Instant Genius - How our everyday rituals affect our happiness and wellbeing

Episode Date: May 5, 2024

Do you brush your teeth before you shower in the morning, or do you shower first? Perhaps you like to give yourself a pep talk in the bathroom mirror before you’re about to give an important presentation at work. Or maybe you always cook a particular meal on special occasions. These are all examples of the personal rituals that many of us perform in our daily lives. But where do they come from, why are we so attached to them, and can they really help us to have a better day or make a more successful presentation? In this episode I speak to Prof Michael Norton, a behavioural scientist based at Harvard University. He tells me about the fascinating discoveries he made while writing his new book The Ritual Effect: The Transformative Power of Our Everyday Actions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost! Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water.

The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people

with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this shell will get a $75 sponsor job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Introducing the new best skin ever ultra slim precision concealer from Sephora Collection. It's full coverage with a matte finish and perfect for any look, whether you're building it up for a full glam moment or targeting correction for a more natural vibe. At only $12, it's great for affordable touch-ups on the go.

Get this new must-have concealer at Sephora or at Sephora.com today. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. Streaming has made music more accessible than ever, but true listening is about more than ease. It's about quality. British audio experts name audio, alongside French acoustic specialist focal, combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation

and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio. Hello and welcome to Incent Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. Each week you'll hear world-leading experts and scientists talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today.

I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor of BBC Science Focus. Do you brush your teeth before you're shower in the morning, or do you shower first? Perhaps you'd like to give yourself a pep talk in the bathroom mirror before you're about to give an important presentation at work. Or maybe you always cook a particular meal on special occasions. These are all examples of the personal rituals that many of us perform in our daily lives. But where do they come from? Why are we so attached to them?

And can they really help us to have a better day or make a more successful presentation? In this episode, I speak to Professor Michael Norton, a behavioural scientist based at Harvard University. He tells me about the fascinating discoveries he made while writing his new book, The Ritual Effect, the transformative power of our everyday actions. So first off, welcome to the podcast. Thanks very much for joining us. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

So today we're talking about rituals, your book, The Ritual Effect. So this is quite an unusual topic of study, I think. So how did you come to it? A few years ago, I was kind of looking around the world for something to study, honestly. I'd been studying how to spend your money to be happier, kind of looking at it. it weighs not so much if you had a billion dollars what would you do but you know five dollars five pounds how should you spend it to be the happiest and i started looking around for other little daily things that affect our happiness and one of the things that kept coming up were little rituals people would say

i do this in the morning or i do this at work or i do this when i'm nervous or i do this to try to get to sleep and i really kind of wanted to dive in and see what are these things and what are they doing for us so let's have a look at that then so early on in the book you make the distinction between rituals and habits. So what's the difference and why make that distinction? I think in some domains, it's clear that they're different. So if you think about a funeral or a wedding, we typically don't make habits out of those, meaning, you know, we want to get married every single day and never miss a marriage or something like that, although some people do. But then there are these domains of life where they are quite similar, I think, if you think of, you know, when you're trying to eat healthy or

trying to exercise habits and rituals start to be a little similar. I think about it in a silly way, which is I'll ask people in the morning when you're getting ready, do you brush your teeth first and then shower? Or do you shower and then brush your teeth? Do you mind if I ask you that question? Oh, no. This is something that I found really interesting because if you'd have asked me, are you a ritualistic person before I read the book? I just said, no, I don't do things like that. But yeah, I have to shower first. It feels incredibly weird if I don't. And like, what is the feeling if I said switch it. How would you feel? You feel weird? But yeah, be very strange. I really wouldn't want to do that. Yeah. So it's funny. About half of people brush their teeth first and then

shower and half shower and then brush their teeth. Some people do them both of the same time, but the main categories are those two. But then the most important question for me is what I asked you, which is if you had to switch it, if you had to change it, how would you feel? And there again, actually, about half of people say, no problem, you know, couldn't care less, happy to do it. because they're like habits. There are things on their checklist that they need to get done every day. But they don't really care how or when or exactly how it's done. And then there's half of people who are like you,

