Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Science of Rituals & How They Can Transform Our Health, Happiness and Relationships with Professor Michael Norton #452

Episode Date: May 14, 2024

Have you ever thought about the role that rituals play in our health and wellbeing? Whether it's a morning routine, a pre-game warmup, or a cultural tradition, rituals can provide us with structure, meaning, and connection.   Today’s guest is Professor Michael Norton, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and author of the brand new book, The Ritual Effect: The Transformative Power of Our Everyday Actions, which delves into the science and psychology behind, why turning everyday habits into rituals can improve our work, our relationships and our lives.   In this conversation, Michael and I explore the fascinating world of rituals and how they impact on our mental and physical health. We discuss the distinction between rituals and routines, why they can be really helpful in making our habits stick over the long term and how, by providing order and structure, they can help us manage overwhelm and stress.   We also explore how rituals foster community and connection, how elite athletes like Serena Williams use rituals to enhance performance and mental preparation, and how team rituals, like the New Zealand rugby team’s iconic Hakka, are a great example of how ritual behaviours boost togetherness and collective identity.    Michael and I also share some of our own personal rituals  - including the preparation rituals I go through each week to prepare for this podcast. And, we also acknowledge that rituals can become problematic if taken to an extreme and the importance of maintaining a healthy relationship with them, using them as tools for self-improvement rather than allowing them to be in control of us.   Ultimately, this is a conversation that offers a compelling case for the power of rituals in enhancing our health and happiness. Whether you're an athlete striving for peak performance, or simply someone looking to live a more fulfilled life, I think you’ll find that understanding the "ritual effect" can be truly transformative. Find out more about my NEW Journal here https://drchatterjee.com/journal Thanks to our sponsors: https://calm.com/livemore https://drinkag1.com/livemore Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/452 DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

In the domain of well-being, we'd like to feel that we're making progress, so we use things that we can count, then we can say it's more or less. But what about the fuzzier things that we don't have good metrics on? Do we lose sight of them because we can't measure them, instead of thinking, actually, I really need to invest in that? Hey guys, how you doing? Hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More. Have you ever thought about the role that rituals play in our health and well-being? Whether it's a morning routine, a pre-game warm-up, or a cultural tradition, rituals can provide us with structure, meaning, and connection. Today's guest is Professor Michael Norton, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and author of the brand new book, The Ritual Effect,

The Transformative Power of Our Everyday Actions, which delves into the science and psychology behind why turning everyday habits into rituals can improve our work, our relationships, and our wider lives. In this conversation, Michael and I explore the fascinating world of rituals and how they impact on our mental and physical health. We discuss the distinction between rituals and routines, why they can be really helpful in making our habits stick over the long term, and how, by providing order and structure, they can help us manage overwhelm and stress. We also explore how rituals foster community and connection, how elite athletes like Serena Williams used rituals to enhance performance and

mental preparation, and how team rituals like the New Zealand rugby team's iconic hacker are a great example of how ritual behaviours boost togetherness and collective identity. Michael and I also share some of our own personal rituals, including the preparation ritual I go through each week to prepare for this podcast. And we also acknowledge that rituals can become problematic if taken to an extreme, and the importance of maintaining a healthy relationship with them, using them as tools for self-improvement, rather than allowing them to be in control of us. Ultimately, this is a conversation that offers a compelling case for the power of rituals in enhancing our health and

happiness. Whether you're an athlete striving for peak performance or simply someone who is looking to live a more fulfilled life, I think you'll find that understanding the ritual effect can be truly transformative. A lot of people listen to this show because they want to improve their health. You've written this fantastic new book, The Ritual Effect. In your opinion, how do rituals help us improve our health? I think one of the key things with rituals is that they provoke a huge range of emotions. So we did this research a few years ago. We ended up calling it emo diversity, which was a shame

because people think emo like music, but really it's just this idea. It's like biodiversity almost, but with emotions. So we tried to show that it's true. We all want to be happy, but we also want to have a rich emotional life. Sometimes sadness is good. We grow when we're sad. We learn things when we're afraid. And so the idea was that when you have this mix of emotions, that can actually be very good for your wellbeing.

And one of the things that rituals do for us is they're like a shortcut to many, many different emotions in life. Marriages and funerals, very different emotions that we're getting from those kinds of rituals. Something like awe, which is an amazing emotion that we can get. Again, we can't get that easily,

but rituals are one of the ways we unlock it. So for me, they're just this wonderful opportunity to unlock many, many different emotions in our lives. Yeah. If we think about health habits that people are trying to introduce into their lives, let's say exercise, movement, meditation, journaling, you know, whatever it might be,

do you think ritual or ritualizing those practices can help people stick with them for longer? You know, it's funny. I was talking to some elite runners the other week about their rituals. First off, if you ask any elite person who does anything, singer, athlete, whatever, they will almost always have really, really elaborate, fascinating rituals that they do before, during, after their performances. And one of the things they all talked about was their shoe tying. Very, very specific, very elaborate shoe tying. Now, shoe tying is probably the most boring thing we do. I mean, you know, put your shoes on, tie the laces, and then, you know, you're off to go.

But they do it almost as a, it's almost like a religious ceremony that they do before they run. And one of the things it does is it makes them feel that they're ready to go. So when you have these kinds of, it's left foot, then tie it twice, then right foot, then very, very funny. What they do with the socks, which socks,

all this kind of stuff that really gets into it. Do they do that for practice or just for the main events, the main events, the main A race of the year or every time they go out? Amazing. They often have littler ones for practice and then really a lot of ones for races. So, and we see that in a lot of domains that you amp up your level of ritual as the stress increases. Yeah. But they really do say that when they're doing that ritual, that is a thing that gets them in the place they need to be to go and do it. And I'm not an elite runner, unfortunately. Most people are not.

But there is something to that where when you have the ritual to get you going, it does make you feel now I'm at the moment when I can go and do that thing. Yeah. When I think about that, I think about the way I have often described morning routines to people. Why I believe, certainly, that for many people a morning routine, or dare I say it, a morning ritual, might be really beneficial because it grounds you. It means that no matter what is going on out there in the world, all of the uncontrollables, there's something that you can control what you do for the first 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes each morning. And I feel that that gives you a sense of control so that whatever you need to go and do that day, you're better prepared. Maybe a bit like those runners. Yeah. I mean,

we're in many different ways. We use these little things to try to get us to a place we want to go. It can be many different emotions that we're unlocking when we're engaged in rituals. But one of the key ones is this sense of control that you're talking about where life is chaotic. You know, if you have kids, the morning is chaotic. The world is chaotic. People will often go through their morning. I would call them rituals, but we can chat about the difference between routines and rituals in order to just get to a place where they feel that they're ready to leave the house

without being completely stressed out of their minds. Or at the end of the day, people have their bedtime rituals as well, where they're trying to, the opposite in a sense, they're trying to wind down from all the stress of the day so that they can actually get to sleep yeah i've been stuck in your book for the last 48 hours there's so many interesting stories in it and i think this idea of rituals is fascinating because there are annual rituals things like christmas if you live in the UK or US, I guess it's big, whether you're

Christian or not, actually it's a big cultural celebration. I guess if you lived in certain countries, Ramadan each year for one month where everyone around you is engaging in a communal practice of fasting. These are all rituals that religion have given us for many, many years. We've also talking about perhaps daily morning rituals that we might engage in. So there's a big variety, isn't there? But I guess it's a wider point for me, which is as many societies are becoming less religious

and more secular, are we losing important rituals or are we inventing new ones to replace them? I think a little bit of both actually. So you can think of the religious or cultural ones that are often received or inherited. Our parents teach us how to do it or our faith teaches us how to do it. Then there are the ones that we come up with ourselves as well, our little morning ritual that we might do. But we also see people inventing new ones at a cultural level. So one of my favorite examples is Burning Man, which is if you really break down what happens at Burning Man, a group of like-minded people do a pilgrimage to the desert where they

gather, sometimes take some substances, for example, together for a while. There's music. There's a lot of communal activity. At the end, there's a giant wooden thing that they burn. And that's the end of the, if you didn't think it was Burning Man, it can sound like a religious ceremony. So we often actually are creating, they don't have the faith element that other rituals might have, but they have many of the other elements as well. So it's almost as though when we lose some of them, we don't just say goodbye. We either create new ones at a cultural level, or we come up with these ones in our own lives or in our own groups or in our own families. Yeah. Or could it be, if we look across society and see these growing rates of

mental health problems, of course, there's many different reasons for that. And I'm not here to either be pro-religion or anti-religion. I understand that religion serves a very important role for many people. For others, it doesn't. But I do wonder sometimes what these religions often gave us was a structure, a framework on how we should live our lives. Let's say every Sunday you do this, or on the Jewish Sabbath you do this, whatever it might be, you have this framework. And as we become more secular, could it be that the loss of some of

these cultural rituals is perhaps making us feel a bit lost and rudderless in this kind of world where there are endless things that we could be doing. I think that's probably right. You know, one of the funniest examples we encountered in the research on the West Coast of the US, there's this thing called the Seattle Atheist Church, which kind of is hard to parse because atheistists and church don't usually go together, but you can see exactly what they've done. So they've said, what's good about church for them? They don't, they happen to not believe in a higher power. So they're atheists, but at the same time, they recognize there's amazingly good things about religious gatherings.

They bond you together with other people. They literally get you out of the house. They give you an excuse to get out of the house and gather, which when you're struggling with depression, that's a big ask. This is something that gets you there with people who care about you, who share similar values. And at this church, they actually go around and share how they are doing in order to get social and emotional support. So they are, it's true, lacking the faith in a god or god, but they're getting all the other benefits of it because they recognize so many benefits from these kinds of gatherings. Yeah, it's fascinating. As you were describing that story, I was taken back to my youth. I used to be a mega Bon Jovi fan back in the day. So sorry. And I remember as a teenager, maybe, I don't know, 16, 17, maybe, I can't remember when now,

being at a big Bon Jovi concert in a stadium. And at the start of Lay Your Hands On Me, John would come on stage and he would say, welcome to Johnny's Church of Rock and Roll, which I thought was the coolest thing at the time. But I think it speaks to this idea that these, you know, we gather together in community to, you know, to bond, to experience something together. It has real value, doesn't it? But I guess it speaks to this wider idea as to what is a ritual, because you could argue that, well, going to a concert is going to a concert, right? Is that a ritual? You know, having a morning routine where let's say you, I don't know, you work out for five minutes when you write in your journal. Is that a habit? Is it routine? Is it a ritual? Does it even matter? So let's sort of really establish

how you think about rituals. What's the definition of a ritual? Maybe it's a good place to start. Yeah, I think about rituals and routines as routines and habits are kind of things that we do in order to get them done. We kind of have to cross them off our list. The example I always use, even though it's silly, is brushing your teeth and showering. Which order you do those in? Do you have an order, by the way? Do you brush and then shower or shower and then brush your teeth? I would brush my teeth and then shower. And how would you feel if I said, hey, tomorrow, can you flip the order of those two and do it in the opposite way? Yeah, no problem. If I had to flip the order.

