably going to go wrong, you'd have more stress.
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If you're in a situation where you're just fine, you probably don't need to do it quite
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So rituals can help us feel more calm in periods of uncertainty.
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It can also help reduce stress when we're feeling anxious about a performance, a big
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And that's basically because it gives us a sense that we have a bit of control, even
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though, you know, rationally, these actions that we take part in might not have any direct
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Maybe they do, you know, maybe we can be metaphysical here and say, yeah, maybe they do
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have something, but we're going to keep things rational here and say, well, they don't have
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a direct effect, but it gives us a sense of control.
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And you were talking about some of these pregame rituals, these pre-performance rituals that
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musicians do, actors do before they get on the stage, can these rituals that they take
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part in, or maybe we take part in to get ready for a speech, can the ritualistic behavior
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It's so interesting because we tend to think of rituals as, you know, we're feeling stressed
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and so I'm going to do this ritual and it's going to calm me down.
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And many people report that that's how it feels, that they are nervous, then they do their
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ritual and then they feel calmer before they go on.
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But the problem is that rituals can get in the way as well, right?
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So in a couple of ways, one is if I always, before I go on stage, do the exact same ritual
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Well, if that gets disrupted, then I'm going to feel less ready to go, right?
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So if I've set myself up that I need to do this ritual and then I can't do the ritual,
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I might actually be worse off than if I never had it in the first place.
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Like when does a ritual become obsessive compulsive?
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And for people who have a tendency or prone to obsessive compulsiveness, can rituals do more
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So often we're engaged in a ritual in the service of something else.
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So if you think about even something like checking to see if you remember to lock the door of your
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house or apartment before you leave for the day, you're checking that in order to feel good
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about leaving so that you can go and engage in your day and have a good day at work.
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And sometimes what can happen is that we lose the link between we were doing the ritual in order
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Like I was doing the pre-show ritual in order to then go out on stage and perform well.
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And with obsessive compulsive disorder, what can happen is the ritual itself becomes the reward.
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We lose the link between I'm doing this in the service of something else, and it becomes
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So even with baseball players, you can see scouts sometimes say this person's batting
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ritual is so elaborate that it's not helping them get in the zone.
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It's actually interfering with them getting in the zone.
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Because after a thousand movements, it's like three pitches have gone by and they struck
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Or if you're checking the lock to your door of your house or apartment before you go to
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work, if you lose the link between checking and leaving, then you're just checking in order
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And then again, we can see, well, when that ritual starts to interfere with your goals and
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interfere with your life, that's when we can start to say, you know what, this has gone
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far beyond being useful and might actually be harmful.
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Have you done any research on how individuals develop these rituals for performance?
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Let's say like an athlete or a singer, you know, they have these different things that
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And then how do they get imbued with ritualistic meaning?
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What is so fascinating is that often people can't quite explain it.
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So sometimes if they use, for example, a song, they can explain the song.
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And you can even say like, well, this song came out in 2007, you know, when I was in college
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and that's why I started using it as part of my performance routine.
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But most of the movements that people have, they actually can't track.
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They're not sure why they tap twice instead of three times.
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Nobody told them at the time to tap two versus three times.
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And then they just become the way that we do things.
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I had an undergraduate student at Harvard who was an athlete who had a pre-performance
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And I asked her the question that you asked me, which is, well, does that ever interfere?
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And she said, well, no, I actually made it very elaborate so that it's almost impossible
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to do perfectly correctly so that if I don't perform well, I can blame it on the fact that
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And if I do perform well, I can say, well, I probably did the ritual perfectly.
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Now, if you think about the psychology, first off, it's genius.
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But if you think of the psychology of that, we're very carefully constructing our rituals
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and calibrating them to be exactly what we need right in that moment, even sometimes going
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too far in order to later be able to point to the ritual as the problem.
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She also couldn't really point to say, and the reason I started, you know, this step and
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in this step was because of this and this, it often just happens in the environment.
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And as we were saying earlier, even with our kids' bedtime rituals, often it's just, you
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know, you had the kid and then the book that was close to you was chicka chicka boom, you
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know, and so that became the book that you use rather than, well, we carefully surveyed every
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children's book in the world and, you know, discovered that this was the optimal book.
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It's often like a little kind of environmental stimulus that then gets built into things.
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I think what's interesting about that girl with her ritual, she was using ritual as ego
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So, you know, she failed as like, ah, I don't feel so bad because it wasn't my performance.