and also, by the way, like me, who is switching the order feels weird. They say things like, I wouldn't feel ready for the day. I'd feel off all day. And when you have that kind of emotion and meaning and it matters to you how you do something, that's when it moves more away from kind of a dry habit, a little bit toward a ritual. Not a ritual like people in robes with candles chanting further down the continuum, but going in that direction, which is these same actions that don't mean much in and of themselves. Now to you mean something more. Yeah, so you mentioned that the

sort of rituals that you'd think, I suppose if you said ritual to somebody like organized religion and that sort of thing. But you say quite often we invent our rituals ourselves. They're personal rituals. So how does that work? I think when I started studying rituals, I was thinking about the kind that we usually think about, which are the religious or cultural rituals that we inherit in some sense. We might tweak them a little bit, but we do sort of inherit them from our family or from our faith. And those play incredibly important roles in our lives. It's just that wasn't the kind that people started telling me about. They started telling me about these funny little quirky ones that they did. So even if you ask a couple, we usually don't say, do you have a ritual because people

think, no, I don't stand in robes and chant. We just say, you know, do you have something special that the two of you do you do it every day or every week? And it kind of is important to you. And couples say, you know, they had a marriage and a wedding, but a wedding is only one day. So when you ask them, well, what do you do after the wedding for the next 50 years? People say, well, you know what we do? And then they have these little quirky thing. My favorite couple ever was a couple that said, every time before we eat, we clink our silverware together. And it's just this tiniest little thing that they do. There's no thousand-year-old text that says, you know, clink your forks together before you eat. But they came up with themselves. And then the more we kept looking,

the more we kept hearing more and more of these quirky stories, well, people said, yeah, you know, I do my religious rituals that are important to me, or I do my cultural rituals that are important to me. And I freelance and make up my own at the same time. Yeah, so sort of, personally speaking, I have one, I didn't really even think about it until I read the book. So I'm in my mid-40s now. So it's quite a long time ago when I went to university. I unpacked, I got into my hall, and I put on out on the weekend by Neil Young on my record player. And since then, every time I've moved into a new home, I have to do it. I love it. Even in my 40s.

And you mentioned, if you say, why do you do that? I couldn't really tell you, but it just makes me feel good. So this is a sort of roundabout way of me asking, what role does emotion play in our ritualistic behavior? You know, I do think we tend to reserve words like a blessing for religious activities, but in a sense, you're sort of blessing your new home. You know, I mean, you're coming into it and you're saying, this is my space because I'm playing my song that is important to me and has this history for me. And what's so funny is another person who doesn't like Neil Young, that'd be the worst thing ever, right? They would say, wow, I'd do that.

But they might have their own song that's important to them that evokes these emotions. And that is the thing about rituals. Speaking of the difference between habits and rituals as well, habits tend to be not emotionless, but not hugely emotional. And rituals make us feel all kinds of different ways in the world. I mean, even thinking about weddings versus funerals, well, we're not looking for the same emotion in those two situations. They're looking more very different emotions. For you moving in, you're looking for this sense of home that this ritual is helping

to give you, that couple clinking silverware is looking for connection with each other. So they really do bring out and prompt these emotions in us. We get emotions in all sorts of other ways. It's not just rituals. But typically when people do rituals, some key emotion is coming out of doing it. So another way in which we sort of bond with things is something you mentioned called the IKEA effect. So I thought this is really interesting. So can you explain that for us? Yes, if you think about things in your own home that don't look that good, but you make sure to keep, speaking of making

sure you do something every time you move, many people have, you know, a watercolor that they did, or an oil painting, or a table that they built at some point, even when they were, you know, 16 or 17 years old, they built it. And it's not good. Or a pot they made in a pottery class or a that they made. And, you know, they don't look that good, but we keep them around. I have a terrible stone sculpture that I made 25 years ago that I still keep with me. I know it's terrible, but I put the work into it. And that's what we call the IKEA effect, because, of course, you build your own furniture

there, which is when you invest something of yourself and making things, almost independent of the quality of the thing, it has more meaning to us because it becomes really part of us. It's something that stands for who we are. Wishing you could be there live for the big game, soaking up the atmosphere in the crowd, but too often, life gets busy, or the price hold you back. Priceline is here to help you make it happen.