Totally fascinating. First off, half of people in the world brush and then shower, and half shower and then brush. So humans have not decided on the optimal order. But more importantly, half of people are like you. They say, why would I care? I got to brush my teeth. I got to shower. I don't care the order. And half of people will say, I'd rather not. And I say, really, why? And they say, well, I don't like it. I would feel weird. I would feel uncomfortable. I wouldn't feel ready to start my day.

And if you think about kind of a habit versus a ritual, a habit is really these things. I got to brush my teeth, got to shower, order doesn't matter. As soon as you start caring about how, exactly how things are done, not just what you're doing, but how you do it, that's when they start to move toward being a little ritualistic. Not like people in robes and candles chanting and that kind of ritual, that's further away. But it is this sense of when you do it the way you want to do it, it provokes more meaning and more emotion. And we know that because if it gets disrupted is when you start to feel off. So they

both help us in the sense, if I can do my morning ritual, I feel good. And if it gets interrupted, I feel bad. Whereas if it's my habit, if they get interrupted, I can just do the other one later. And it's not that big of a deal to me. Yeah. It's an interesting example that, okay, so do you brush first and then shower, or do you shower first and then brush? By the way, some people do them at the same time, I should say, which I find very disturbing, but that's just a personal opinion. That's personal. That's not your research. Exactly. It's a personal opinion.

That's not a scientific fact, yeah. So when I've thought about rituals or even written about rituals in the past, I've always felt that they are habits or routines which have meaning. Okay. So it's not necessarily the what, it's the how, right? And so, for example, and I've spoken about this many times, I do like to have a little morning ritual. Okay. It works for me. It works for my family. It's something i've put into place since i had young kids who would get up early and i realized that i'm a better human being when i have some time to myself before the rest of the family erupt literally we often insert them in times of chaos

i mean we well there you go we almost say i need to do something everything's out of control let me just try this before everybody wakes up and get a little handle on it. Yeah, I love that because I can't now honestly say I can remember when it started, but that kind of rings true. Like if I didn't get up and nourish myself in some way, I didn't feel I was the best dad or husband or human being, frankly, right? So my morning routine, which at the moment encompasses a few things like breath work and coffee, and I'm very ritualistic with how I make coffee. And we can talk about tea ceremonies and things in a moment. But I just want to compare that to this brushing and showering because to me, at least, I don't feel the same thing. So I do my morning routine. I do my morning ritual because I like what it says about who I am. It

says to me that no matter what's going on in the world, I've found at least 10 minutes to nourish myself each day. I feel I've done a few things that are really good for me first thing in the morning. So I feel calmer, more present, more productive. If I'm traveling and I can't do it though, I'm okay still, but I would still call it a ritual. So when I hear you saying, if you are someone who would feel slightly off if the order is flipped regarding you brushing your teeth and showering, could you not argue that that's a little problematic? So the dark side of rituals where they start to control us? Do you see what I'm getting at? I do. Yeah. So help me understand that. Yeah. I think first is, for you, it sounds like coffee is a

big part of it. And you said breathing as well is a part of your morning ritual? Yeah. So look, I have these three M's, mindfulness, movement, and mindset. At the moment, it's this kind of breathwork meditation for 10 minutes. I then come into my kitchen. I weigh out my coffee, right? It's very, you know, I don't just shove instant in and pour hot water in. It's, you know, I'm very intentional about it. Whilst it's brewing for five minutes, I'll do a little workout in my pajamas for five minutes. And then what I do is I have the coffee

just the way I like it and I drink it whilst writing in my journal. Okay, so it's this little routine that, you know, depending on what's going on in my life at the moment probably takes around 20 minutes or so. So that's just to give you a bit more color there in case it's helpful. Yeah. And I think for some people listening, they would say, hey, that sounds like kind of what I do, or that sounds like that would work. That feels like a nice sequence of events to get you to where you want to be. And other people would say, I don't like coffee or I don't like breathing exercises.

And so they might use something completely different yeah no problem which is fascinating to me in and of itself that we freelance all the time with what we do but amazingly for some people it is like the order in which they brush their teeth and shower that's the thing that gets them that same feeling that you get from really a more elaborate ritual that you're doing that has more components to it. But we see almost the base case is like, what is the smallest sequence of events that we can start to say that's moved to be something, as you said, that has more meaning in it than just actions. And even something as silly as the order in which we do these kinds of tasks already starts to get us down that path. these kinds of tasks already starts to get us down that path. But we also want to see,

because we're scientists, like what is the minimal possible base case of something being a tiny bit ritualistic? And then we build from there to say, my gosh, look at all these layers, these personal layers, these religious layers, these cultural layers, these family layers that get layered on top of it. Yeah. It's so interesting to me, interesting to me this, where a habit ends and a ritual begins. Completely. I would say for me, and I've seen this with many patients over the years, that if the habit becomes more ritualistic, so there is an attached meaning to it in some way,

I feel it helps them stick with that behavior for longer. It's not just something I do. Me doing it says something about me and who I am. I certainly think that's the case for me. Is there any research showing that turning a habit into a ritual, showing that turning a habit into a ritual, let's think about it through the lens of health and well-being, does it make it more likely that you can stick with your new habits or your new behaviors in the long term if you sprinkle on a bit of ritual on top? Yeah, one of my favorite studies in the last little while on exercise is by Katie Milkman. Oh yeah. Who's at Wharton, who's just does amazing research, but she has this thing called temptation bundling, which is in and of itself, just a great name for anything. But what she does

is she wants people to exercise. People say, I want to exercise more, but I can't bring myself to the gym because I've got stuff to do. And I lose the motive, just like all of us humans. And so what she does is she says, well, here's how it works. Anytime you go to the gym because I've got stuff to do and I lose the motive, just like all of us humans. And so what she does is she says, well, here's how it works. Anytime you go to the gym, you can watch or listen to your trashiest preference, like the worst show, the worst pot, whatever it might be, your guilty pleasure, but you can only do it when you're at the gym exercising. You can almost even think you can just leave the thing there and only be able to access that when you're there. And the idea there is what you're doing is you're building this, you know,

you might have a ritual where you listen to your favorite podcast every morning, but you could do it wherever you want. She's saying, no, no. If you're gonna have your ritual of listening to your podcast every morning, you can only enact that when you're at the gym exercising. So it is this case of

trying to layer on a ritual that we already have onto a habit that we're trying to do. And she shows in the research that actually does help people stick with it for longer because they've paired something else meaningful with a habit that doesn't necessarily have meaning for them quite yet. So there's an extra reward element. So let's say you're at the gym, you're on a treadmill or a bike, whatever you like to do, and you're associating being at the gym with something maybe you struggle to motivate yourself to go and do with your favorite trashy soap opera that perhaps you wouldn't watch at home. So yeah, so it's that reward. It's the reward part of the habit loop. For sure. And you get this kind of identity with it as well. Like,

this is my favorite show and I'm going to pair it with this habit that is not my favorite habit at all and see if I can link them together so that I can enact it even more. So does that make it a ritual, would you say? I think it works best for people who are in a sense taking a ritual that they have. In other words, this is my favorite show and I watch it at this time every week. You know, we all have our favorite things that we do. Many people do have a favorite podcast they listen to every morning. That's kind of their breathing exercise or their coffee making. And so the idea is that you import that ritual onto something else that's a dry habit and see if you can pull some of the meaning

of the ritual onto the habit and link them together in a way that makes you hopefully keep going a little bit longer. If someone's listening to us, Michael, and they're saying, okay, look, let's pick a habit. I don't know. I mean, coffee's not a great one because people who drink coffee

generally don't need motivation to make coffee or buy coffee, right? So, but let's say, I don't know, let's say journaling, for example. Let's say someone has heard about the many benefits of journaling and they just can't get it going. And they're thinking, you know, I know I keep hearing about this journaling thing they just can't get it going. And they're thinking, you know, I know I keep hearing about this journaling thing. I've got a journal sitting there or someone gifted to me, but I'm not in the habit of doing it. I know your book's not on habit change per se. It's more about rituals. But I wonder, is there anything you can advise that person to do to try and sprinkle a bit of ritual magic on top of it,

let's say for the next seven days, to see if it changes their relationship with it? Yeah, no, I love this. I think I was talking to a journalist a couple of weeks ago who was saying, I don't have any rituals. And I was a skeptic in rituals too. So that resonates with me. Like, what is this guy talking about this ritual stuff? But she said, I don't have any rituals at all. And I said, oh, well, let's, you know, let's explore that a little bit. And she said, well, look, I have coffee every

morning, but I'm just having coffee. There's nothing to it. And she said, well, how would you help me make it a ritual according to your research? And I said, well, I don't know you that well, but I'll give you some examples of what other people, you know, have done. And I said, well, I don't know you that well, but I'll give you some examples of what other people have done. And I said, for example, some people, the coffee or tea that they drink has an emotional tag to it. It's what their grandmother drank or their grandfather drank. And then I said, other people, the mug that they use has meaning to them. It's a family mug or it's something they made it themselves, for example. And she cut me off and she said, oh, my God, I just realized I use the same mug every morning.

It's a mug that I got with my daughter when we were seeing elephant seals giving birth. And I use the same mug every morning since then. And last week, my husband brought me in a different mug and I made him take it away and bring it back in the right mug. So what has she done? She's taken this, it's coffee.

I mean, it's literally, you can think about it, it's liquid that you drink. It's the most boring, you know, I mean, if you really boil it down and she's built onto it unknowingly in a sense, until you really start to think about what you're doing, all of this extra meaning and extra emotion into it. And so even the most mundane little things that we do, we find ways to build ritual into it. So for journaling, for example, one of the first things I always encourage people to do is think about what are you already doing when you're getting into it? Even something like the pen that you use can be very, very important, right? What is the pen?