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But I can see that get in the way though, because how do you improve?
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You think, well, it wasn't because I did this thing wrong in my performance.
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If you, if you don't take it as a, maybe I should also practice more.
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We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
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So rituals can help us feel more calm during periods of stress and uncertainty can help
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increase our performance, but also rituals can hinder our performance if taken to an extreme.
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You also talk about research you've come across and done about how ritual can help us savor
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I think that a life of perfect habits, again, you'd be very, very healthy.
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And if, even if you think about just, you know, eating and drinking, what we need are
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And so, you know, if you may have heard of soylent as, you know, kind of a not very tasty,
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but has all the nutrients that we need to survive kind of food.
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And if you just have soylent and probably some water, you'd be perfectly healthy.
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And there's nothing wrong with, I mean, I want everybody to eat whatever they feel like
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But if you think about savoring life, it's, you could just eat the same thing every single
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day, but we can use food for much, much more than that.
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You know, a cake is not just a cake when it's a birthday cake.
00:25:48.740
Or liquid in a glass isn't just liquid in a glass.
00:25:51.740
When we raise it and clink glasses and say cheers or slancha or salute, you know, we're
00:25:57.060
using ritual to imbue boring, in a sense, boring things.
00:26:01.340
It's just calories and liquid, but we're using ritual to imbue it with something more than
00:26:06.440
that, like meaning or connection with other people, or literally going from age seven to
00:26:12.540
age eight with this birthday cake, with this number of candles that signifies that I'm
00:26:19.180
So they can help us, I think, move beyond being very utilitarian towards something that
00:26:25.340
really is much more rich and meaningful than just going through the motions.
00:26:33.340
We're just very busy and running around all the time.
00:26:36.720
And rituals can serve as a little reminder, like my three minutes with my coffee in the morning.
00:26:42.100
It's just a little reminder that I don't need to be sprinting everywhere at all times.
00:26:46.320
I can take even just one minute and savor the moment just briefly before I go back into the
00:26:54.520
So you can use food to create more emotion, more connection.
00:26:57.960
I think holiday traditions with food are, you see this, my kids, they are really gung-ho
00:27:03.620
about we got to eat these certain foods on these certain days and they get kind of upset
00:27:08.760
And so in my family, a couple of years ago, I started making corned beef and like potatoes
00:27:17.380
Cause I did that when I was growing up, started doing it.
00:27:20.160
I did it once and then it became a thing and they're like, yeah, they look forward to it.
00:27:24.900
And it's like, you know, I get the Walmart corned beef.
00:27:27.900
But now like we could, we didn't do this one year and they're like, they were really bummed
00:27:31.040
like, Oh, like something's off with the world because we didn't eat corned beef and cabbage
00:27:36.580
I do the same thing with, with my daughter and, and my wife.
00:27:39.820
And what's funny is neither of them like corned beef at all.
00:27:44.660
And in fact, that has nothing to do with the fact that we're going to make it every year.
00:27:48.960
And that, you know, in and of itself, it's like, wait, what are we doing by making this?
00:27:52.940
My daughter this year, she's eight and she tried a little piece of corned beef.
00:27:57.340
And then she said, very skillfully, she said, I really like this.
00:28:04.060
Which was just, you know, chef's kiss of, uh, social subtlety there.
00:28:08.960
But, uh, but, but again, next year, we're definitely going to do it.
00:28:13.080
So I remember my grandmother making that, you know, this, all this history and tradition
00:28:18.440
in these things that I can remember my grandmother without, but when you engage in these rituals,
00:28:25.280
I mean, literally the smell of things can bring you back to memory in a way that is hard
00:28:31.460
So we also, by enacting these rituals over time, we literally do connect ourselves more
00:28:39.040
And my daughter is never going to meet my grandmother who she's named after.
00:28:42.900
But when we make corned beef together, she is connected to her in a very different way
00:28:48.020
than if we don't enact some of those traditions in our family.
00:28:51.920
So those food traditions, those food rituals can help us engage in mental time travel.
00:28:58.720
And I mean, religion does the same, you know, I mean, the, the feeling of being connected
00:29:01.860
to a history of thousands of years, that's a really, really powerful feeling.