With millions of deals on flights, hotels, and rental cars, you can go see the game live. Don't just dream about the trip. Book it with Priceline. Download the Priceline app or visit Priceline.com. Actual prices may vary, limited time offer. Where is Daredevil? I'm right here.

Don't miss the return of Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again. So what's next? I'm going to take this city back. In an all-new season, now streaming only on Disney Plus. They're hunting us. It's time we started hunting them. I can work with that. This should be tons of fun.

Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again, now streaming only on Disney Plus. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. With over 100 years of combined expertise, name and focal have been bringing music to listeners just as the artist intended. Since day one, this mantra has shaped every innovation in high-fi design,

technology and acoustic engineering, balancing craftsmanship and tradition with pioneering thinking. Name audio pushes cutting-edge technology to ensure digital precision, sustaining Pratt, pace, rhythm and timing, the elusive quality that makes music feel alive and gives it emotional texture. Today, in partnership with French acoustic specialist focal, name audio creates systems that deliver exceptional sound and unforgettable listening experiences at home. Try it for yourself at a focal powered by name boutique. Visit focal powered by name.com

for more information. So talking about rituals and, I guess, eccentric rituals, most people will probably say, well, professional athletes seem to be particularly prone to do this. So there's all sorts of different ones, quite bizarre rituals that they do before a game or an event. So first off, do you have any favourite ones? And secondly, what can we say about that? Why do they do it? it's by the way, if you want to spend an entire day of your life doing something, take any athlete or any celebrity and type their name and then type ritual and then search. And you will find not every celebrity and every athlete has them, but you will find an astonishing array of really elaborate, really quirky, really idiosyncratic rituals that these people have. And they do them all the time.

They always make sure to do them before they perform. my personal favorite, I'm a tennis fan, so Rafael Nadal. Raphael Nadal is very well known for his, if you like tennis, you already know, for his pre-serve routine, which is there's wiping and tugging and all these sorts of things with the ball and the racket and the headband and all this stuff. And then my favorite thing actually is my daughter came to see me give a talk the other day, like probably an hour long thing with Q&A and things like that. And at the end, the only feedback she had for me, she's eight years old, the only feedback

she had was, does that tennis guy really pick his wedgy? So the only thing she took from it, and it is true, in fact, that Raphael Nadal, if you watch him, before every single serve, among the many other things, he actually picks his wedgis. Now, we don't let regular people like us pick our wedgies in public, but for these people who are performing at this incredibly high level, we actually, we think it's a little odd, but we allow them to do it because we know how stressful it is, and we know that maybe they need this to get there. So it's a way of coping with stress and pressure?

Very often. And I mean, we certainly don't, you know, before I teach, I don't stand up in front of the class and pick my wedgy and adjust stuff because it's not that stressful. But again, what people say is they'll do private ones. It's actually incredibly common that people will say before a big meeting at work, I will go into the bathroom, check under the stalls to make sure nobody's in there, and then talk to myself in the mirror and psych myself. I mean, it's amazing how common it is. If you think about the insanity of that behavior that you would be telling you. yourself that you've got this, you're ready to go. And yet it's not so different from Nadal or Serena Williams or anybody else that has these rituals. We all use them when the stress amps up.