Which pen are you using? Do you use the same pen all the time? It's almost like a magic lucky object that you can use. And we see people saying, you know what? What I do is whenever I journal, I always drink this. I sit there, I do this. Then I have this pen and then I write for exactly this long. And they're trying to build it into not just,

I have to put words on paper because that's very boring. That's like liquid in a cup. But I'm journaling. You know, I'm expressing something about myself through how I'm doing it. And then we see people start to build more meaning into it. Yeah. It could also be, I guess, if let's say the habit is meditation, lighting a candle just before you do it, for example, if that appeals to you, that also is potentially ritualizing the practice of meditation yep and you get there you get also a visual you get a sensory experience because there's flame

there's smell and things like humans use candles across an insane variety of rituals actually it's one of our favorite things is to use fire with ritual. And we are in a sense, it's got nothing to do with it. Like you can meditate without a flame. You can have a birthday cake without a flame also, but we've decided, no, let's build this into it to make it more than it actually is. Yeah. There's this, I can't remember which chapter it is in your book. There's this gorgeous section where you write about, I don't know if she's called Anne, a lady just looking around in her kitchen for candles. But I think you paint two scenarios. One is where the lights have suddenly gone off, she can't see. So of course, it makes sense that she's looking and trying to find the matches in the candle to give her light. But you then contrast it with the same situation, but all the lights are on.

So she doesn't need to do it. There's already light there, but she's probably doing it. Is that right? Am I remembering it correctly? That's exactly right. Yeah. We, our minds, if someone's doing a behavior that doesn't seem to have a purpose,

our minds immediately start to think why. Why is that happening? Because if it's dark and she lights a candle, we're done. We say, oh, that's for light. If it's light and she lights a candle, we say, hmm, it's not for light. And then our minds are built. So we start circling around. Why would she be doing that? Why would she be doing that? And one of the reasons that we come up with, it must have a deeper purpose or meaning. It's something that we're actually very prone to do as humans is try to figure out what's going on and attribute meaning to it.

And then we say, maybe it's a religious ceremony. Maybe it's a birthday. It must be something other than just light. What is it? Let's pursue. There's a section in the book which I noted down, right? Because for me, it really spoke to such an important point that I often think is getting missed when we talk about

health or happiness. If you don't mind, I just want to read to you a section from your book. Is it always a mistake to fail to execute on your good habits or is the experience of savoring a decadent dessert simply a different kind of success. Michael, I love that. I absolutely love that. Can you explain what you meant when you wrote those words? Just taking a quick break to give a shout out to the mental wellness app Calm. Now do you ever feel like your brain is on overdrive and your mind is constantly racing? The plans, worries and to-do lists can often feel never-ending. Well Calm can help your mind take a break from the noise by softening anxiety symptoms in the moment and helping you cope with day-to-day stresses.

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vitamin D and K2 and five free travel packs with their first order. But until the end of January, they are doubling the five free travel packs to 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. That's drinkag1.com forward slash live more. That's drinkag1.com forward slash live more. I thought about a person, I mean, let me say I am very pro habit. I wish I had better habits. We all should have good, healthy habits, just to be very, very clear. At the same time, if I think about,

imagine starting today, you had perfect habits for the next. At the same time, if I think about, imagine starting today, you had perfect habits for the next 40 years. You know, you got up at the same time every day, you exercise, you did everything exactly as you wanted to do. If you ask people, what kind of life would that be? They say, well, I would definitely be very healthy for sure, but I'm not sure that would have been a rich and interesting life. Or if you ask people, imagine being married to someone who has completely rigid habits that they execute the same way every single day forever. Does that sound like a fun relationship?

Or does that sound like a problem? And people say, yeah, no, I guess they'd be healthy. But I want to mix it up. I want to travel. I want to do all these other different things. And so it really started to occur to me that for sure good habits are good, but is that the life that we wanna lead more broadly? If we look back at our life,

do we say I'm so happy that I always ran at 6 a.m. or do we say I'm so happy I had a range and variety of experiences in my life? And I do think sometimes rituals are the thing that remind us to do more than just habits. And that's true, both of our own private rituals that we come up with, but even cultural rituals you can think about, you know, it just gets to be every day is the same. We do the thing, we go to work, we just hum drum over and over. Culture gives us punctuated things. They say, not today.

Today is Christmas. And on Christmas, you do something very, very different. For example, you have to gather with family on Christmas, whether you like it or not, but they're telling us family's important. You got to take some time for it. So that day, maybe we can't do all of our habits exactly the way we usually do, but I think that's a positive thing. So both culturally, we get these punctuations to remind us. If you think of marriage, you know, you have a wedding that's one day and then you're married for 50 years. What do you do all the other days? Well, we have Valentine's day. We have anniversaries. We punctuate them with, Hey, don't forget this person's really important. You should celebrate this relationship. They do serve as reminders to do more than just go through the

motion. We have this phrase going through the motions and it's a very negative phrase. Rituals are always more than just going through the motions, and it's a very negative phrase. Rituals are always more than just going through the motions. Yeah, thank you for explaining that. I mean, I think the point about this phrase that really speaks to me is I think sometimes with science, we have reduced things down so much and we draw conclusions that aren't actually that relevant in real life some of the time. And I'll explain what I mean by that. So we could, for example, look at all of the blue zones,

these areas around the world where people are living to a ripe old age, apparently in really good health and with high levels of happiness as well. And Dan Boatman will write about this in his books, about that these guys drink coffee. They have probably a glass of wine every evening in some of them. And then so often the conclusion is, I would say, in the West, is that, oh, well, coffee is good for you then because of that. You know, there were lots of correlation

studies showing some benefits of coffee consumption. However, I really feel that if you're overly stressed and you're overly committed and you're drinking coffee to keep you going so you can keep up with that workload, I'm just not sure that the research on the blue zones is relevant for you. Your nervous system is fried. You're in a completely different state. You're not using it as a way of bonding. It's not necessarily a ritual for you. You're literally grabbing it as you run to the train. You're just going, yeah, get me a latte takeaway. And again, no judgment of people doing that, but it's not the same thing, right? If you're drinking alcohol to numb your loneliness at night by yourself, it's not the same thing as in the

blue zones where you're doing it at 5 p.m. in community and when it's just half a glass. There is something about the meaning of what we do that is so relevant to the impact it has on us. I completely agree. And I think about this a lot. I mean, there's this phrase, the Mediterranean diet, and what we take from that is the diet part, but it could be the Mediterranean that's causing it. So I think we do try to boil it down into some actionable steps that we can take in our lives. And as you said, those can be really beneficial and often the science supports that as well, but it doesn't mean that's the whole steps that we can take in our lives. And as you said, those can be really beneficial. And often the science supports that as well, but it doesn't mean that's the whole thing that's happening.

I used to study how people could spend their money to be happier. And one of the things that we've found very robustly is that you tend to be happier when you spend money on other people than when you spend it on yourself. Not every single time, but on average, spending on others makes you happier than yourself. And that could be giving to charity. It could be giving to a homeless person. It could be buying a gift for a friend, treating your mom to lunch, whatever it might be,

just outward instead of inward. And of course, it's not really the money that's the thing. It's the intention that you have. You know, you use the money to enact the intention, but what really matters is, and we show this in the research, you feel like you're having a positive impact on somebody else in the world. You don't need money to do that, right? So it's not that you should take your bank account and start divvying it up into 25 and all this kind of stuff. It's that the intention really matters. And so even with the research that we've done, sometimes the practical advice, it's true, but there's a larger

thing surrounding it, which is, do you have meaning in your life? Are you having an impact on the people you care about? Or are you just focused on yourself all the time? Yeah. It also makes you think about there's a cost to everything we do. I think I spoke about this about six months ago on one of my podcasts, but this idea that there's only so much time that you have in your day. And yes, you could argue, and it's not you could argue,

it is true that physical activity is exceptionally good for your short-term and long-term health. But so are relationships. And so in your limited time, if you're going off for a two-hour walk by yourself, you also have to factor in, well, what else are you not doing in that time? Maybe it's time with your kids. Maybe it's time with your wife or your husband or your partner. And yeah, for me, it's always about looking at these things holistically and taking a 360 degree approach. So yeah, thank you for sharing that.

We had a project a few years ago that we were calling the curse of counting and in the domain of wellbeing. And the idea was that we'd like to feel that we're making progress in life. And sometimes that's very hard to know if we're making progress in life. And sometimes that's very hard to know if we're making progress in life. So we use things that we can count because then we can say it's more or less. So salary is a great example. If I'm making more money, then I'm probably doing better than I was before. Step counts are a great one. If I'm taking more steps, that's better than taking fewer steps. So these things that we can measure, we really start to rely on them because of what we're human. We want to know

where we stand, but a lot of the most important things, and you just reminded me of this, are you a good dad? There's no metric, you know, there's no scale where it's one to 10 and your kids have a knob and they rate you every day and you can track your progress. It's just something that has to matter to you or not. And you could say, well, I'll increase the hours I spend with my kids. I'll count them. That's not it either, right? It's not about the amount of time you spend. It's what you're bringing to it when you are with your kids. And I do get concerned actually, that when we measure things, we start to focus on the measured ones instead. And those can be really, really

important. I mean, steps are good, like your exercise is good, as you said. But what about the fuzzier things that we don't have good metrics on? Do we lose sight of them because we can't measure them instead of thinking, actually, I really need to invest in that? 100%. I'm so on board with you. But I would say I'm now starting to prioritize the unmeasurables. I would say I'm now starting to prioritize the unmeasurables. You know, I realize now that a weekend with no work, if I'm able to, with my wife and kids, we go out for walks and have meals together.

