The One You Feed - How to Harness the Power of Rituals with Michael Norton

Episode Date: July 19, 2024

In this episode, Michael Norton shares how to harness the power of rituals in everyday life. He discusses the difference between rituals and habits that shed light on the transformative power of rituals. Michael's research and anecdotes emphasize the emotional and psychological benefits of engaging in rituals, underscoring their potential to enhance well-being and enrich your life. In this episode, you will be able to: Discover the benefits of incorporating daily rituals for increased happiness and fulfillment Learn how to differentiate between rituals, habits, and compulsions, and harness the power of intentional practices Explore the emotional benefits of relationship rituals and how they can deepen connections Find out how rituals play a vital role in managing uncertainty and stress, and how they can be a powerful tool for maintaining emotional balance To learn more, click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We ask couples, hey, is there anything the two of you do that's kind of unique to you and special, and you make sure to do it regularly, you know, every day, once a week, once a month, anything like that, and varies from study to study, but two-thirds to three-quarters of couples say, you know what, yes. And then we say, well, what is it? And they say the cutest, most endearing things you've ever heard in your entire life. things you've ever heard in your entire life. you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life

worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer.

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Follow The Big Take Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast think, embarrassing to the SEC. Follow the Big Take podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Michael Norton. He's the Harold M. Brearley Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He is also known for identifying and naming the IKEA effect, which is a cognitive bias in which consumers place disproportionately high value on products they partially created. Today, Mike and Eric discuss his new book, The Ritual Effect. From habit to ritual, harness the surprising power of everyday actions. Hi, Mike. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me on. I'm excited to have you on.

We're going to be discussing your book, The Ritual Effect. From habit to ritual, harness the surprising power of everyday actions. But before we get into that, let's start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with her grandchild, and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, thinks about it for a second, looks up at their grandparent

and says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. The first thing that I thought of was actually something that we started to do a few years ago with our daughter, who's eight years old. When we start dinner every night, we go around and everyone has to say something that happened that day that they're grateful for.

We actually tried to do other things, but she kept refusing to do them. So eventually, eventually we got to a gratitude and she's willing to do that one. As I was thinking about the parable, I was thinking, you know, why that? Because we could do anything at the beginning of dinner, but we've chosen to do that. And I think it's for my wife and I, I think the idea of behaving in a way where people would be grateful for how you treat them and also being very grateful for other people and how lucky many of us are in life is really one of the core, not just like a moral thing, but a core reason for happiness for our daughter. So I was thinking about what are we trying to feed when we have that little practice that we do at the beginning of every dinner?

And it really is this idea of make sure you feed the other oriented part of yourself, not just the part that's for you only. Yeah. When I was growing up, dinner was with the nightly news on every night. So I can suspect that had we done gratitude every evening instead of the nightly news, I might be a different person. I had four siblings, so dinner for me was trying to eat as quickly as possible so that you could get more of the food. So I don't know what's worse. Yeah, yeah, I had two others. Let's jump in and

start talking about the book. I guess to start, what made you interested in rituals as something to write a book about? So for quite a few years, I'm a social psychologist by training, and I was working on happiness, which is, I guess, a pretty large and nebulous topic. But I was particularly interested in finding things that people could do to increase their happiness today, meaning not so much huge life decisions, you know, getting married and all this sort of stuff, but small things like if you had 30 minutes right now, do I have any advice for you on what to do to make yourself, you know, feel good? And the initial research was about using money for that. So how should we spend our money to

get more happiness out of it? And speaking of gratitude, one of the things we showed is spending on other people is much better for happiness than spending on yourself. But from that research, I think I got this idea of what are the small practices we can do every single day of our lives that might have an impact on the quality of our lives. And I got from that to outside the domain of money, but to ritual, which is I kept seeing in so many places in life and big events as well, like marriage and funerals, rituals come into play, but also just in people's everyday lives, these small little practices that people have in the morning or with their kids or with their spouse or with their teams at work that seem to be really important for them in their daily lives that I think we

didn't know a ton about as researchers, at least in my field. And I was hooked. Again, I really wanted to understand these smaller little rituals that people often come up with themselves from scratch and what role are they playing in our lives. So when we think about ritual, there are some other words that are close to it. We could think of ritual. You could also think of a routine. You could think of a habit. You could think of perhaps something that's even stronger than that, like a compulsion. What differentiates a ritual from those things?

A couple of things. i think it's important question in part because the point of the research on this book is not to say that more rituals is better you know it's not like the 10 secret rituals that you can do every day to be a happy person that's not what it is and the word compulsion is so important because we do see that rituals can go too far that you're trying to use them to improve your life but they can get a hold of you instead so one thing we always think about with rituals is it's not just more is better but use them in the places where they might help you the most so that they're not compulsions but they're helpful and then for habit there's some rituals that are close to habits and then others that are, so we usually don't make a habit out of getting married. For example,

I guess some people might, we're not trying to do it every day, you know, and get better at getting married. Maybe I've got a couple more under my belt than I might like, but I wouldn't call it habitual. Yeah. At least not publicly. Maybe it would be fair to say. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So some of the rituals that we do, they don't have the property of habit, but some for sure do. Our morning routine and what people do before they exercise, they tie their shoes in a particular way. And those things I think are closer to habits. For me, the big difference between rituals and habits is that habits tend to be kind of dry and unemotional. They're sort of things we do to get them done.