Many people use these to try to calm themselves back down. So I was going to say then, what happens if we can't perform these rituals we're used to? You know, how damaging is that to us psychologically? I'm really glad you asked because it's not the case that rituals are just good. you know, that if you, the more rituals you add, the better off you are. And if you add the seven secret rituals, you'll be happy forever. That's just not how they work. And you're absolutely right, that they're kind of a risk and reward situation. Because even with your showering in the morning, you know, you've got to shower first. When you do it your way, it's true that you feel really good and ready to go and start your day. But if the water's broken, you know, or your partner

or kid needs to use the shower instead, well, now you're off. And so, there is this sense of sometimes you're better off not having it at all and just going with the flow. And sometimes when you can enact, then they do give you this better sense. So it really is this push and pull almost in what rituals can do for us. So sort of off the back of that with rituals causing a problem, you know, how does this fit in with something like obsessive-compulsive disorder? What do we know about that? So if you think of very simple rituals that people do, so imagine, you know, when you leave your house in the morning, you always double-checked to make sure you locked the door. And you're doing that in order to go to work or go hang out with friends or whatever it might be

and just know that your place is locked. What happens with OCD is you lose the link between I'm doing that in order to achieve another goal. In other words, I'm checking the lock in order to feel good about that and go work or go have fun or whatever it is I'm going to do. And with obsessive-compulsive disorder, it can be the lock itself becomes the goal. So I get lost in a sense in the ritual. So the checking of the lock becomes the thing in and of itself. You don't have another goal that you're trying to do.

If you're calming yourself down before a meeting, you're trying to do that in order to then go lead the meeting. But again, if you get stuck in the loop of the ritual, then we can say it's interfering with other things in life. And that's when perhaps you need to pull it back. So you mentioned earlier the couple that do the cheers with the silverware. So another sort of area of our lives that is, I think is heavily ritualistic, is dinner time. So you mentioned a few things like the Scandinavian idea of FECA, but we all have different ones. So why does that stick out so much? Why is that such a common thing to do?

I believe that. So we've looked at family rituals, kind of the everyday ones. And we've also looked at them on holidays, you know, Christmas and holidays like that, New Year's. And one of my theory, I'm from a large Irish Catholic family. one of my theories is that rituals are so common in families because they give us something to do instead of just staring at each other and then starting to argue about things from the past. In other words, or political arguments, whatever it might be. In other words, we do these things.

We're used to them. They're who we are. We've done them for years. Maybe even our grandparents did them as well. So we know we're a family. You know, I mean, this pie that we make that our grandmother made, it's connecting us all as a family. And I think they play a really important role in reminding us that we're close, that we are a family, and giving us something to do. You know, you go do this. These two people make

the pie. These two people go get the other thing. And by the time we've done all those rituals all day, it's like the holiday's over and we got through it and nobody yelled at anybody. So let's stick with holidays for a moment. So as you say, they're sort of unique to different families in a way. So on, say, when I go to my wife's family, and they do things differently, wrong. Why does that bother me so much? You know, it's funny. I teach a class of freshmen at university.

Many of them have never been away from home for any extended period of time. So this is kind of their first time away from home. And in the States, Thanksgiving is a huge holiday, family holiday. So some students who can't travel all the way home will go home. will go home with a friend for Thanksgiving. And they come back horrified. You know, just what kind of a family, you know, what kind of people? And the things are, would eat at 2 o'clock.

I mean, you know, the rage and disgust that we feel. And what it prompts you to realize is for you, the holiday was just, it just happened. You know, it was given to you by your family. You didn't need to do anything. But you did have a way that you actually really liked and was important to you. And only when you encounter somebody else. is whether it's a friend or a significant other, not only do you realize that yours is a thing and is good, but you also realize that you think yours is right. It's not just nice and good to do. It's correct.

And there again is another thing about rituals, right? They're not just warm and fuzzy. They lead us to not only love the things that are important to us, but we can when they go wrong start to say, well, if my way is great, then your way must be terrible. So sort of sticking with that along the same lines, what role does the sort of emotion of nostalgia play with our ritualistic behavior? This is one of my honestly favorite emotions that we have. It's very complex, right, because it's bittersweet. You know, it's a lovely feeling and we miss things at the same time. But at the same time, being connected to the past is a really powerful feeling that humans want and that it's a little bit hard to get to. and rituals are one of the ways that help us connect all the way back. So even if you think about to go back to making a pie, you know, I remember my grandmother and I remember what she was like, but it's hard to bring people really into the present.