I can't measure that in any way, but the feeling it gives me is just, you know, it's like nothing else. Yeah, we don't have words almost. Yeah. And so I've, from having made mistakes in the past, I'm now very clear on a few things that whenever I'm weighing up a new offer, engagement, speaking, whatever it might be, I'm always going, okay, that was the upside. What's the downside? Yeah. Because most things have got a downside as well. We just, we're very good at looking at the upside. So yeah, fascinating. Let's get back to this idea that rituals are subjective,

or I think they are at least. How do you then as a scientist go about trying to study rituals? It's very annoying and frustrating. This is the short answer. In part because, That's the short answer. In part because, as you said, two people can be doing the exact same thing. And for one of them, it's a meaningful ritual. And for the other person, they couldn't care less. So even with something like religious services, for example, if I'm taking a bird's eye view, I'm Irish Catholic. So imagine I'm watching a Catholic mass. Everyone's doing the exact same thing at the exact same time. You know, they're kneeling when they're supposed to and standing when they're supposed to and singing when they're supposed to

and talking when they're supposed to. You know, so everyone understands. For some people in that church, what they are doing is an incredibly deep expression of their faith. It's connecting them to their parents, to their grandparents, to their shared history. Other people are there because their parents made them. And I can't tell who's who by looking. They're doing the exact

same thing. It appears to be that they're engaged in this kind of ritualistic behavior. The only way I can really know is if I ask people straight up, hey, what were you doing in there? And some people will say, I was practicing my faith and feeling this connection to a higher power. And other people will say, I was literally counting the minutes until we could leave because I wanted to go play football. And so we have to actually get these subjective impressions from people in order to understand is what you're doing more than just the actions or is it just the actions? And what is particularly frustrating is you could imagine that what we would find is that if you clap three times and stomp 10 times, that's a ritual,

but two claps and 11 stomps is not. So we can actually figure out these are the motions that make it a ritual and these are the ones that make it not a ritual. And there may be some sequence of actions that works for everybody, but we never have seen that. In other words, it's not that the specific actions

are the ones that are the key. It's actions that you have imbued with more meaning. If you imbue brushing your teeth and showering with more meaning, other people do not like you. If you imbue your coffee with more meaning because it connects you to things, that works for you as well. But the way to know are you just drinking coffee or are

you enacting something is for me to say hey how were you feeling when you were drinking that coffee yeah there's this idea isn't there in your book about rituals are a way of turning ordinary events into extraordinary moments and you give a really beautiful example, I think of two couples and their Saturday shopping. Perhaps you could explain that. It's very sad. So we, um, one of them was very sad. Yeah. We did this research. Um, Jimena Garcia Rada was the lead author. She studies decision-making in couples, which in and of itself was just an incredibly fascinating topic. We worked together on this research on rituals in romantic couples. And if you ask couples, you know, is there anything you do? We usually don't say,

do you have a ritual? Cause people think people in robes with candles. So we say, is there anything you do that's special to you that has meaning for you that you make sure to do every day or every week or every so often. And people say yes or no, and then they tell us about them. And what we see is most couples have something like that, usually between two thirds and three quarters. But when we ask people, so what I can do is I can interview you and ask you about it, and then I can interview your spouse separately so they can't hear what you said and ask them about it. And what we find is very often, both people agree. They say, yes, we do have something like that. And they tell us about the same one. A smaller number of people

say, no, we don't have one, but at least they agree. They both say, no, we don't have anything like that. But the very sad, to me, the very sad couples are the one where we ask one person and they say, oh my God, yes, we have this wonderful thing, you know, that we do every week. It's very special. And here's why. And we go to the other room and ask the other person and they say, no, we don't have anything. Those are ones where there's a mismatch. And we see even on something like shopping on the weekend, we see some couples who say, you know, every Saturday morning we go to the market and we explore together.

You know, we explore new foods. We explore new cuisines. We're foodies, so we love to do that together. And then bring it home and cook together. And it's a really important part of our weekend. And other couples say, yeah, we got to go to the market every weekend to get food. And there's nothing. And it's a pain.

Nothing else in it at all. And so technically, again, if we look at them, they're both going to the market to buy food. But for one couple, it's this amazing expression of their bond. And for the other couple, it's just nothing at all. And again, the saddest are one person says, oh, we go to the market and we're foodies and we express our... The other person says, yeah, I guess we go to the market.

I don't know. Yeah. It's not the what, it's the how. And the agreement is so critical, right? That we both are in this together. We both see those actions as more than just actions. Since you started studying rituals, is there anything you learned that you wish you knew sooner? I think actually, so when I started studying, I mean, as you know, I am a scientist from Harvard, so I'm supposed to be very objective and things like that. And when I started studying rituals, I had a sense that they were very ubiquitous in human life. And I kind of knew they were in my life too, because, you know, that's birthday parties and

things like that, that I was doing. But I really didn't think that I was a ritual person. I wouldn't have said like, I'm the kind of person who's into that. And speaking of the chaos of the morning when you have kids. So the moment when it really hit me was when my wife and I had our daughter eight years ago now, when you have a kid, if you've ever had a kid, what happens is you go to the hospital and then a little while after that, they give you a baby and they say, go away and take care of it forever. It's a very, very stressful moment in life. And so what do parents do? I mean, it's about as chaotic and stressful as you can have in your life. And so what parents do, and we did it too,

but I didn't realize it until in retrospect, was we bring rituals to bear almost immediately, just intuitively. It's not in a book or anything like that, but we start to do things like, when you ever talk to a couple with new, it's like, is the baby sleeping? Are you sleeping? Who's sleeping? When are they sleeping? You know, that's the conversation about it. And what parents do is they develop rituals around sleep almost instantaneously. It's, you know, and it's this book and then this song, and then we do the bath and then these two songs, and then we do the swaddle. And then it's these songs in this book with this person and then that, and then these three stuffed animals. I mean, it's very, very elaborate sequence of events

in order to try to get the kid to sleep. And we did that, but I didn't know I was doing it at the time until later it suddenly hit me talking to parents. All parents develop their own special sleep ritual for their kid. And I think what was so important for me that even after that realization was that it wasn't that it was necessarily helping her. It might've been, but it might not have been. In other words, we didn't try 12 different rituals and figure out which one was the best. We just ended up with one that seemed to work. And I think what it was is it was helping us,

not so much helping her. Giving you a sense of control. And that I think was such an insight, which is sometimes we're doing a ritual for a seeming purpose, but in fact, it might be helping us in a completely different way. And that started to pop up in more places that I had never thought of until I got into the research. Yeah, that's fascinating. It also,

to me, speaks to this idea that we're now creating rituals that maybe we didn't need to before because of the way culture has changed. And if I think about that specific example, because of the way culture has changed. And if I think about that specific example, the nuclear family is quite a modern invention, really. The way many people now live, certainly in Western countries, is not the way that we've ever raised kids for years.

You know, it's always been in groups. There's been a community, a tribe. There's been a family there. So I guess maybe a hundred years ago, baby's born and the grandma is providing that wisdom and insight as to this is what you do. Do you know what I mean? All those things are there. But now, because for many people that's been lost because their parents live miles away or they've moved for opportunity, for work. Actually, it is chaos. And if you don't know what you should be doing, you're going to create something

to give you that sense of control, aren't you? Completely. And you know, we have, it is one of the hardest things, hardest shifts that we make in our life. And there are people who are really expert at it. There's like doctors and nurses and people who've had kids before it. There's like doctors and nurses and people

who've had kids before and grandparents, all of these people. And we remove all of them from the environment. We just say, let's have two rookies without any support at all. Just try to figure this out. I mean, we rarely do that in life where we say, here's something that's very, very important. Let's get a couple of novices on it and see what they can do. Instead of get an expert in the room who says, that's not how, you know, do it like this instead. What are you doing? I like the way you call yourself a ritual skeptic. You write about that in the book as well, that you approach this, you started off as a skeptic and now you're a full-on believer, if I can say it. Getting there, getting there. Getting there. You mentioned the sleep routine with your daughter. I'm interested as to what else might have changed in your life. You've studied rituals for many years now. You've

written this wonderful book on them. Do you think that writing that book or even just studying this subject area has changed anything about the way you go about your day-to-day life? Have you started to introduce rituals to things that previously were just routines? For sure. I think in two domains, one is for sure at home

and the other is at work. I think we have this lab group that we call Nerd Lab because we're nerds and it's a lab group. We're not that creative on the naming. But it's professors and PhD students and postdocs who we all work together. And in the lab, we always had kind of unstated norms about what we valued in the lab and what was important in the lab. what we valued in the lab and what was important in the lab. But after I started studying rituals, I started really thinking about more,

what are the key things that make this group different from other groups and make it distinct? And one of the things that was so important was to really value ideas for their own sake, not because they would work or because they're practical or because they have any basis in reality, but just value, creativity, and ideas. And so started thinking about implementing rituals, in a sense, to try to make sure that we were enacting that value that was so important. So we literally have something that's called random ideas, where every so often we just come in and you have to have random ideas, and you're not allowed to study them. In other words, you may not study your random idea. You just have to bring it as an idea. We do things like if you just

take Beatles songs, you can say, come up with a research project based on a Beatles song. And they're all like really, really great. Like Can't Buy Me Love. I mean, any Beatles song is a fantastic social science project right there. We're not going to do the project, right? But it's this idea of instituting this practice that really shows over time what we care about here is ideas. And no idea is bad because we're just trying to pull ideas. And instead of just vaguely valuing that, creating practices actually that make sure we bring that to bear. Yeah. Again, this idea that rituals are about meaning. So you're talking about values in your lab and how can you ensure that those values are upheld? So I guess it could be like every Wednesday lunchtime, for example, we're having random ideas

hour or whatever, you know, or something like that to ensure that that value is being acted upon. For sure. I mean, you go to any organization and they all have different mission statements, but they're all the same in the end, underlying it a little bit. And the question is not, you know, and it's things like, you know, inclusivity and innovation and words like this that are really important and valuable. But what are the practices being put into place to actually bring those values to bear? You have to actually institute not just the words, but what are really you're going to do day to day or every Wednesday in order to surface those values.

So that means, I guess, that there has to be a practical component to rituals? I think you do. In other words, you have to do it. You know what I mean? The actions are just the actions. So you could do whatever you want in any meeting, but you need to bring this set of actions together in order to live out that value. But I guess because it's subjective, let's say there's 10 people in the lab, right? Let's say five people are coming and go, this is great because this is what we value. And so, you know, I can't wait for a random idea Wednesday lunchtime again, because that's my favorite part of the week or whatever. But the other five might be, man, I didn't join this lab for this. What a drag, right? So again, that could mean that for 50% of the lab, that is a ritual.