00:29:06.740
And I could just sit here and try to feel that way, but rituals really give me a very
00:29:11.580
different way of doing that, of saying people like me have been doing this and this has been
00:29:17.860
It's just a very different, rich connection that rituals can help us to get.
00:29:36.120
So like once a year, you're supposed to celebrate and say, you know, oh yeah, I still like you.
00:29:40.300
I guess Valentine's Day makes us also do that at least one time a year.
00:29:48.060
And when you ask couples, you know, is there anything, we rarely ask, do you have a ritual?
00:29:52.300
But we'll ask, you know, is there anything that you, the two of you do that's special,
00:29:56.600
that you make sure you always do it, that other couples don't really do?
00:30:02.360
Two thirds, three quarters of a couple say, you know what?
00:30:05.180
And there are things like, we always kiss in threes.
00:30:08.760
And one person that was like, we've been doing it for 22 years.
00:30:11.740
It's just, you know, they could have done two kisses or four, but for them it's three.
00:30:15.320
And this other couple said, before we eat, we clink our silverware together.
00:30:20.160
Just these little tiny, you know, forks are boring, but this couple made their silverware
00:30:25.880
into something really meaningful for themselves.
00:30:28.240
Speaking of savoring, kind of savoring the moment before they start to eat.
00:30:32.460
And we do see that couples who say they have a relationship ritual tend to report higher
00:30:37.440
relationship satisfaction than couples who say, we don't have anything like that.
00:30:45.460
If you find out that, like there's that, I think there's that Olivia Rodrigo song, Deja Vu.
00:30:53.480
You know, it's about this guy who's, you know, dated one girl, broke up with her,
00:30:57.500
And he's doing the exact same things that he did with his previous girlfriend.
00:31:02.600
You know, this girl thinks it's like a neat, unique thing to her, but she doesn't realize,
00:31:07.160
actually, this guy just does it to every girl that he's in a relationship with.
00:31:15.640
So when you break up with somebody, you might not like it, but they're definitely allowed
00:31:24.460
Again, you might not love it, but they're allowed to do that.
00:31:27.360
But they are not allowed to reuse your rituals with their new partner.
00:31:32.600
Like that is simply the rudest thing you could possibly do.
00:31:36.520
And people get so, even something like your pet nicknames.
00:31:39.960
Like if we were Shmooper Bear or whatever it was, you may not call your next partner.
00:31:45.620
You may marry them and spend the rest of your life with them.
00:31:50.340
And it's exactly as you said, because it's such a violation of what was special about
00:31:55.300
us that you would ever think to use that with somebody else.
00:31:59.080
And you also talk about that people have rituals around the breakup itself.
00:32:04.320
So when a relationship ends, how do I leave that relationship behind me?
00:32:09.640
And you see people often engaging in ritual to sort of say, let me put to bed the person
00:32:14.960
I was with whoever that was so that I can be a new person with this new person.
00:32:19.700
Some of the best, honestly, the most entertaining best examples of self-made rituals are the
00:32:26.560
ones that people do when they, especially when they are broken up with.
00:32:30.300
Now it's like delete the pictures on Instagram or whatever.
00:32:32.920
But in the old world, it's shockingly common that people would take all the pictures of themselves
00:32:37.380
with their ex and burn them, literally put them in a pile and burn them to say, like,
00:32:43.620
I'm eliminating you from everything of my life.
00:32:49.940
On the one hand, you can say, what an odd thing to do.
00:32:51.520
On the other hand, it sounds like, that's probably a good idea.
00:32:53.380
I wish I had tried that, you know, at least one time.
00:32:56.200
Because we're trying to use it to say demarcation.
00:33:02.520
Continuing on this idea of relationships and rituals, let's talk about family rituals.
00:33:06.080
We've mentioned a few throughout this conversation.
00:33:08.180
People have their own unique Thanksgiving rituals they might do, holiday rituals.
00:33:12.000
But you have this idea that there are people and families that are really good about making
00:33:25.780
You can think of the person in your family, every extended family.
00:33:32.580
And then an extended family has someone as well, who is the person who is responsible
00:33:41.340
They are the ones who call everyone or email everyone and say, what are we going to do for
00:33:48.580
What are we going to do for this holiday this year?
00:33:53.040
And if you look across time, you know, across decades, it's the same person every single year
00:34:00.360
Their siblings and family members sometimes find them annoying.
00:34:04.400
Why does this person keep bothering us with the birthday thing?