I got to go for a run today because it's good for me to go for a run. And when I finish the run, I check it off. And rituals often, it could be the exact same thing, but it's not dry. There's something more emotional or meaningful about it. And so you see athletes who say, you know, I always tie my shoes and I put this shoe on and I tie it like this. And then I put this shoe on and I tie it like this. And then I do this. And then I do this, you know, these very elaborate rituals that they do. And they're turning running from just something to get done into something more for them. And I think our rituals, the little

ones that we do every day, they often take us from going through the motions of life and add sometimes to those motions a little bit more emotion, meaning other things I think that are helpful for us. Yeah. You say rituals are emotional catalysts that energize, inspire, and elevate us. And you also go on to say that habit automates and ritual animates. to say that habit automates and ritual animates. By the way, let me just say good habits are good. Sure. I never mean to say don't have good habits. They're not their ways of time. I wish I had better habits. You know, I should exercise more too. But I think if you had a life of perfect habits, so imagine starting today, you always had perfect habits for the next 30 years, every single day, perfect habits.

I think at the end of the 30 years, you'd probably be very, very healthy, but would you look back and say, what an interesting and rich life I lived? Or would you say, maybe I spent too much time counting my steps. And that really was where it came for me was to say, of course we need to have these better habits, but life is not all about executing on our good habits. There's much, much more to it. And I think for many people, rituals play a role in kind of making life more interesting and more emotional. I mean, holidays that we have, in part, you know, we have like one or two a month. Most faiths and most cultures have a couple a month. And I think it's partly because life gets kind of boring. And so we insert these reminders to gather with family, for example, or celebrate something that's important to us. I think they serve this

really important role in enriching our lives. You tell a story in the book about how even as you were paying attention to ritual, you were a little like, I don't know, do I really have rituals or do I need rituals? And then you discuss when your daughter was born, you say, I instantly and unthinkingly transformed into a shamanic madman. Tell me more. I think anybody who's had a kid resonates. You know, when you have a kid, you go to the hospital or you could have a kid at home and maybe somebody is there for a little while. And then they basically say, why don't you take this thing and take care of it for the next 20 years with no guidance?

You know, nobody with you often. And the number one thing with new parents is it's all they talk about. And I did too, is sleep. You know, are you sleeping? Is the baby sleeping? How's the sleep? How's the nap? And it's like the most central thing in your life is to get this little creature to sleep because you know that it's good for them. And what do you do when you're left to

your own devices with this thing that you really want to sleep? What do people turn to? And what we found is that, and us as well as people very often turn to ritual. Now they don't say, What we found is that, and us as well, is people very often turn to ritual. Now, they don't say, hey, let's sit down and make a ritual and, you know, write it out. I don't mean it like that. But what happens is you start to have specific books that you read, specific songs that you sing. Like you do the bath at this time and then the book and then the song. My daughter, for some reason, she was a little bit older, started saying good night to the stairs as i walked up the stairs with her and if we skipped it we'd have to go back and say good

night to the stairs so i'm you know i'm a scientist saying good night to the stairs but at some point i realized you know why are we doing all of this and of course it was we were trying to help her transition from awake self to a sleep self. And one of the things we thought we might do just like we do with ourselves at night sometimes is have a little bedtime routine or ritual that we go through to try to get us from being awake to being asleep. I will say later, I realized it's completely unclear if it helped her sleep at all. We never really tested it, but I know that it helped us feel like we had some control over a situation that was really, really stressful and something

we really cared a lot about. So even if it didn't quite do the sleep thing that we were hoping, I think it had benefits for us. And rituals sometimes do that. They have an unusual benefit that isn't exactly what we thought they were going to do for us. Yeah, I think it's interesting. You talk about rituals as a response to uncertainty and stress. And so obviously for you, there was some uncertainty and stress in getting a child to go to sleep. As I was thinking about that, I was also wondering, I wonder with children, I was one, but I don't know what it's like to be your first couple years of life, right? I have no recollection of that, but it seems like it might be uncertain. Maybe children are drawn to this repetition, this ritual for the same reason certain adults might be. And that's just a theory. Completely. Everything must be a complete surprise and shock to them all the time. I mean, for one thing, they don't even know that

when objects disappear, they still exist. So, you know, if you put something in their field of view and then not, it's like you're a magic person having this thing reappear. And so they're really struggling to understand the physical world. And I do think the same sounds and the same words and the same people and the same smells do probably help them feel a sense of regularity so that they can actually regulate themselves down enough to maybe take a nap. Let's stay on this topic of rituals helping with uncertainty. You tell a story of B.F. Skinner, who's known for lots of behavioral things, but you tell a story about him in pigeons. And I was curious if you could share what these pigeons started doing and why.

This is in the 1950s, a guy who most of his research was about, people sometimes know these words like operant conditioning, classical conditioning. He worked with pigeons and rats and he would do things like have a machine with a bunch of buttons and levers on it. And if you pecked this one button three times, if you were a pigeon, you got a piece of food. And what he wanted to see is how quickly pigeons could learn that. So he's looking really at how do you reinforce behaviors and things like this. It was very practical in a sense. If I want something or someone to do a behavior, how do I encourage them to do that behavior?

Except he did this one funny piece of research where he decided to, same thing, like a big box with buttons and levers and stuff, pigeons pecking at it. And he decided that he would just have the food come out completely randomly. So no matter what they pulled or pushed or pecked or anything like that at random intervals, food would come out. So what pigeons should do is nothing. They should realize that it's random and just sit back and wait for the food, right? That's not what they do. They should realize that it's random and just sit back and wait for the food. That's not what they do. They start to peck and pull the levers and things like that. And what was so fascinating was they developed rituals. Like one pigeon would be like, I know what it is. It's three taps over there and then pull the lever. But a different pigeon would say it's four levers and then two pecks over there. So they actually, pigeons we're talking about, very quickly developed little superstitious rituals in the effort to control what we know

to be a completely random process. And I think humans are a little more sophisticated than pigeons, but I think we sometimes do the exact same thing, which is, I mean, the older you get, the more you realize very few things are in our control, unfortunately. And so how do we feel at least a sense of control? I think just like pigeons, one of the things that we do is use rituals to try to have that sense of control. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor.