But for the other 50%, it's more a routine. Is that fair to say? Almost a distraction, even more than just a routine. Why don't we get to the science instead of doing this random idea thing? And in fact, that's such an important point because when you have these practices that enact values, they help people sort. You know, you can say, oh, this is not the research group for me, or this is not the company for me because these practices that everyone around me seems to value very highly, they don't

resonate with me at all. That's not what I'm looking for. And we do see even over time in our own research community, people will filter in, try it. And some of them will say, oh my God, this is what I've been looking for. And other people will say, I don't know why we're doing this Beatles song stuff. We got to get to work. And they'll go to a different lab group. And so they are, I mean, and we should talk about rituals can be very connecting and binding, but they can also cause difference and division because the way that we do it is the way that we do it. And we'd like other people to join in or we start to get a little suspicious of them. Yeah. Especially

within relationships, I guess, you know, um, one of the things that I guess has concerned me over the last few years, particularly since COVID, I would say is how many in-person gatherings have just fallen away. There's almost like this passivity that has taken over humanity where we just can't be bothered anymore. If we could do it over Zoom or a WhatsApp group, well, why bother to go in person? Because you can kind of get the same thing done without. I guess a really specific example of that might be, and the reason I bring this up because I've heard about this and seen this with so many people, that they used to go to things like yoga classes or Pilates classes or, you know, martial arts, whatever it might be, pre-COVID, during the lockdowns and the way people live for a few years, a lot of those things went

onto Zoom. And so people are now used to, well, I can just do it on Zoom, or I can just watch my 10-minute YouTube video and do yoga. And I'm always encouraging people to go, that's cool if you want to do 10, 15 minutes yoga each day on YouTube, great, but don't neglect, if you can, the weekly class where you go and interact with other people. I think it's a great way to tackle loneliness for some people. It's a great first step, I should say. But through the lens of ritual, can we say then for some people, their weekly yoga class is a form of ritual. I think for sure. And it relates to our earlier conversation, which is it's true that yoga itself has health benefits,

whether you're doing it in your house or doing it at a yoga studio, but that's not all the benefits of yoga. There's more to it than that. There's these social benefits. There's these connecting benefits. There's these gathering with people who share some similar values with you and maybe having a coffee or a tea before or

after. Those interactions are, even if you're never going to see the person again, those kinds of interactions are a real source of happiness. Even small talk, you know, research shows it's much better than no talk because at least you're connecting with someone and smiling and making some jokes. So it is true that we can get a lot of the benefits, but again, we're missing the broader context of, well, it's not martial arts isn't just doing these movements by myself. It's actually connecting with people and creating something larger. Yeah. Let's go about rituals for performance. There's a section on this in the book. And I mean, I guess some famous examples of athletes we might know like Rafael Nadal, Tom Brady, Serena Williams, these guys all have quite particular

rituals, certainly habits and routines. And perhaps you could explain what they are and why you consider them to be ritualistic. I gave a talk a couple of weeks ago that was maybe 60 or 90 minutes or something. My daughter came, my wife brought my daughter and she actually very patiently sat through it, which I was shocked. How old was your daughter? Actually, both my wife and my daughter patiently sat through it.

Both were shocking. My daughter's eight. Okay. And so I talked about all kinds of, almost like we've been talking, all these different domains of life, rituals and all this stuff, holidays and all this stuff.

And at the end, my daughter had one piece of feedback. She said, does that tennis guy really pick his wedgie? That was the only thing she took from the whole thing. So Rafael Nadal, if you're a tennis fan, you can already envision what he does before he serves every time. I mean, extremely elaborate tugging and wiping and all this kinds of stuff. How long does it take? It takes quite some time, doesn't it? It depends

on whether it's his first or second serve and how stressed he is, but it does take, he often runs into the clock. For people who aren't tennis fans and have never seen Nadal play, can you just sort of put some color on what it looks like when he's doing this? I mean, with Nadal, he's got a headband that he likes to play with. He's got his hair he likes to play with, likes to wipe his sweat off. He does stuff with his shorts. He does stuff with his racket, with the ball. Basically, any object that's around him, he incorporates into his pre-serve ritual. And why does he do that? It's so interesting because he has said he knows he doesn't need to do it, but when he does it, he feels like he's ready to go.

So it's a feeling. It's a feeling. For sure. So we don't know if, you know, if he doesn't pick his wedgie, we don't know if he's going to double fault every time. We don't know that, right? But for him, it's this way of, I mean, he's got to do one of the hardest things that humans do physically, and he's got to do it over and over and over again perfectly. So for him, he's got this very elaborate sequence so that he feels at that moment every time, I can do this, I've got this. Yeah.

It's interesting, isn't it? Because at what point does a ritual, does a helpful ritual start to tip over into being something unhelpful? Now, I obviously can't speak for Nadal. His success speaks for himself. It's clearly working for him. But let's say that routine currently takes 30 seconds. And let's say it started to edge up to being five minutes, which is probably not allowed. I'm guessing there is a time limit, which, you know, I'm sure five minutes between each serve is going to cause problems. You know, if we think about, you know, there's a tension, isn't there, where we can use a few things to ground us and give us a sense of control. Let's say my morning routine, for example, what it does for me. And I suspect 10 years ago, I may have struggled without it, but I've tried to become less attached to things in a variety of ways over the last four or five years.

So I feel it's good to have it, but I feel it's also good that it doesn't control me. So if I'm away and I can't have it, then I'm still able to function because otherwise it's something helpful that then becomes something that weighs me down if I can't have it. So I guess what I'm getting at is what's the dark side to these rituals or is there a dark side where they start to become controlling rather than helpful? Before we get back to this week's episode, I just wanted to let you know that I am doing my very first national UK theatre tour. I am planning a really special evening where I share how you can break free from the habits that are holding you back and make meaningful changes in your life that

truly last. It is called the Thrive Tour. Be the architect of your health and happiness. So many people tell me that health feels really complicated, but it really doesn't need to be. In my live event, I'm going to simplify health and together we're going to learn the skill of happiness, the secrets to optimal health, how to break free from the habits that are holding you back in your life, and I'm going to teach you how to make changes that actually last. Sound good? All you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash tour and I can't wait to see you there. This episode is also brought to you by the Three Question Journal, the journal that I designed and created in partnership with Intelligent Change.

Now, journaling is something that I've been recommending to my patients for years. It can help improve sleep, lead to better decision making and reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. It's also been shown to decrease emotional stress, make it easier to turn new behaviours into long-term habits and improve our relationships. There are of course many different ways to journal and as with most things it's important that you find the method that works best for you. One method that you may want to consider is the one that I outline in the three-question journal. In it, you will find a really simple and structured way of answering the three most impactful questions

I believe that we can all ask ourselves every morning and every evening. Answering these questions will take you less than five minutes, but the practice of answering them regularly will be transformative. Since the journal was published in January, I have received hundreds of messages from people telling me how much it has helped them and how much more in control of their lives they now feel. Now, if you already have a journal or you don't actually want to buy a journal, that is completely fine. I go through

in detail all of the questions within the three-question journal completely free on episode 413 of this podcast. But if you are keen to check it out, all you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash journal, or click on the link in your podcast app. Yeah, I think that's exactly the way to think about it, which is we're often using them to feel a sense of control, but we can overuse them and they start to control us instead. You can think of something like obsessive compulsive disorder where, so typically in our research, what we show, and you can think of Nadal, Serena Williams, whoever. What we're doing is we're doing a ritual in order to then do something else. In other words, the rituals in the service of another goal that we might have.

Our morning ritual is in the service of feeling calm and ready to start our day. Leave the house, go to work, spend time with family. For Nadal, Serena Williams, the ritual is in order to then serve at a high level. What can happen with obsessive compulsive disorder is you lose the link between the ritual and the goal that you had. So even something like checking to see if your door is locked before you leave in the morning. Many people double check it just to double check it. And they're doing that so that they feel all day, my house is fine. My flat is fine. No problem. So the rituals and the service of, with obsessive compulsive disorder, the ritual becomes the goal.

So you're checking the lock in order to check the lock, and then you're going to keep checking the lock and keep checking the lock because you've lost the link between that and what you wanted to get done. And that is when we start to see that you've moved too far. Now, we don't know the exact point at which it becomes too far, but really the standard is when it starts to interfere with other goals in your life, that's when we say the ritual has come too far and needs to be backed up. So with Nadal, if his serve ritual was five minutes, he'd lose every match. He'd be thrown out because you're not allowed to do that because there is a clock. So he knows he's got this amount of time and he's constructed his ritual to fit in that amount of time, oddly enough, so that he can still do what he needs to do. And we see that very common, even in our own lives. If I'm stressed about a meeting or people very commonly say

at work, if they're stressed about something, they go in the bathroom, always to the bathroom, look under the stalls to make sure nobody else is in there and talk to themselves in the mirror. Number one strategy for our ritual at work to get going. And you can feel why people are doing that. But if they go in there five minutes before the meeting starts and they talk to themselves for three hours, it's not going to work out very well, right? So we also have this sense of, I need to do this thing to feel in control, but I also know that it needs to stop at this time in order to accomplish the other goal. Yeah. Serena Williams, I think you said in the book, I think she bounces the ball five times for her first serve and only two times for her second serve. So in the spirit of

trying to become less attached to things, okay, that works for them, right? Are there any examples of where people thought, this is great, it works, but I want to be less dependent on this? So are there any athletes, for example, who used to have a ritual that worked and they thought, you know what, I want to get rid of this so I'm free of it. That would be quite interesting, actually. Yes, there was a baseball player who developed, so research on baseball players in particular, there's a bunch. And if you videotape baseball players and then code their movements before each swing, the average is 83 movements. That's like a lot of movements that

they have, but the range is very wide, like 50 to 150. So this particular player started to develop a ritual that was so elaborate that it was getting into this space where thinking about doing it correctly was distracting him from actually what he needed to do, which was hit a baseball. And so teams have actually sports psychologists who monitor this. They want you to be able to do the thing that you need to do, like Nadal, in order to get in the zone, but they want to make sure that it's not so elaborate that now you're stressed about whether you're even going to finish it and you can't even get to the thing you were trying to do. Yeah. It's fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. Tom Brady, what's his ritual?