00:34:08.180
And yet, without the role that person plays, families start to disintegrate.
00:34:12.620
I mean, is a family a collection of random individuals or is a family a family?
00:34:18.300
And just like any relationship, including romantic relationships, they require work.
00:34:25.960
Every relationship, you have to put something into it to keep it healthy and sustained.
00:34:30.880
And these kin keepers who do this enormous amount of emotional work for families are really
00:34:35.580
the glue in terms of keeping a family a family.
00:34:40.800
You know, people say, I never would have seen my aunts and uncles unless we'd had these
00:34:46.940
Well, they should thank whoever the kin keeper was in that generation because they're the ones
00:34:52.260
They're the ones that gave you an extended family through doing a huge amount of work
00:34:57.340
on the back end to make sure everybody came together.
00:35:00.300
Yeah, I know in my family, on my mother's side, we got together quite often growing up
00:35:08.060
It was because my grandfather had this ranch in New Mexico and we would go there for Thanksgiving.
00:35:13.960
But then once my grandpa got too old and he had to sell the ranch, the family get-togethers
00:35:22.780
And really, the last time my extended family got together was at his funeral.
00:35:32.380
And you need somebody to replace that person somehow or it's very, very difficult to keep
00:35:39.020
Also, by the way, genius is when parents are like, I never see my kids anymore, they're
00:35:47.840
If you have the cash, the best way to make your kids and then your grandkids visit you
00:35:51.980
is to live somewhere awesome so that they feel like visiting you anyway.
00:35:56.000
I don't have necessarily the cash to buy 10 houses all over the place, but it does seem
00:36:02.600
I think what helped my grandfather be in the kin keeper was that his place in New Mexico,
00:36:11.980
I mean, at least the grandkids wanted to go there.
00:36:14.560
It's harder to entice people to come to a gathering and say the regular suburbs than
00:36:21.940
Have you done any research on how people combine family traditions when they get married?
00:36:27.340
It is a source of enormous conflict for many, many couples.
00:36:32.100
The one case, of course, is when people of different faiths marry, and then you need to
00:36:38.000
combine not just family rituals, but also religious rituals.
00:36:45.320
But even in the absence of religious differences, there's just cultural differences and there's
00:36:52.180
So, you know, on Thanksgiving, if my family always ate at four and yours ate at two, do
00:37:00.900
Or do we do four, but we make sure that we do another thing that your family did?
00:37:05.740
And what you see couples doing as they develop is they very, very often take some from one
00:37:11.960
family, some from another family, and then they develop their own over time.
00:37:16.660
That's the most common pattern, which means you're both honoring the past and keeping things
00:37:22.880
that were important and keeping that connection.
00:37:25.360
And you're also constantly, just like in all these domains of life, freelancing and creating
00:37:30.140
your own that have special meaning for you, giving them to your kids, and then they're
00:37:34.280
going to do the same thing in the next generation.
00:37:36.620
How do you know when it's time to discard a family tradition?
00:37:41.280
For me, it's if people, as you said, if people stop showing up, you probably should try
00:37:47.060
You know, I think if there's too much conflict around it or people are just too resistant
00:37:52.020
to doing it, you can't force people to do anything, right?
00:37:55.240
So you have to create things that are going to be meaningful enough that people are going
00:38:03.320
My hometown puts on this really big 4th of July parade.
00:38:06.400
We went to it every single 4th of July when I was a kid.
00:38:10.120
And then even after I got married, my siblings got married, we'd still go to it.
00:38:14.580
And the thing is, it's the exact same thing for 30 plus years.
00:38:21.920
It's usually just advertisements for the local businesses on these floats.
00:38:32.360
You know, my brother-in-law would have to get out there at six o'clock in the morning to
00:38:37.880
And you had to sit at this thing for like two and a half hours, three hours.
00:38:45.600
We got to go to the Liberty Fest 4th of July parade in Edmond, Oklahoma.
00:38:49.480
And I remember one year, my wife and I were just like, we don't want to do this anymore.
00:38:56.700
And then everyone else was like, yeah, actually, you know what?
00:39:03.900
I mean, we still get together on 4th of July, but we do other things.
00:39:06.980
But it's just funny because we kept doing this tradition of going to the parade year
00:39:11.200
after year because that's what the tradition was.
00:39:15.780
We used to go to, when I was a kid, to the St. Patrick's Day parade in Boston.