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to decide. Follow the Big Take podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. You also talk about that fishermen who fish in choppier and more dangerous waters, those cultures are known to have more ritual than cultures who are fishing in safer waters. So anthropologists, of course, have been studying rituals for long, long before I started studying this topic. And they identified this idea that in the face of uncertainty, there seems to be this natural correlation where the more uncertain something is, the more rituals are brought to bear. kind of risky occupations, like fishing in uncertain, scary places, you're more likely to have these rituals than if you fish on a calm surface where there's no uncertainty whatsoever. And across many domains, actually, they were able to show that there is this natural relationship between uncertainty and ritual. For example, rain rituals, rain dance rituals, which have emerged many times in human history. On the one hand, you could say, I think we know that something we do on the ground here is not going

to cause it to rain. So why would they emerge? And of course, where they emerge is in cultures where there's unpredictable drought. So you can easily see why in this face of this uncertainty, I mean, this is life or death uncertainty, why some cultures would be more likely than others to develop practices to have them feel at least that they have some control over this very risky and upsetting event. So there's two ways to think about that, I think. One is to think, well, that's just ridiculous superstition and we should do away with it. Like why dance if it doesn't do any good? I think you're making a deeper point though, which is not that the rituals that we do necessarily cause the thing to happen that we want. They help us psychologically deal with the uncertainty that is there in a way that truly just staring down the uncertainty might not do.

That's right. And you know, if we were feeling a lack of control and we were incredibly stressed and anxious, if research showed that if we snapped our fingers, it would go away and then people still did rain dances, I would say, you don't need to do those anymore because I don't know if you knew this, but you can magically snap your fingers and all your anxiety goes away. But that's not how we're built. I wish we were, that we could just decide not to be anxious and worried, but we can't. We need to do something often to change how we're feeling. And one of the things that we do to change how we're feeling is we turn to ritual to help us go from one state to another state. And if you think of rain rituals in particular, it's true that they probably don't make rain come down. But what they do is, if you think of rain rituals in particular, it's true that they probably don't make rain come down. But what they do is if you think of a time of drought, what happens is

conflict starts to develop in groups. Because of a scarce resource, we start to, you know, I'm not going to share anything with you now because I have to keep it for me. And what these rain rituals do is they bring us all together as a community and remind us that we're a community and remind us that we have a shared history. And by the way, people were doing this 300 years ago and they got through this drought. So by doing this practice now, we're actually providing real evidence that we can together get through this. So a skeptic, as you said, could say, stop doing those things. You know, it's not making it rain. Anyone who understands humans would say, I think it actually is very, very valuable use of time in terms of helping people through these

really difficult times. Hi, everyone. One of the things that I know many of you struggle with is anxiety. And very recently, I shared some tips on managing anxiety in our newsletter. Specifically, I shared a practice on clarifying your values. In the practice, you write down one or two of your core values and then identify one action step that aligns with them. I find that taking one positive action towards things that matter to me really helps reduce anxiety. Also, I have a reflection question. What positive experiences have you had today that you could focus on instead of your anxiety? Every Wednesday, I send out a newsletter called A Weekly Bite of Wisdom for a Wiser, Happier You.

And in it, I give tips and reflections like you just got. And it's an opportunity for you to pause, reflect, and practice. It's a way to stay focused on what's important and meaningful to you. Each month, we focus on a theme. This month's theme is anxiety. And next month, we'll be focusing on acceptance. To sign up for these bits of weekly wisdom, go to goodwolf.me slash newsletter. I've got a question.

I can't quite compose it here, but it's something along the lines of, is a ritual still valuable in times of uncertainty, even if you know that it's something along the lines of, is a ritual still valuable in times of uncertainty, even if you know that it doesn't impact the outcome? So we know why rituals make sense for people doing a rain dance. Now we can look back anthropologically and we go, well, did all these things for the culture, et cetera. They didn't know that at the time we do. So if I know that whatever the thing is I'm about to do, isn't going to affect the outcome, are there still ways for it to be valuable for me? You take your baseball hat and turn it inside out and put it back on because you're rooting for your team. Every fan can do it.

You've got 30,000 people all with a hat on inside out or whatever it might be. On some level, you're aware that turning the hat inside out does not guarantee victory. Of course, we're not completely clueless. So why do we do that, for example? And I think, again, it's we really want our team to win and we have this shared thing now right we're all doing this to root for them together so we're getting this feeling of solidarity that i think is a really useful powerful feeling to get that we can't really get unless we're doing something ritualistic together the wave is of course is

another amazing example. We're literally working together with this thing to feel more connected to each other. So yeah, it's true. It's not going to affect the performance of the players, but it's going to affect our experience and sometimes in a very big way to make us feel more connected and a little less worried. Yeah. My brain is like the hitter is going to glance up here to right field just for a second, and he's going to see that I do not have my hat turned inside out. And he's going to inside feel sad. Exactly.

Like, as much as I know it, it doesn't affect it. And yet, we're always trying to just grasp for, like, it just seems natively wrong that the way we do something just doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. And yet we know that to rationally be true. That's right. And we also think, you know, even people at home will turn their hat inside out who are watching on TV and you know, they can't see you then, but there we're thinking some kind of karma or something is watching me right now to see if I turn my hat inside out and somehow that will get into the batter's head. And you know what I mean? In the one hand, what a weird thing we do. On the other hand, it's actually perfectly sensible and we do stuff like this all the time.