He did this amazing, this is years ago, but when the Patriots were struggling, this was after they were a dynasty, they were struggling and they lost a couple of games. And the coach, Bill Belichick and Tom Brady gathered the team together. They dug a hole, dug a hole and put the football in it and buried the football. And they literally said, we're leaving that part of the season behind. And the story is that Brady went back and kind of like kicked the dirt and muttered something almost like an exorcism of the football from what they were going to do next. exorcism of the football from what they were going to do next. And that example is interesting to me too, because you think about, we use rituals before, you know, we're getting ready to serve. People often use them during the performance itself. And then we even use them after the performance. So if it didn't go well, we sometimes use rituals to try to feel better. So even just in the domain of performance, we're using rituals for very different reasons and very different purposes very commonly. Yeah, I love that example. I think you were writing about failure in that

part of the book and the idea that they had a really bad match, I think, against their rivals. But this idea that then when all the players came to the next practice, there was this big hole with the match ball from when they got demolished was buried as a symbolic way of saying, right, that's it, we're moving on from that. And I think they went on to have a really good season after that. They did. Again, that speaks to this idea. It's not the what, it's the how, right?

It's this idea that they're all great football players, American football players, you know, they're playing for one of the top teams, right? So they know how to play, but, you know, I don't know if any of them have spoken afterwards about that. And have any of them said that actually that, they remember that?

That was a key moment. Really, that was a key moment. They do remember the moments, for sure. That was a key moment. And, you know, it's funny because if there were a way, so imagine that when we lose, whatever it might be, we have a loss that we feel badly about. Imagine that science had shown that if you snap, you feel fine about it. You know, there's some magical thing you can do and you

feel fine about loss. Well, then if people did this ball burying stuff and digging holes, I would say, what are you, you're wasting your time. Why don't you just do the snap thing that science has shown? But we don't have anything like that for loss. We don't have anything that we know helps people get over loss. And so when people do these things like bury footballs and things like that, it's almost like, well, compared to what? If we had a magical solution for trying to move on from a devastating loss, I wish that we did, but we don't have one. So people do turn to rituals because there's uncertainty. How are we supposed to move past this but we don't have one. So people do turn to rituals because there's uncertainty. How are we supposed to move past this? We don't know how to move past it. And humans

pretty much typically say, let's at least try some kind of ritual, in this case, a collective group ritual to see if that can help us on the way to getting over this and starting again. Yeah. There's also rituals, aren't there, around negative emotions and you write them on a piece of paper and then you burn the piece of paper. And I actually, I can't recall the studies at the top of my head, but I'm pretty sure there's studies shown that that actually works. It does help, but it kind of makes sense, doesn't it? Why such a powerful visual representation of these negative emotions and thoughts, you're then burning them and allowing the paper just to disintegrate into ash. It's pretty powerful. You know, us humans are, we like

attaching meaning to things, don't we? Well, sure. And we see, you know, there's amazing, amazingly funny, heartbreaking and funny stories about when people end a romantic relationship. Typically, if you've been broken up with, people will say, well, what I did was, you know, I took all the letters that we ever exchanged, or I took all the pictures of us. One person at one point said, I took all the pictures of us together. I took them to the park where we met in a coffee can, tore them up and burned them in the park where we first kissed, I think it was what it was. And again, on the one hand, you could say that's an unusual kind of behavior to do. Although many people say, well, I kind of did something like that once too, but you know, an unusual behavior. But again, when somebody

breaks up with you, we don't have a magical solution to make you feel fine about it. You know, you need social support, you know, you can exercise and eat right. You know, we have things that help us when we're depressed, but we don't have anything that just says, I'm over it. And so again, people turn to this tearing up and burning as one way to try to, again, start the process of moving on from something painful. I don't think until I read your book, I was aware of this new term.

Is it divorcesary? Is that right? Perhaps you could explain what it is. Because this really speaks to rituals, doesn't it? Or us inventing rituals when they don't exist. That's right. I mean, if you think of the practice of divorce, it's relatively new in human history, or at least wasn't practiced very widely, which is a problem. But we can leave that discussion aside for why we weren't allowed to get divorced. But it is the case that we don't have thousand year old rituals about what cultures do when two people get divorced. They're just, they don't exist. And we still don't have them actually, even though people

get divorced quite commonly now. And you could say, well, maybe that's because we don't need them at that moment. So we don't have them there, but that's not what happens because what people do when there's nothing official, you know, there's no Valentine's day or divorce day, they make up their own with their own and all kinds of fascinating ways, which again, speaks to the, the impulse that we have to turn to ritual. But two of the amazing ones are this, um, there's, there's a good, well, they're both good versions. One is you get divorced from somebody and you want to be amicable and stay friends. And so on the anniversary of your divorce, you get together and celebrate

the two of you who got divorced to say, you know what, this was still an important relationship. If you have kids together, you might involve them. So you're, you're kind of trying to own the divorce from not being negative. But there's another version that people have done, which is you get divorced and it didn't go that well. And then typically women will, on the anniversary of that day, get together with their girlfriends and basically just slag the guy off the entire time.

But again, one year. You could do it at any date, anytime you want. But we decide, you know what? Let's take that date and make that date special and make sure we do something on that date forever from now on. We just are turning to ritual in order to, again, try to help us with these really, really difficult situations. Yeah.

This morning I was thinking about rituals and I was thinking about this idea that control, they give us a sense of control. They also give us direction if and when we don't know what to do, if they are cultural rituals that have been passed down. And the example that came to mind this morning was when my dad died in 2013. So when someone dies, obviously there's a lot of emotion, tears, the grief process starts, all that kind of stuff. And it's actually very reassuring to know, like mum and dad, you know, grew up in India. So as a family, they would probably describe

themselves as Hindu. So there's a set sequence of things that you do. You call the priests, you know, you send the invites out, you get someone for the food afterward, you know, You know, you send the invites out, you get someone for the food afterwards, you know, and after the actual cremation, you know, you pray to your ancestors. There's a set sequence of things to do. Now, whether you believe in that or not, in many ways, it's kind of irrelevant, or I shouldn't say irrelevant. It's not only whether you believe in it or not. That's right. There's also the fact that there is meaning, there is a system, there is a sequence of things. So when you're struggling and you're going through grief,

you don't have to think and make all these choices. It's there laid out for you. Yep, the moment when you're most overwhelmed is the moment when you most need some existing structure to help you through it because you're just, you're not capable when you're intensely in grief of making any kinds of decisions. I do think they help us in that way. And I think there's another thing that these kinds of rituals do, which is when you are experiencing grief, especially acute grief, one of the feelings is that it will never go away. You know, this will

never get better. It's too powerful, it's too intense. And that can last for quite some time. And what these established ceremonies do, among other things, is they say, well, other people have gotten through this. Actually for thousands of years, other people have used this exact thing and they were okay with it,

including some of the people at this funeral right now who lost their parents years ago. They did this this and I can literally see that they're okay. So they provide almost like proof to us that even when it feels there's no possible way I could ever feel any better, something about this has worked over time. And so perhaps there's hope for me as well. Yeah. Super powerful. Really, really powerful. I mentioned before about rituals as a way of helping us get through failure. And I really like this section that you wrote about, I think it was a 2017 study done in Toronto, I don't know if you remember it or not. And you sort of concluded that perhaps rituals help regulate the brain's response to failure. They dampen our negative response to errors.

Perhaps talk us through that study, because I thought that was quite powerful. Yeah, so if you think about, there's kind of having lost, what do we do? You know, bury the football or whatever it might be. There's also the, when we're performing, as we're performing, things go slightly wrong all the time. You know, if you're acting, you slightly miss a word or something like that. It's not enough the time. You know, if you're acting, you slightly miss a word or something like that. It's not enough to stop. You know, you can keep going, but your mind can start to ruminate on the mistake. So you're still trying to act or sing the way you were supposed to, but a little part of your mind is saying, oh, you blew it. You know, everything's terrible now. And so the question is, are there ways to help us

not get so stuck in the rumination as we're still performing? And one of the things that this research shows actually is that when you train people to do rituals, to make things ritualistic, the ritual itself helps them not to go as much to that ruminating place where I feel terrible about what I did wrong. terrible about what I did wrong. And you can think about it with anxiety as well, where when you're anxious, what happens is you start to spiral. First you're anxious about the presentation, but then you're anxious about your job. And then you're anxious about losing your job and how that's going to affect your family. I mean, anxiety has this property of spiraling out of control in the same way that rumination about negative things can spiral out of control. This research shows that one of the things that rituals do, it's almost as though they literally take up enough space that we can't. It's like we don't have enough resources left to spiral quite as far or to ruminate quite as much because the ritual is bringing us back into the moment and helping us get re-centered. Yeah, that is absolutely fascinating. I'm drawn back to the example of

Nadal. So we were saying that it's a way of giving him a sense of control and getting him ready, but you just said something there which made me think, well, it's also taking up a lot of real estate in his brain, right? So instead of stressing out about the scores or the backhand he put out in the last rally, which he may be doing, but if there's only so much space in your brain to be thinking about things, the idea that, well, I've got these 23 things to do before I can do my next serve, you have no room left to ruminate. So that kind of makes sense. The study you, I think, you outlined in your book, it was quite a bizarre ritual. Was it when you hit your chest and put your hands up and inhale? And like, for me, I read that, I thought, wow, does that really help people

deal with failure better? And obviously that study showed that it did. One of the funny things about when we give people, I wasn't involved with that research, but in other research we've done, we can make up rituals and have people engage in them. Like tap your chest, raise your hands, clap, whatever it might be. And they're not real rituals. In other words, we can say we made it up. But what can happen when people engage in these rituals is they start to have meaning to them remember we talked about the candle in the room yeah where if it's already light we start to wonder what's going on when we engage in actions that have no purpose part of us also says i wonder why would i be throwing my hands up like this and clapping like this and part part of us starts to say, perhaps there's some meaning or usefulness in it. It's something that's built into us, ironically, where we start

to imbue even random things with meaning. Again, like brushing teeth and showering, they don't matter that much, but we imbue them with meaning. And we can show, in fact, that when we have people do these rituals, especially in groups where it's communal and you see other people doing it at the same time, it does start to have some meaning beyond just mere actions. Not the same amount as a ritual with long history and tradition, of course not. But even the very basic level, we can in fact get some of these rituals to start to have a little bit of meaning so that they can start to affect things like your anxiety or your rumination over failure. Yeah, doing rituals together

is obviously really, really powerful. Have you ever watched much rugby before? Yeah, I mean, the pre-rugby, pre-any sport, but pre-rugby especially is like extraordinary. The all black set. Exactly, I mean, I don't think that was in the book, but I was thinking I must ask you about that because to me it seems one of the most powerful examples of rituals being used in sports.