00:39:19.740
And at some point when I was a kid, I think my parents realized that mainly what it was
00:39:24.520
was super drunk college students just shouting and throwing stuff around.
00:39:44.980
This is a case where, not to overclaim, but really if you look at any faith or any culture,
00:39:58.400
Even the color that is used in some cultures, you wear black.
00:40:09.500
There's a decided upon ceremony that helps us get through grief.
00:40:13.580
And those ceremonies are incredibly important for people in bringing their family together,
00:40:19.620
giving them social support, connecting them with their faith.
00:40:24.320
And also what we see is people, again, are freelancing their own little rituals.
00:40:34.160
They say, well, you know, actually, another thing that I did was I listened to my mom's
00:40:37.580
favorite song every morning on the way to work for a year.
00:40:41.060
There's no 2,000-year-old text that says, listen to your mom's favorite song, you know,
00:40:49.420
Well, the funeral is one day, and now we're still grieving.
00:40:53.580
And so people come up with their own little rituals, not, you know, candles and people in
00:40:58.320
robes rituals, but their own little practices to try to honor the person that they lost.
00:41:03.640
Again, these rituals are helping with the stress of losing somebody.
00:41:07.580
It's a process, you know, if I do these things, even though I'm feeling bad, I can do these
00:41:15.340
Grief is such a complicated series of emotions.
00:41:18.040
It's not just one emotion, but one of the key predictors of grief is feeling a lack of
00:41:24.020
control because this terrible thing happened that you absolutely did not want to happen,
00:41:29.760
and you were powerless to stop it from happening.
00:41:32.620
And that loss of control is in and of itself a predictor of the intensity of your grief,
00:41:38.800
because as we discussed earlier, we do not like to feel that we don't have control,
00:41:43.300
especially over the things that are most important to us.
00:41:46.600
And researchers have suggested that rituals in the face of grief,
00:41:50.880
they're orderly practiced events that we've inherited, that they might be also part of
00:41:56.600
restoring a little bit of a sense of control in these moments where we really feel out of
00:42:02.860
So we've been talking about, you know, people creating their own DIY version of a ritual.
00:42:08.100
Do you have any advice on how people can create their own rituals?
00:42:12.460
You know, when should they create a ritual for something?
00:42:17.360
Or do we just have like an intuitive sense on how to do this already?
00:42:21.020
The first step that I always suggest people do is actually to take an inventory of their
00:42:25.980
current rituals, because even if you're someone who thinks I don't do these, you know, I'm
00:42:31.520
not a new agey millennial or whatever you might think, you absolutely are doing them in various
00:42:38.580
And if you don't think you're doing them, you can ask your significant other, you can ask your
00:42:44.380
kids, you can ask your co-workers, do I do anything?
00:42:47.540
And they'll be happy to tell you all of the quirky things that you're up to.
00:42:51.540
And I think even before thinking about adding anything, because, you know, if I said, you know what's
00:42:58.740
It's like, well, thanks for the advice, but I don't have, you know, six hours every day to
00:43:04.660
I do think actually recognizing where you already have them and then owning them a little bit
00:43:09.380
more, you know, recognizing that these are little practices, recognizing what you and your
00:43:13.760
spouse do when you say goodbye in the morning, that in and of itself can already be a start
00:43:19.020
on seeing the important roles that rituals are playing in your life.
00:43:23.060
Well, Michael, this has been a great conversation.
00:43:24.460
Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
00:43:30.780
So if you go to the website, just click quiz and it's a very quick quiz, but we ask you about
00:43:37.220
Speaking of doing an inventory that kind of tells you which domains are you high and low on
00:43:42.040
and where might you think about trying some different things.
00:43:44.980
Well, Michael Norton, thanks so much for your time.
00:43:50.440
He's the author of the book, The Ritual Effect.
00:43:52.220
It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.
00:43:54.480
You can find more information about his work at his website, michaelnorton.com.
00:43:57.780
Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash everyday rituals.
00:44:10.620
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast.
00:44:13.560
The Art of Manly's website has been around for over 16 years now and the podcast for over
00:44:17.440
10, and they both have always had one aim, to help men take action, to improve every area
00:44:22.640
of their lives, to become better friends, citizens, husbands, and fathers, better men.
00:44:28.420
If you've gotten something out of the AOM podcast, please consider giving back by leaving a review
00:44:34.220
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00:44:38.080
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