Yeah. Yeah. So one of the things that I think about when I think about ritual, particularly the types of rituals that you do regularly. So there's rituals that you do ideally once in a while, like being married. I assume, you know, you don't do it often enough that that ritual is boring. But a lot of things that become rituals, we do them regularly. And if the goal of a ritual is to sort of catalyze emotion to some degree, is there anything that you've learned about how we can keep those rituals that we do very regularly filled with emotion. Because repetition often drains emotion out of something, which then renders the ritual effect of it less

useful. Yes, that's right. I mean, many, many things that we do in life, the more we do them, the sicker we are of them in a sense. You know, if you eat chocolate cake, the first bite's amazing. And by the 10th bite, you're still going to eat it because it's chocolate cake, the first bite's amazing. And by the 10th bite, you're still going to eat it because it's chocolate cake, but it's getting a little bit worse and worse over time. And so there is this sense that for lots of things in life, repetition leads to less enjoyment or less good feelings. But there's something about rituals actually where the more we do them, the more they get imbued with meaning. So it isn't quite enjoyment in the sense of,

you know, I'm happy that I'm eating cake. Sometimes rituals do fill us with joy, but the idea of meaning actually is a little bit more elusive. And one of the things that does produce meaning for us is in fact, repeating things over time, they can become imbued with more and more meaning, even if they're not as exciting as chocolate cake, more and more meaning over time. And so the fact that I'm doing this, you know, I've been doing this for years. If it's a religious practice, for example, I know that my parents and grandparents did this.

And I know in some faiths, people have been doing this for thousands of years. That means that every time I do it, it's an enormously meaningful act. It's connecting me to my ancestry, to my parents, to my family. And so when I do it again, it's not actually getting worse. It's getting more, more meaning because it's being even more built into something that's really important to me. It seems to me that we need to cultivate that though, right? Because I can think of certain things that I've done again and again in life that could have meaning and also could not. I'll just give a couple examples. I'm a recovering addict and alcoholic, and I went to more meetings in my early years of recovery than you could shake a stick at,

and they read the same thing at the beginning of every meeting. Hundreds of times, thousands of times of hearing the 12 steps read. There is a way in which that could become progressively more meaningful. There are ways in which it could make me insane. I've also spent a fair amount of time practicing Zen Buddhism, and Zen Buddhism is a very ritualized thing. You do certain things in a certain way every time. And again, that can be something that has meaning and it can also be something where, you know, the phrase going through the emotions. So it seems that there is something we're bringing to it that is allowing it to remain meaningful and not become habitual. I think that's right. And I think we

didn't discover in the research, for example, that there are some rituals that work on everyone. Imagine we discovered that if you clap six times and stomp 12 times, it works on every single human. It does something. And that really isn't what we see. It's much more idiosyncratic than that. So the same behaviors could mean nothing to you and be part of a very important ritual to me. And we see people who in one domain say these rituals are doing nothing for me might in another domain really get a lot of benefit out of rituals. So even if you're some, if the 12 steps being read doesn't do anything for you, it may be that there are other things in life that are ritualistic that do something for you.

And so partly I think what people do over time, not necessarily consciously, but they try to figure out in what domains of life are these kinds of practices helpful for me and which ones I see that they land for other people. But for me, they just, they don't really do anything. So I'm not going to keep doing them. And that is actually for me, very interesting about rituals because it means it isn't just that there's a cookie cutter ritual that we know works for all humans. It's much more complex than that. It's really a very individual thing, what works for me. And of course, then people also make up their own completely from scratch. And those can become very meaningful to us as well. Yeah, I was going to say the examples I just gave were rituals that by being part of those groups, I inherited those rituals, right?

And your ritual for putting your daughter to sleep was one that you made up. And throughout the book, you sort of make this distinction. Yeah, there are some rituals that are tradition-based, but a ritual doesn't have to be tradition-based. It can be completely made up, as you said. And often we use both kinds in different situations in life. When we've asked people about grief, for example, you know, think of someone you love who passed away, and we ask people, what did you do? We don't say, which rituals did you do? We say, what did you do? And people will say, you know, there was a funeral, whatever

their faith or culture is. They say, yeah, we did that. Everyone got together and we did that practice. And it was incredibly helpful. These legacy rituals that are handed to us play an incredibly important role in our lives. So I'm never saying those aren't useful because they really are useful. But then people would say, but I also did this other thing actually to honor that person. One woman said, I washed his car every weekend the way he used to do. There's definitely no 2000 year old text that says wash a car. Number one, there weren't any cars. Right, right. But what is she doing? And of course you can see what she's doing. Obviously her husband loved his car and took good care of it. Now he's gone. She went to the funeral and got the social support.

But she's doing this private thing that she came up with entirely on her own that's very idiosyncratic and special to their relationship. And we see that in domain after domain. You know, people get married and there's a wedding. And then couples tell us about the little things that they do. So we always see this combination. the little things that they do. So that we always see this combination. People are sort of looking between the official ones that are handed down and the ones that kind of are bottom up that we come up with ourselves. And most people use both in some different situations. So I'd like to talk about a couple of those different situations. We're going to get to

relationship rituals a little bit later on. but first I'd like to talk about, you've alluded to it a little bit, the rituals of high-performing people. If you want to waste, well, maybe not waste an afternoon, spend an afternoon, type in an athlete's name or a musician's name or a singer's name and the word ritual. And it's extraordinary how many of them have very elaborate rituals. And in fact, if there's a celebrity that it doesn't come up, it's not necessarily that they don't have one. It's just nobody reported on it yet.