And has that been studied at all? There is research on one of the things that team rituals do in general is the ritual itself comes to have meaning to us. You know, this is what we do. We've done it for years. When new players come in, they do it and become meaning to us. You know, this is what we do. We've done it for years. When new players come in, they do it and become part of us. And there is a sense that the meaning that we attach to that

can translate a bit to the work that we do as a group after that. So there's something in them where by doing this activity that's meaningful, that by the way, is not related to the actual task. In other words,

if they kept doing the thing, the whole match, they would lose every time not related to the actual task. In other words, if they kept doing the pretty thing, the whole match, they would lose every time because you got to start playing. But there's something in there where we do it together. That gets us all in this moment where now we're going to go perform. Yeah. I mean, for people who don't know what we're talking about,

we're talking about, I think it's called the hacker. The hacker, yeah. Which the New Zealand rugby team do before every rugby game. I read yesterday that actually they didn't do do before every rugby game. I read yesterday that actually they didn't do it before every single game, I think until 1986, when they realised how powerful it was and how important it was. Now it's every game.

Before it was, I think, maybe on just home games or something else. And I'm not a huge rugby fan, but I've always noticed that. And I think I've heard some players on opposing teams before saying it's pretty scary like before they start they see these powerful men doing this war tribal routine and please excuse me or forgive me if i've described it incorrectly but it's it's a beautiful sight to see which you think of course it's going to help improve their performance of like this is who we are we go out we win rugby games

we play with aggression and if you're on the receiving end of that it's probably quite scary to watch it yeah and you know we see I mean almost any sports team you've ever been on in your life there's something that you do together before the game starts

not as elaborate as that typically but you know you bring it, you stand in a circle and you all shout something or you put your hands all together and throw them up and then you're ready to go. We don't do it as elaborate because we're not as good athletes as those guys are. But the rest of us also, before we do these things,

we do our own little version of it because we're still feeling like, hey, we gotta go do something together. Let's do this first in order to try to do that thing better once we get started. I love it. Talk to me about the Ikea effect. What is it and what is its relevance to rituals? We've a few years ago started noticing in myself, but also in others, if you ask people or their actually their romantic partners, especially, is there something in the house that is homemade that is ugly? People will say, yes, there is.

And you say, well, who made it? And they say, well, my spouse or partner made it. And it's this watercolor or this terrible bowl that they made in a pottery class or a terrible bookcase or whatever it might be. Nobody has one of themselves, of course. It's just their partner that has one. So you ask their partner. And then the question was, so I have this terrible, terrible stone sculpture that I made probably 25 years ago now that I still have. Every time I move, I pack it up very carefully,

this whole thing. It's terrible, but I made it. I chiseled it and all this kind of stuff. And this question was like, well, what's going on there? Why do we keep objectively not so great things if we made them ourselves? We ended up calling this the Ikea effect because of course you make your own furniture at Ikea.

And it's funny actually, because people say, but I don't like my Ikea furniture after I make it. And the test is actually not so much, do you love your Ikea furniture, but the same looking thing that somebody else made. So, you know, yours is lopsided and you lost some of the screws and it doesn't hold together very well.

I don't know what you're talking about. Exactly. But, and you don't think this is the greatest whatever, but if I said, would you trade with me for the one I made that looks the same? People say, no, I'd like to keep the one that I, even though it's not good, I'd like to keep the one that I made because I made it and they actually imbue it with some of their identity that's me

that's something that I did and we even do I mean I do this funny thing with um when I teach executives at the Harvard Business School which is a very fancy place these are very accomplished executives I'll have them I'll give them lego sets that are meant for small children six ten piece lego sets and I'll have them build little things like a little dog or a little frog or something. And they're, you know, I mean, they're thinking, well, I'm paying all this money for this guy to make a Lego set. And then they put them together kind of grudgingly. And then I say, okay, can you, everybody take them back apart and turn them back in? And I mean, the, the rage, you know, the horror, like, well, what do you mean?

This is my little frog that I'm in. I'm not going to take it back apart. And you know, the rage, you know, the horror, like, well, what do you mean? This is my little frog that I made. I'm not going to take it back apart. And, you know, I can even have them bid on it and stuff and they'll pay money to take the frog with them. And of course, you know, they could afford Legos anytime they want, but it's only after they put it together that they say, no, I'm going to keep it. This one's mine. And if I say, well, will you trade your frog for someone else's identical frog? Absolutely not.

I mean, you just wouldn't, right? It's believable. It's totally believable. This one's mine. It's obviously better in some way. And so again, we call this the Ikea effect because we have this thing where when we imbue things with ourself, more is attached to them. Maybe more than is deserved. Like my sculpture is very ugly, but who cares? It's something that becomes valuable to us that really gives us a lot of meaning. Yeah. I love that. I mean, I don't know if this is necessarily the same thing or not. You can tell me afterwards if it is. But this kind of

links to what we were saying before about the unmeasurables in life. So let's take this podcast, for example. Now, I'm very meticulous with how I do my research and preparation for each conversation. Like I fully invest in every single conversation. And many of the other big podcasts out there have got researchers. Not all of them, but I know a lot of them do have researchers. So they'll, you know, compile the guest's book and their work and give them some sheets. Now I've never done that. I've always done the research myself for every single conversation. Why I think this is relevant, or perhaps relevant in this conversation about rituals and the Ikea effect, is you could argue that it's a more efficient

use of my time to have someone do the research. So instead of me spending almost two days, which is often what I spend researching a guest, one to two days, you know, I could maybe spend an hour reading the research notes and then have the conversation. So in terms of the measurables, I'm saving time. But I've never been interested in that because I've realized that I want to do the research. I enjoy doing the research. And so the question for me has been, how do I want my experience of life to be? Well, I don't really care if that saves me time. The experience of life that I want leading into this podcast is to myself, immerse myself into the life of my guests, watch some videos, read their articles, read their book, and really

tap into who they are. So hopefully I can have an interesting conversation when they show up in the studio. And so to me, you know, and I have a few things that I do and about an hour before the guests arise, I sit at my kitchen table, I like it all clean, frustrates me if it's not clean. So, you know, sort of clean all the kids' breakfast stuff away and it's there. And I have this blue book now where I've got all my notes in scrap form. And then in this blue book about an hour beforehand with coloured pens, and the colored pens is really important, I write down some key ideas that I may want to talk about. Not questions, but ideas, maybe some quotes, that sort of thing. So I guess my question to you is, that feels quite

ritualistic, how I write these things down about an hour before the guest comes in. But the wider point is, you know, would you call that a bit of the Ikea effect? The fact that I don't want someone else to do the research for me. It wouldn't feel like my podcast if someone else did that. Does that make sense, Mike? It sure does. I mean, I think you're also, you have, you're not just trying to churn out podcasts, you have a learning goal. I mean, you're trying to not just ask questions, but actually deeply engage with all the material that comes across. And so that's, that can be very, very different. And you are then investing yourself in the topic. And I'm sure it becomes actually much more rewarding because it really, when we put effort into things, we really do come to own them. We literally own them psychologically

much, much more. I was praying you would explain the blue binder in front of me with all the color-coded writing because I knew that that was going to be a ritual. Very, very often people do exactly the same thing, you know, right before the meeting, clear the table, really buckle down. I have a black binder that I use before I teach that has yellow lined paper only. I only use yellow lined paper to write down what I'm going to teach about. Very, very common that we have these things. And I do think, again, the act of making it changes it as opposed to just printing it out or getting a printout from somebody else that we really show in the research, we value it more highly and we invest it with more meaning.

Yeah. It's interesting because this speaks for another idea that rituals can evolve over time right because i didn't used to do this the show's been going for maybe six and a half years now and this blue um i don't know if i like it being called a binder actually now now there's a maybe this is a ritual you know i feel it's a i feel it's a gorgeous sort of, I don't know what I would call it, this book with thick paper in it. But I specifically went, I remember I was with my daughter,

I think in January, we went to the stationery shop and I wanted something special for the podcast. And I always put the guest name, you'll see always in blue with a red underline at the start. Love it. And the idea really was

that instead of having all these scrap pieces of paper, I thought, wow, when this is full and I look back on it, I've got some incredible guests on the show and I'm putting the key points and ideas that I want to discuss or the ideas that I think are important or interesting. Yeah. But wow, that'll be a great resource at the end of the year as well to look back on and go, oh, wow, yeah, I forgot about that.

I forgot about that. I forgot about that. So it had multiple, there were multiple reasons why I did it, but certainly that's a ritual. And I like the way that even the way I prepare is indicative of the IKEA effect. Yeah, it's so great. My colleague Ting Zhang has this research on,

she actually decided to study why humans make time capsules. Right. You know, when we take stuff and put it in a thing she actually decided to study why humans make time capsules. Right. You know, when we take stuff and put it in a thing and- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Bury it in the ground for some reason. And then later we dig it up and look at it again. It's very unusual behavior if you think about it, but really common.

And one of the things that she shows is when we do things like that, what it helps us do is rediscover the past. And it's particularly mundane things that are exciting to rediscover. So she has people literally write about Valentine's Day or the day before Valentine's Day. And people think, oh, later on, I'm going to really want to read about Valentine's Day. That was an interesting day with my partner or whatever. But when it comes to it and they look back, they say, oh yeah, I knew that. I mean, I remember Valentine's Day. We went out for that thing. But the day before Valentine's Day, which is a random day with random people, fascinating.

Oh my God, I forgot about that sandwich that I had or that person that I talked to. I think you'll have this too. If you look back, you'll remember the key, key highlights, the very memorable moments. But you're going to see little things jotted down when you say, I completely forgot about that. We had a little conversation about that. And you're giving yourself through a ritual, the opportunity to rediscover,

which is really an amazing, powerful feeling we can give ourselves. Yeah, let's just talk about rituals that mark transitions or coming of age, as it were, because that's kind of getting lost in certain cultures. A lot of cultures used to have these, boy turning into a man, for example, you go and do something, don't you?