It's just hard. Unfortunately, we just can't quite do it. And when we engage in these rituals that we used to engage in with them, you know, we're making this pie or, you know, that's where Nana used to sit at the table. We're bringing them back in a more visceral way. It's almost like we can smell them and feel them when we do these family rituals. And I think it's a huge gift that rituals can give us, actually. And if you think of religious rituals as well, now I'm connected back not just to my family,

but to thousands of years of history. You know, I mean, it's a very powerful feeling that we can have that we could probably get in other ways, but one of the ways that's really effective or very common is via ritual. Having said all of this, are some people more prone to ritualistic behavior than others? There is some truth to that, that there are people who kind of veer toward ritual and veer away from ritual. But I will say, you know, we do surveys and we ask people to tell us about all different domains of their life. You know, so do you have a morning thing that you do?

Do you have a thing when you're nervous at work? Do you have a thing with your significant other? Do you have a thing before bed? You know, we could go on and on and ask people these questions. And for most people, the answer is yes to some and no to others. And we don't see, for example, that it's just that if you say yes to one, it's all of them, or if you say no to one, it's no to all of them. We do see people using them in different spots in life for different reasons.

So I think there's something in us that does vary by person, but it's also this sense of different situations prompt different things in us. If I don't get nervous before meetings, I don't need to do a ritual, but I might still want to cling silverware with my wife. So, you know, we use them across these domains in very flexible ways. So let's have a look at work now, then. You mentioned meetings and things there. So you talk about the power of these group rituals.

So I'm talking about things like team building exercises, which, you know, people have various opinions about. Yeah. So what's going on there? How does that function? It is funny to go into a company and say, you know, tell them about my work and say, we're going to do this. we're going to do some of these rituals, come up with them ourselves. Because the eye roll, you can almost hear the collective eye. It's so strong that people say, oh, my God, he's going to make us do this stuff.

And people, of course, these corporate retreats and trustfalls and things like that, not a huge fan often. I want to say two things. One is, compared to what? So if you never see your coworkers outside of work ever, is that better than doing a kind of cheesy corporate retreat and kind of a silly trust fall or not? And I think often the answer is, you know, yeah, I mean, even as we're saying this trust ball is stupid, we're bonding together, saying it's stupid. So it's giving us something that we can't get otherwise. But then also what we see is teams freelancing at work. It isn't just like corporate says clap six times and we're going to do it. Teams themselves say, you know what, let's do this special thing that we do as our team that's important to us. And we see when teams have those kinds of practices, those teams tend to see their work as more meaningful. that there's something about the meaning of having a ritual with this group of people

that can translate a little bit into saying, my job isn't just punching buttons, there's something more meaningful in it. So we can't really talk about work now without all of the things that have changed since the COVID pandemic, with lots of us changing from working in an office to working at home. So that must have had a big impact on the way that we perform our rituals. Completely fast. I mean, I'm a nerd, but it was completely fascinating. to me that so many people have a commuting ritual. You know, you leave your home and on the commute,

you do something. You always read, you listen to the same songs, you do something. And then you get to work and you've kind of transitioned from your home self to your work self. When nearly everyone needed to work from home overnight, the question is, what do we do? And one thing that humans could do is just say, I'm not going to do that anymore. I don't need it. And that's not at all. what people did. People said, no, I still need it, but I need to change it. And so again, we see this really flexible creativity in what people do. My favorite example was this guy who said he was a biker, and he used to bike to work every morning and they got out, you know, go to work. And he tried to do work from home and it wasn't feeling right. And so he decided that what he would do is in the morning,

get up, put on his biking gear, hop on his bike, bike down his hallway, get off the bike, put on his work clothes, go to work. And then end of the day, of course, bike clothes back on, on the bike, bike down the hallway. And on the one hand, very, very unusual behavior. On the other hand, we don't have a great way to separate work from home when we're stuck in the same apartment or house.

So these are things, you know, if we could snap our fingers and transition, I would say, don't hop on your bike, just snap your fingers, except that's just not how we work, right? We need these things in between. And the creativity of people was just so interesting. to see. So let's have a look at another sort of common area of rituals, coming of age rituals.