I mean, they're really, really common for high performers that they have something that they do before they go on stage, before the match, before the game. Tennis players before every serve, you can conjure them up, actually. I can show the steps of different tennis players, rituals, and tennis fans can say, I know exactly who that is. So I can put up Rafael Nadal's ritual. And by the third step, people say that's Rafa, you know, cause it's the headband. And then he picks his wedgie. He does all these specific things. Serena Williams has the same thing with bouncing the ball a specific number of times, you know, these amazing performers. And it's funny because, for example, Nadal will say, I know I don't need to do it. It's just that when I do it,

I feel like I'm ready to go. And a lot of high performers explain it exactly that way. It's almost like the rally cap. We know it's not going to cause a victory, but when we engage in these practices, it does something for us. And these high performers, if you think of the stress that they are, I can't even imagine what it's like to play at Wimbledon. The stress that they are under is so profound that you see them very, very often turn, just like the choppy water fishermen, they're turning to these rituals to try to get a little bit of calm before they have to engage in this incredibly difficult behavior. Yeah, many of our guests have to engage in great amounts of ritual to feel confident enough to come on this show.

So I'm really impressed with how you've just kind of showed. I don't know what your pregame was for this. It's really interesting that we know the ritual isn't doing anything externally for, say, Nadal or the basketball player who spins the ball X number of times, bounces it three times before a free throw. It's not magic on the ball. And yet it is profoundly doing something internally for them that actually does affect their performance. So to say that it doesn't do anything is not quite accurate. It doesn't do anything externally. Researchers have suggested that if you think about anxiety, everyday anxiety, but clinical anxiety as well, one of the properties

of anxiety is that it spirals. So, you know, if you have a big meeting at work and you're worried about it, first you're worried about the meeting, but then anxiety has this property where it just keeps going and going. So you're worried, you know, the meeting isn't going to go well. I'm probably going to get fired, probably going to get a divorce So you're worried, you know, the meeting isn't going to go well. I'm probably going to get fired. Probably going to get a divorce because I get fired. You know, that's what anxiety is. It really spirals out of control. And these researchers have suggested that one thing that rituals do for us is they occupy

enough of our mental space that we can't spiral as much. So it's not as though if we do them, we're not nervous anymore. We're still nervous about the meeting. I bet Nadal is still nervous about serving. Yeah. But it kind of contains the anxiety a little bit. For me, I think it's not that these rituals make you perform better. I could do Nadal's ritual and I still stink at tennis.

You know, the ritual itself is not going to make me good at tennis. But I think it allows people to perform to their potential. It gets some things out of the way, at least, so that you can do what it is that you're good at. So you've just described ritual as a way of working with anxiety. And we sort of started off by talking about compulsions. And OCD appears to be that mechanism gone awry. I believe that if I do these things, that then I will feel settled or it will do something and I do them, but it doesn't really work. So what did you learn about where that goes awry or how to know when it's gone awry? If you think about what people are often doing with rituals is they're engaged

in the ritual in order to then do something else. So Nadal is doing his wedgie picking in order to then serve or musicians are doing stuff backstage in order to then go on stage and perform. Or even something like when you leave the house in the morning, if you double check, if the door is locked, you're doing that in order to feel okay about leaving the house and you don't have to worry about it all day. So there's this, the ritual in order to accomplish other goals in life. And what can happen with OCD is we lose the link between those two. So instead of checking the lock in order to leave the house and go to work or hang out with my friends, I'm checking the lock in order to check the lock. Instead of the link to another thing that we're trying to do,

it becomes a circular loop. And one of the ways to say that a ritual has gotten too compulsive is in fact, is it interfering with other things in your life? And if it starts to interfere with other things in your life, you know, we don't know exactly the point at which, but you can see when it starts to interfere with other things in your life, that's when clinically you might say, we need to pull that back. People who use them helpfully in a sense, they leave enough time and space to do them, but they finish them. I mean, if Nadal picked his wedgie the entire match, he'd lose 6-0, 6-0, 6-0. Right.

We have to perform them at a time and place and then accomplish the other things we wanted to accomplish. Right, right. If mid-volley, he was like, hang on a second, I got to check this wedgie, he would have a problem. Yeah. Be a good viral moment though, I think, but yeah. It's interesting because as I was reading your book, I started thinking about rituals that I might have for performance. And there's one that I do before podcast interviews usually, which is, it actually serves a real purpose. It's called the announcer's test. And it's this very sort of complicated one hand, two ducks, three squawking geese,

four limerick oysters, five corpulent porpoises, six, I could go on, it goes on. So on one hand, it warms up my mouth, it connects my mouth and my brain. And I think it's also slightly ritualistic in that I do it before I do that. And it helps, you know. I think when I sit down to do focused work, there's a playlist that I put on that's always kind of the same. And I just think it primes my brain in some way that this is now time for concentration. So I think if we all look, we have some of these things. So I think if we all look, we have some of these things. And I've actually thought about after reading the book, would I actually do better with even more of them?

You know, thinking about the discussion about compulsion as well. So one risk of rituals is that they can become compulsive. But another one is actually you have those things that you do pre-show. And if you do them, you feel more ready to go for the show. But there's a risk as well, which is if you do them, you feel more ready to go for the show. But there's a risk as well, which is if you get interrupted and you can't do it, you actually feel worse. You feel even less ready to go than probably if you never had any ritual at all. So they're funny in the sense that it's not just that rituals are good, it's that they provoke emotion in us. And it's

a risk and reward. It can either make you feel great and ready to go, or you can feel like, I'm not going to be able to do this at all today because I couldn't say the whole porpoises thing, you know, the way that I want to do. Kids ruin every single ritual we've ever had because they always come in and interfere with everything. So I think that's important as well, that it isn't that rituals just, you do them and it's great. It's you do them and they're going to make you feel, but what you feel is and it's great. It's you do them and they're going to make you feel. But what you feel is very, very variable. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. The forces shaping markets and the economy are often hiding behind a blur of numbers. So that's why we created The Big Take from Bloomberg Podcasts, to give you the context you need to make sense of it all. Every day in just 15 minutes, we dive into one global business story that matters. You'll hear from Bloomberg journalists like Matt Levine. A lot of this meme stock stuff is, I think, embarrassing to the SEC. Amanda Mull, who writes our Business Week Buying Power column. Very few companies who go viral are like totally prepared for what that means.