We have. Sometimes when people are, I mean, I admit it, I'm a ritual skeptic at heart, but some people who say, I have no rituals. I don't do any rituals. I have no role in my life. I'll say, well, have you ever on a certain day put on a very long robe and a very funny looking hat, like maybe it's a square or maybe it's kind of poofy and walked up on a stage and walked across the stage and grabbed a scroll of paper and then walked off the stage, sat back down, more stuff happens. Then everybody claps and maybe even throw your hat in the air. And they said, well, yeah, of course we've done

that. That's graduation, but I never do any rituals. And I say, okay, well, let's unpack that because obviously we do, we have these things to mark these transitions from school. It's still quite common, but you're right that some of the other ones do get a little bit lost over time. Different faiths have more or less elaborate rituals in a sense that people will go through and different cultures do as well. But there's, to my knowledge, there's not a culture that doesn't have typically between the age of 12 and 16, something, at least traditionally, that happens where you go from being a kid to not necessarily an adult, but a full member of the community. In your book, there was a fascinating one about Norwegian boys. Do you remember that one?

Yeah, the thing that they do in Norway is they, it's basically almost like they dare people to do pranks. So you do like very outlandish pranks. Like one of them was walk up to a stranger in the mall and give them a condom, which is not again, like a thousand year old tradition. I don't think, but they have these things. The one that I love is actually take a, go for a swim in the ocean before March, I think, something like that,

which in Norway means- Cold. Very, very cold. They do this in order to kind of, if you think about what these rituals do, they often require something of you, which could be reciting a text from memory. It could be shaving your head. It could be embarrassment, actually. A lot of the rituals in this Norwegian one are, you have to be embarrassed in order to get through it, but there's some cost most often associated with it, that you have to do something in order to then qualify to go through it. And most rites have passed. And it could, again, physical pain, social pain, emotional pain,

but something in it that is a challenge. And it's a little bit like the Ikea effect. In order to feel like you've gone past the threshold, you got to put something of yourself into it so that you feel once you're through it, I'm a different person. Yeah. It's interesting. One of my friends is part of an organization who are now recognizing that a lot of boys in the UK don't have this kind of ritual passage into adulthood. And so they're introducing it. So I think they're teenage boys. They go for a weekend. They're out into the forest with, you know, this is a male ritual.

So there's male elders and the teenage boys and they do things with fire and they discuss things and they have to do certain things. It's a weekend. I think it's only been running for two years. But what he tells me is that the results have been fantastic in terms of what they have done for those kids and the sense of who they are. I'd be interested to know what that's done for their mental wellbeing and all those kinds of things which people are struggling with, but maybe the loss of some important rituals is coming at a huge cost. You know, and I do think again, it's you might, you might say, well,

I don't know about going into the woods and lighting fires and stuff. I don't see why that would be helpful. But again, compared to what, you know, if we had something in place that was helping these kids through this transition, we would use that. You know, if we had something in place that was helping these kids through this transition, we would use that. You know, I mean, if there's something that already works, there's no need to go in the woods and have fire, but often it's lacking. And so this is another case where when something seems to be lacking, one of the things that we turn to is ritual because how else are you supposed to know that you were something different yesterday than you are today? I mean, marriage is a great,

you don't have to have a wedding in order to be married. Many people don't. Why do we keep having them? They're very stressful and all this. Partly, of course, is because how do I know that I'm no longer a single person, but I'm a completely new person as part of a couple?

We could just decide, or we can try to do a ceremony that marks it so that we have this before and after period. What I think about human behaviors and what makes us tick, I always think about big business because these guys understand human behavior very well. So for example, when Amazon brought in one-click ordering,

you know, many years ago now, the rumors are that profits went up by over $300 million a year. I.e. instead of having three or four different steps to take before you make an order, you reduce the friction, the behavior happens easily. So therefore we can apply that and go, wow, Amazon understand that. So if we want to bring a new behavior into our life, we've also got to make it easy and simple and not have lots of different steps where I also happen to think ritual can help here. It can help us reduce choice and go, no, this is what I do each morning. So for me, I'd have to choose every morning. I know what I do,

and I made it really, really simple. But through the lens of ritual, now I'm thinking, what are companies doing? Because if they know rituals are important and they help us do stuff, well, I'm pretty sure they must be hijacking it somewhere. And so the ideas that come to mind for me are popcorn at cinemas, right? Maybe it started off as something, but now it's like a thing that you go to the cinema and you eat popcorn. Again, I'm not criticizing. I'm just putting it out there, you know, that it seems to be a thing. I think you write in the book about Starbucks and one of their logos about, it's about rituals, is it not? Take comfort in rituals. Take comfort in rituals, right? So that's become a thing

where, you know, for Starbucks lovers out there, it becomes your ritual. Then I think about things like you mentioned Valentine's Day before. I don't know the history of how that started, things like you mentioned Valentine's Day before. I don't know the history of how that started, but many people choose not to celebrate it like myself because it feels like a big commercial experiment, basically. So I know a lot of people who won't do anything on Valentine's Day. It's like, no, I'm not going to celebrate my love for my partner on this day and buy all these overpriced roses and all that kind of stuff. You can even apply Christmas here, right? And I'll tell you where I'm going with this. I definitely want to hear your thoughts on this. We were in Egypt a few months ago as a family, and I spoke to this

lovely chap who is a member of the Coptic Orthodox Church, which I believe is the oldest form of Christianity. But their Christmas day is at the start of January. Okay, so it's not on the 25th of December, it's at the start of January. But leading up to Christmas day, they have 40 days, I guess a bit like Lent, where they're restricting. So I think it's very simple food, I think it's vegan, I think there's no alcohol. There's, you know, there's 40 days. And then they have the Christmas day celebration, loads of food, maybe wine and, you know, the kind of feast as it were. I remember when he told me that, I thought, wow, you know, I've grown up in the UK. And yes, there's of course a religious element to Christmas, but it has also become very, very commercial now as well.

And I feel December in the West has become a decadent month. So it's more decadence and more comfort eating or whatever it might be. And then you have Christmas Day, which often leads to these restrictive New Year's resolutions to try and rebalance. And I thought, wow, you see the point. So I guess my wider question is, are rituals as helpful as they are for us as individuals? Have they been commercialized by big companies who want more profit? One of the, like there's been an explosion literally in the last even five years in the number of companies that have the word ritual in the title. Really?

There's a skincare company that's ritual something. There's a non-alcoholic beverage company that's ritual something. There's more, more, more, more ritual, ritual, ritual, because there's some awareness that the word itself has a little bit of a magical kind of connotation and a little bit of a, you know, if you think about consuming a product

ritualistically, there is this, it feels very different than just consuming it. One of my favorite examples is Stella Artois has this very elaborate sequence of how to create, how to pour the perfect Stella Artois. And the steps are called like the sacrifice, the purification, you know, the beheading actually is when you take the head

off. So they're using almost religious language. It's a little tongue in cheek, obviously, but at the same time, you watch the bartender perform, you know, prepare it in this way. And it does feel very different when you receive the chalice, call it the chalice, the chalice of this beer. So for sure, I think marketers are onto this. One of my favorite case studies ever, it's a case study in the development of skincare regimes over time. And if you look, I'm going to have the numbers completely wrong, just to be clear. But if you look at the course of human history, there's like no soap and then there's soap, just soap. You use it everywhere, hair, face, body, whatever. And then a little while after that, it's like,

well, maybe we need different kinds of soap for different parts of the, so maybe we need shampoo and soap. And then it's like, well, maybe we need different soap for the face than we do for the body. So then we need three. Then we need conditioner after the shampoo, then you get four.

And then, you know, maybe we need soap for the eyes. It's different from the cheeks. It's different. So you just see this insane exponential growth in skincare products. And it's true, I guess, that we do need, the cheeks. It's different. So you just see this insane exponential growth in skincare products. And it's true, I guess, that we do need, we could use different soaps for different things, but it's also marketers saying, hey, how can we in the morning ritual, skincare ritual,

how can we keep building in new steps to sell more product? And the coolest thing really is that the curve for women went up sooner than the curve for men for a number of skincare products. But in the last 10 to 20 years, the curve for men has been shooting up as well, that we're getting more and more skin products for men as well to try to get the same curve up of, you got to have 73 things every morning. You're not going to look good before you leave the house. Yeah. Once you start seeing it and a lot of things you took for granted and you start to go, well, where did this actually come from? Like, ah, there's a lot of profits to be made here. You know, maybe this isn't necessarily what I need. It's what I'm being told. And so, yeah, fascinating. Look, like I think you've written just a wonderful book about a topic

that I'm so fascinated by, rituals. Right at the end of our conversation, I guess for people who have heard what you had to say, I thought, yeah, you know what? I think I'm missing ritual from my life. I think ritual would help me with my health, with my happiness, with my relationships. What are your final words to them? I think it isn't the case that adding 71 new rituals tomorrow is the way to go. Number one, who has the time to be adding all this stuff? I think actually a really helpful first step

is to take an inventory of what you're already doing. So I find when I talk to people about this topic, like we've been talking, what happens is people will say, oh, you know, I actually am doing something in that, or, you know, I actually do do something with my spouse, or I do do something with my kid. It'll kind of occur to you that you have these special practices that you're already, or I do something in the morning that's important to me. And so the first thing actually is literally just take inventory of what's already happening, Because when you do, you can appreciate them a little bit more. You know, if you have something cute that you do with your kids, now that you see that it's a regular practice, each time you do it, it actually can get a little more meaning.

And you might even also laugh at yourself a little bit. Like, here we go doing this thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it enriches it, I think. So looking just to see where they are now. And if you don't think you have any, you can ask your spouse, you can ask your kids, you can ask your coworkers,

hey, do I have any? And they'll say, oh my God, you do. And here's 19 things that you do. So you can get some social information as well. But I do think actually that this is a wonderful first step is just to see the role that they're already playing. And then if there's domains in life where you think you could use a little bit more,

think about trying them there. So if you don't get nervous at all before performance, you don't need to experiment with a pre-performance ritual because that's not something that matters for you. But if you're worried about your connection with your family, think about trying something at dinner. It may or may not stick, it may or may not work, but when they do stick, they really do work and add meaning. So it's kind of a think of domains in which a little something extra might be needed and think about experimenting in there. Yeah, I love that.

It could be as simple as lighting a candle before you have your evening meal or maybe a simple gratitude exercise that you do that I've spoken about many times on the show that I do with my family each night over dinner. Mike, I really appreciate you writing the book. I appreciate all your research into rituals. Thanks for making the journey up to the studio. Thank you so much. It was really great to chat. Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away

and apply into your own life. And also have a think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life. And also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember, when you teach someone, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information. Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday Five. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I'd be consuming, and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect. And I have to say, in a world of endless emails,

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