So obviously there's countless movies made and books written about this sort of thing. You know, why do we find these so important and appealing? Many, many people are ritual skeptics is what I would say, to put it mildly, you know, that I don't do this kind of stuff. It's fine if other people do it, but it's not for me. In one of the examples I always use is, you know, have you ever put on a robe, very long robe, and a very funny hat, could be a square hat or kind of a poofy hat, and walked up on a stage,

walked across the stage, grabbed a piece of paper from somebody, and then everybody claps, and then you walk off the stage, and then later maybe you even throw the weird hat in the air. And people say, well, yeah, I mean, of course they've done that. That's just like a graduation.

And I say, exactly. You know, so they're around us all the time, and most cultures have in one way or another, a coming-of-age ritual, typically between often 12 and 16, it can go a little lower and a little higher. And by the way, cultures come up with them independently. It's not that it came up in one place and then spread. It's a different human cultures over time have independently decided that around this time of life, we do something to move you from typically a kid to an adult, meaning a full member of the society with all the responsibilities that come with that.

The range is outrageous almost in terms of what the ceremony looks like, but the commonality is, of course, it seems to be everywhere. So we've talked about a lot of different things here, but you're a scientist by trade. So how do you go about studying this sort of thing? It is frustrating, is what I would say, because sometimes the research that we would love to do, we just can't. You know, so it would be amazing to randomly assign people to families and then, you know, randomly give different families rituals for 20 years and, you know, then do a follow-up and do a

nice experiment and get the causal evidence. And sometimes we just can't. We can't randomly assign you to marry somebody and follow up later either. So in some of the things, it's very descriptive, we ask people, does your family do something like this? Do you and your partner do something like this. And then we measure things like how close they are to their family and how close they are to their partner. And we do typically see that, you know, when you have these rituals in place, you feel closer. At the same time, of course, the opposite can be true as well, which is if we feel closer, maybe then we come up with rituals. So the causal arrow sometimes we can't get at. But in some domains we can. We talked about team rituals. There we can actually take strangers and randomly assign

them to a team that does this kind of ritual or a team that does that kind of ritual. And there we can look at the causal effect. And we do see, for example, that when you engage in these types of rituals, even with strangers, you come to see it as a little bit more meaningful. And that meaning can still translate onto work that we have you do next. The gold standard for me is the causal direction, because we always want to see that. And we do it whenever we can. And then the frustrating thing is we can't always do it. So having said that, it's a sort of final question. Was there anything that you got from researching the book that you wished you could have found out, but you just couldn't. Oh my gosh, so many things. I mean, so many of the domains of life are ritualistic, you know,

in the end. It's almost wherever you look, you're going to find people doing rituals of some kind or another. I think one thing that came about very late in writing the book was the realization that there are domains of life where we could really use them, but humans haven't come up with them yet. Like for some reason, our cultures just didn't generate them yet. And one that always stands out to me is divorce or just ending a very long-term relationship. We have great ceremonies to start them with weddings and things like that. We have nothing to end them. We really don't. You just kind of go your separate ways, I guess, and get on with your life. And there, I think, is a case where there's an opportunity for creativity. And people do get creative in the way that they break up. And that's something,

again to dive into and figure out, you know, what are people doing? What does it do for them? Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Professor Michael Norton. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out his latest book, The Ritual Effect, The Transformative Power of Our Review Day Actions. If you liked what you just heard, please consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download a copy on your app store of choice.

You can also find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal, Name creates high-end audio systems, combining innovation with craftsmanship,

so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at nameaudio.com. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals, because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Lots of places can expose you to identity theft.

Oh, no. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity, which is way more than anyone can do on their own. If we find anything suspicious, like new loans or changes to your financial accounts, we alert you right away, all through text, phone, email, or the LifeLock app. Get the alerts that could make all the difference. Save up to 40% your first year at LifeLock.com slash special offer. Terms apply.