And Zoe Tillman, senior legal reporter. Courts are not supposed to decide elections. Courts are not really supposed to play a big role in choosing our elected leaders. It's for the voters to decide. Follow the Big Take podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. I want to change direction just a little bit here, which is something that you and a colleague found in your research that you call emo diversity. Share with me what emo diversity is. I mentioned earlier that for a few years I was studying happiness and how to help people be happier. And partly that's because if you ask people, they say, I'd like to be happier. So we try to then help them, you know, be happier. But I think just as the older you get, the more you realize nothing is in your control. The older you get, you realize that life is much more complicated

emotionally than just trying to be happy, that there's all kinds of emotions that we're trying to get that aren't necessarily happiness. They're different things. So if you think of something like pride, for example, we'd like to feel proud of ourselves and we want to feel proud of our kids, but also something like sadness. You know, I don't hope that I'm sad today, but if I think of times that I've been sad in my life, I've learned a ton and I've grown through those times as well. So just trying to be happy doesn't really capture the full richness of life. And this idea of emodiversity, which is a silly name, and we wish we'd come up with a different name,

to be honest. But the idea of it is to look at the whole universe of emotions that you have, sadness and fear and happiness and joy and all of these emotions, and see if the mix of those emotions predicts your feeling that you're having a good life. And that's what we find in the research actually, is that it isn't just having positive emotions is good, although that's nice. It's actually this mix sometimes that makes us feel like our life is going the way we wanted it to go. Yeah, you say that it's associated with measurable benefits in our well-being. What sort of benefits to overall well-being were you measuring that people who had more diversity of emotion? I agree, emo diversity is like the worst name for a 90s

band ever. Exactly, exactly. Out of Nebraska on the Bright Eyes label or something. Yeah, no, not even signed to Bright Eyes. They would never have been that good. You're right. You're right. Okay. That's a niche joke right there for sure. But what were the wellbeing measurements that you were sort of seeing in people who had more emotional diversity? People who study happiness, there's many flavors of happiness, but two that I think we sometimes conflate them, but they're quite different from each other. One is happiness in the moment from how do you feel right now? Do you feel happy right now? But another question is more your life overall.

How happy are you with your life and the way it's going? So I could be very unhappy all day today and still tell you, no, no, my life overall, I still feel really good about. So they're correlated with each other, but they're actually quite different from each other. And what we were looking at actually was the day-to-day kind of emotions, the happiness today, the sadness today. What does the mix of those add up to for that larger feeling of life satisfaction? So it isn't so much that a variance of emotions helps you right now. It's that when people tell us they experience more of these emotions in this mix, they also tell us that they're more satisfied with their life overall.

And that feeling is a great, great feeling to have, you know, that on some scale from one to 10, that if I'm a one and I feel like my life is going that badly, all kinds of negative things are associated with that. And the higher I get on that scale, of course, the better off I'm feeling about my life. It's funny. I had this conversation with the psychologist Paul Bloom recently, actually. And I was saying that as somebody who has a naturally more diverse emotional system, meaning prone to some lower moods, right? Me, that maybe my way of measuring satisfaction, I should stick

with ask me about how my life is in general question, that that's a better way for me to measure than moment to moment, because I have a tendency towards melancholy at times. And so we had a little lively discussion about, well, you know, there's certainly people that argue that you're deceiving yourself, right? That the way you know whether you're happy is what you just ask often enough. And for you to tell me later that you're happy even when you weren't happy is just deception. But I think there's more to it than that. And he wasn't arguing that point. He was just saying that's the way some people view it.

You know, we started a project years ago that I don't remember why we didn't follow through on it. But the idea was, so imagine we have this 10 point scale of happiness with your life overall, this life satisfaction. And somebody says they're a 10, they're having the best life in the world. The idea was to ask them, you know, every day for a month about all the different emotions they were feeling. And the point of that was to say, you might, you might think that someone who says they're

a 10 out of 10 on life overall, that every minute of every day, they're saying it's great. Life is great. I'm happy. I'm happy. I'm happy. But that's not what happens, right? So even people who are the happiest with their life overall have some days where they're really sad or really afraid or really anxious.

So sometimes we have this wrong theory. I think that in order to have that high life satisfaction, if I'm feeling sad today, it must mean that I'm not satisfied with my life because I'm feeling sad. But in fact, it's all a distribution, right? So of course the happiest people with their lives feel these negative emotions too. They might feel them less than some other people, but humans feel a range of emotions no matter how they're doing in their life overall. So we thought maybe people had almost like an unrealistic expectation of what it would look like to feel really good about your life overall.

And we wanted to help people see that, no, no, no, no, no, no. Even people who have the very best life according to them, still a lot like you have these moments and days that are really tough. So people actually would rate their life a 10? Some people will, yes. Yeah. I find them disturbing to be honest. Me too.

I mean, I just feel like this is, again, I think some of this is temperament. I think if you asked me how my life was in almost any time in my life, I would probably say about a seven and a half, regardless of what's happening, which I don't know really even what that says about me, but I think it's kind of true, you know? Well, I'm Irish Catholic. So if I said, you know, I'm a nine out of 10, my family would say, what do you think you're better than us now? So I think we've got some caps for various reasons on our numbers. Exactly. I think I'm in that category of, I can always imagine better and I can certainly imagine much worse, right? Given that, I think I'm happy to be in the upper realm, not the 40% or four, four out of 10. So let's talk about

another thing that contributes to a good life, which is the ability to actually appreciate the moments in life that are good. One term for this that has been used is savoring. What did you find out about rituals and savoring or the ability to appreciate the actual good moments of our lives? Savoring is one of my favorite words because it's typically completely free and yet it has an enormous impact on our happiness and our enjoyment of life. Because if I'm eating chocolate, I can either just shove it down my throat or I can savor it a little bit as I eat it. In any case, the chocolate costs the same amount. It isn't going to take me that much longer to savor it, but I'm going to take from the very same food way more enjoyment if I just take a beat, one beat to savor it instead of just scarf it down. And I think that is something that rituals do for us is they bump us

out of, let's just eat, let's just move on. Let's just quickly get to the next task. And they remind us to slow down a little bit and appreciate things. So, I mean, if you get a cake on a bad day, what I would do is just eat the cake by myself. You know what I mean? Yeah. I wouldn't savor it. I would just say I'm having cake. But then we do things like birthday cakes.

It's still just a cake. But what are we doing? We're saying, no, no, no, we're not just going to eat this cake. Everybody hold off. Nobody eat the cake yet. Kids are like trying to get the frosting. We say, don't touch the frosting until we put candles in the cake, sing a song, blow out the candles, make a wish, all of these things, because we're trying to help people savor

this cake and make it more than just cake by inserting a ritual around it. Now it's a celebration of a rite of passage for you. It's a celebration that we all love you and support you. It's just cake and a couple of candles. But by adding ritual, we savor it. We elongate the meaning that we can get out of these otherwise very simple experiences. I think about this often because I love to eat and read at the same time. And there's a part of me, particularly the part of me that's practiced a lot of Zen Buddhism, that's like, you should just eat, give all your attention to your food. And yet, I think for me, the combination of those things is ritualistic in its way. The two

of them together, to me, are better than not doing it. At least that's my justification for quote unquote, not eating mindfully. And they're not taking away from each other. It sounds like for you. Right. Yeah. I mean, I probably might pay a little bit more attention to the food if I wasn't reading, but again, it's the whole thing is deeply satisfying to me. It's almost as if a ritual involves singing and dancing. You wouldn't say, well, singing and dancing at the same time is ruining the ritual. You would say, no, singing and dancing is the ritual, in fact, for this person. So these different elements can be additive rather than taking away from each other.

What is conceptual consumption? This is an idea that we had a few years ago, which is, of course, when we consume, we're consuming actual things like music or food or drink or whatever it is. But very often when we consume, we're also consuming ideas and emotions at the same time. One of the examples that I think about a lot is my daughter and I make a apple pie that my grandmother made, who's no longer with us. So I make this pie with my daughter and we eat it and it tastes exactly the same because we have her recipe. So what am I eating? You know, what am I consuming really when my daughter and I make this and eat it? Yes, it's a pretty good apple pie. I bet it's not the best apple pie in the world, right? That's not the point. I'm actually bringing back my grandmother all the way down to my daughter and sharing that with her. I don't know the word for what it is that I'm consuming, but it's nostalgia, it's memory, it's meaning.

And if I don't have the pie, I can think about my grandmother for sure, and I can tell my daughter about my grandmother. But there's something about these rituals of consumption that bring us, I think, a little more close to it. They're a little more present when we do these kinds of rituals from the past. It allows us to bring the past into the present in, I think, really, really valuable ways. And we could buy an apple pie that's way better from a store, I'm sure, but we lose all of the other concepts that we got to consume by making this particular one ourselves. Well, I think the word conceptual is the interesting part of that. We hit on this a little bit earlier when we were saying that part of what keeps a ritual from becoming just something you go through the motions is you're bringing something to it.

You're consciously, conceptually imbuing it with something. And that's kind of what you're saying here. You could make your grandmother's recipe apple pie, but if you weren't conscious of what you were doing, it wouldn't have the same thing, right? It's the fact that you are conscious of the fact that I'm doing something that ties me back to my grandmother and all that. So again, I think it's this thing that you're too. Yeah, I think that's right. Cause I could have discovered the same recipe and not known the source. Then I might say, this isn't very good apple pie. You know what I mean? But because of this link, exactly as you're saying,

it's not about the pie. It's about all of this other emotion and meaning that we're bringing to it. You also described like going to a pizza parlor. You and your family have gone to forever and there being a link there. So are you, when you're there, sort of intentionally choosing to cultivate that relationship with the past? In the north end of Boston, which used to be a very Italian neighborhood, so it's amazing Italian food there. There's this kind of hole in the wall called Regina Pizzeria. It's been there for a very long time. My parents went there when they were teenagers because they grew up in Dorchester in Boston. And so I take my daughter there now. Again, it's the taste of the pizza. I went there with my parents as a kid. So I have that in me, but I also have this idea of them as teenagers going there. I wasn't with them there, but it's so interesting. And it's interesting for my daughter to think about, hey, your grandparents, when they were 17, sat right over there. And the smell of

the place and the pizza is important to get those memories out. It brings them back into the present again. I have no idea if it's the best pizza in the world. I couldn't even begin to figure out how to remove all these meanings and emotion from it and actually just try to taste the pizza because we got to imbue it. And I think it's a gift. It's just pizza, but we can imbue it with all of these other things if we really, as you said, are mindful about it and thinking about what we're doing when we consume. When you said that, it made me think of the fact that we just will claim like, this is the best pizza in the world, as if like we've had more than like 10 different kinds.

And of course, the best pizza in the world is always a restaurant that's within 30 minutes of where you live. Right. Amazingly. Amazingly. Yes. Yes. But you're right to you. When we say best, we don't mean best. We mean favorite. best. We don't mean best. We mean favorite, you know, but it's a funny word choice. So let's talk in our remaining few minutes here about rituals in relationships. Talk to me about what you found about the value of relationships that have rituals in them. We can ask couples very simple questions about, you know, how satisfied they are with their relationship. How committed do you feel to your relationship? We get a sense of how well they're doing as a couple, how they feel about each other. And then we can try to figure out, well, what are the things that predict whether they're feeling good or bad about the relationship? And of course, feeling listened to is an important

element of feeling like you're in a good relationship. So there's many, many factors. But one of the things that we see is when we ask couples, hey, is there anything the two of you do that's kind of unique to you and special? And you make sure to do it regularly, you know, every day, once a week, once a month, anything like that. And varies from study to study, but two thirds to three quarters of couples say, you know what? Yes. And then we say, well, what is it? And they say the cutest, most endearing things you've ever heard in your entire life. One couple that I love said every time before we eat, we clink our silverware together. Another couple said we always kiss in threes. I don't know when we started, but we've been doing it for 20 years. But another

couple will say we always kiss in twos. The specifics of these little rituals vary pretty widely from couple to couple. But what we see is couples who say they have one of those, it's predictive of how they feel about their relationship overall. Now, it doesn't mean that if you start clinking forks with your partner that you're going to be amazingly happy instantly. That's not really how they work. But this idea that these shared little practices are a signal of the broader relationship for us was very interesting and very powerful. As I read that, I got to thinking, well, did Ginny and I have rituals? And I thought of like one, and I sort of mentioned it to her and she then rattled off like eight others,

which I was like, oh yeah, I hadn't been thinking of them, but there's a lot there. The saddest part in the book is, and I'm not going from where I just was to this, saying that this is us, right? Because I actually, the minute she said it, I recognize indeed they are rituals and are meaningful. But the saddest part of the book was describing where one partner thought there was this really meaningful ritual and the other partner just thought it was just something they did. And that was a really sad part of the book. It is, you know, if we get both members of a couple and we interview them separately, you know, independent reports of the relationship, most of the time, both people say, yes, we have

something. And yes, here's what it is, which is what you did as well. You had one that you both identified. Yes, this is ours. There's a small percent of couples where they both say, no, we don't have anything. I don't know what to make of them exactly. But as you said, for me, the saddest thing is where we interview one person and they say, oh my God, we have this wonderful thing. You know, we've kissed in threes forever and something, something. And the other person says, we don't have anything like that. And those couples,

I think luckily they're not less happy than couples who agree they have none, but they're no happier. Meaning it isn't the thing where if one of you has it, you get halfway there. It's unless you both share it together, there's no benefit at all in the data. And I think that's sad that people disagree about that, but also telling in terms of what it means really to have a relationship ritual and why they might actually be so predictive of our overall feelings. Yep. And I found it helpful to think about some things that we do that could go either way. When she mentioned one of them being a ritual and I thought, well, I mean, we do that,

but all of a sudden the next couple of times I did it, it was imbued with something different. Yeah. I was able to go, oh, this could be something that I just do, or this could be something that I could put meaning behind, evoke emotion by turning it into something that's a little more ritualized, which I found a really helpful takeaway from the book. A lot of relationship rituals involve coffee and tea in the morning. You know, one person makes it for the other person and brings it to the other person. And there was a couple of chat of a while ago where they had been, I can't remember actually if it was the husband or the wife who'd been bringing the coffee, but the bringer of the coffee didn't see it as a ritual. They just saw it as

like, well, this is just something I do in the morning for them because I love them. But when their partner said, you know what, he always does this thing in the morning and it really means a lot to me, just like you, now it changes the meaning of the action. He's doing it all along and it's important to him, but now by owning it and recognizing it, it can have a little bit more resonance. You know, the next time we clink our silverware, there's a little more to it now where we say, oh my gosh, this is actually our ritual that we've been doing forever. Yeah. Well, it's exactly that. It's bringing of coffee.

And I think it goes back to something we've said several different times, which is in certain cases for rituals to work takes us bringing something to them. You know, I mentioned Zen. There's a thing we do at the end, right? There's a certain way that you bow and do this stuff. And when I consciously think about what it means, it suddenly is something that has importance. When I, on the other hand, I'm just like, it's the thing I do at the end of this. And now I can get out of here and go, it's gone. And so it was the same thing with the coffee. The minute I realized like, oh, I am doing it out of care and love, but let me own that. Like, let me consciously

choose it again. And one thing I love about this is that, again, it's not like add 30 rituals to your life tomorrow. Right. But a lot of it is that, in fact, just seeing where they're already operating and appreciating it a little bit more. And that in and of itself, actually, people say like you say, I'm getting more out of it now. I'm glad that I recognize it. Well, I think that is a beautiful place to wrap up. Thank you so much, Mike, for coming on. I've enjoyed the conversation. I enjoyed the book. And thank you. Thank you so much. It was really fun. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast.

When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really

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The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Decisions Decisions, the podcast where boundaries are pushed and conversations get candid. Join your favorite hosts, me, Weezy WTF, and me, Mandy B, as we dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love. That's right. Every Monday and Wednesday, we both invite you

to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability, and authenticity, we share our personal journeys navigating our 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships, and engage in thought-provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations. From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that will resonate with your experiences, From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that will resonate with your experiences, Decisions Decisions is going to be your go-to source for the open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world. Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections. Tune in and join the conversation. Listen to Decisions Decisions on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The forces shaping markets and the economy are often hiding behind a blur of numbers.

So that's why we created The Big Take from Bloomberg Podcasts, to give you the context you need to make sense of it all. Every day in just 15 minutes, we dive into one global business story that matters. You'll hear from Bloomberg journalists like Matt Levine. A lot of this meme stock stuff is, I think, embarrassing to the SEC. Follow The Big Take podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.