Harvard Professor: How To Reset Your Life, Find Purpose & Make Life Exciting Again | Michael Norton

Summary

Highlights

• Rituals evoke a mix of emotions essential for personal growth and happiness, described as emotional diversity 🌀.
• Elite performers often have detailed rituals that mentally prepare them for their high-stakes events, showcasing the power of ritualized habits 🏃‍♂️.
• Morning rituals help create a predictable structure amid life's unpredictability, benefitting mental health 🧘‍♀️.
• Cultural rituals provide a sense of belonging and continuity, while secular substitutes like festivals also offer communal bonds 🎪.
• The dark side of rituals can emerge when they become excessive or restrictive, as seen in obsessive rituals 🔒.

Key Takeaways

• Rituals provide a shortcut to various emotions and enhance well-being by adding emotional richness to life 🎭.
• Incorporating rituals into routines, like a morning ritual, can ground us and enhance our sense of control each day ☀️.
• Cultural shifts and secularization may lead to the loss of rituals, yet new ones are often created or adapted, like Burning Man 🔥.
• Rituals can improve performance and focus, as seen in athletes like Rafael Nadal and Serena Williams 🎾.
• Commercial entities capitalize on rituals, enhancing consumer experiences under the guise of tradition 🍻.

Overview

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction to Rituals The chapter titled 'Introduction to Rituals' explores how rituals can improve health. The discussion highlights research on 'emo diversity,' which refers to the wide range of emotions provoked by rituals. This emotional diversity is likened to biodiversity, emphasizing the richness in emotional experiences that rituals can bring.
• 00:30 - 01:00: Emo Diversity and Health The concept of emotional diversity is explored, emphasizing the value of experiencing a wide range of emotions for personal growth and well-being. Emotions like sadness and fear are shown to contribute to learning and development. Rituals, such as marriages and funerals, serve as pathways to experiencing this emotional diversity, providing a broad spectrum of emotional experiences that can enhance overall well-being.
• 01:00 - 01:30: Significance of Rituals in Habits The chapter discusses the significance of rituals in forming habits. Rituals are described as a means to unlock a wide range of emotions, including awe. The conversation suggests that rituals provide a wonderful opportunity to introduce and sustain various health habits such as exercise, movement, meditation, and journaling.
• 01:30 - 02:00: Elite Athletes and Rituals The chapter discusses the importance and prevalence of rituals among elite athletes, noting that these rituals are often elaborate and integral to performance. A conversation with elite runners highlighted the specificity and intricacy of rituals, such as the way they tie their shoes, emphasizing the psychological and performance benefits these practices provide.
• 02:00 - 02:30: Rituals for Control and Routine This chapter discusses the ritualistic aspect of a seemingly mundane task: tying shoe laces. It emphasizes how athletes often turn the act of tying their shoes into a ceremonial routine before they run, as a way to mentally prepare themselves and feel ready. The chapter describes the specific order and method they use, such as which foot to start with and how socks are meticulously addressed. The discussion revolves around whether these rituals are followed during practice or just for significant events.
• 02:30 - 03:00: Traditional and Modern Rituals The chapter "Traditional and Modern Rituals" explores the importance and prevalence of rituals in different areas, especially highlighting those related to competitive events like races. It points out how people often engage in smaller, more frequent rituals as practice, and gradually more elaborate ones as the main event approaches, particularly when the stress level is heightened. The narrative suggests that these rituals are crucial for preparing individuals mentally for their tasks ahead, drawing from the example of elite runners who rely on rituals to get into the right mindset before important races.
• 03:00 - 03:30: Impact of Secularization on Rituals The chapter titled 'Impact of Secularization on Rituals' explores the significance of rituals, particularly morning routines, in providing stability in an individual's life amidst the uncertainties of the external world. The author suggests that having a structured routine can be beneficial for many, offering grounding despite the secular influences that might otherwise disconnect people from traditional rituals.
• 03:30 - 04:00: Atheist Church and Social Support The chapter discusses the concept of 'Atheist Church' and its role in providing social support. It emphasizes the idea of finding control in daily routines, such as the first minutes of the morning, which prepares individuals for the day. Additionally, rituals are highlighted as a means to unlock various emotions and maintain a sense of control.
• 04:00 - 04:30: Concerts and Community Rituals The chapter 'Concerts and Community Rituals' discusses the chaotic nature of daily life, particularly for those with children, and how routines or rituals help to manage this chaos. In the morning, people establish rituals to prepare themselves to face the world without stress. Conversely, bedtime rituals help individuals unwind and release the stress accumulated throughout the day. The chapter explores the concept of rituals and routines as crucial tools for maintaining balance in a hectic world.
• 04:30 - 05:00: Creating Personal Rituals The chapter discusses the concept of rituals, using examples like Christmas and Ramadan, to explore the impact and significance of annual cultural celebrations on personal and collective levels.
• 05:00 - 05:30: Rituals vs. Routines The chapter titled 'Rituals vs. Routines' explores the concept of rituals, particularly in a religious context, such as fasting, which is a communal practice observed for a month by some cultures. It also touches on the idea of daily morning rituals that individuals may engage in. The discussion raises a question about the impact of societies becoming less religious and more secular, and whether this shift leads to the loss of important rituals.
• 05:30 - 06:00: Meaning and Emotion in Rituals The chapter explores the concept of rituals, distinguishing between traditional religious or cultural rituals that are inherited and personal or newly invented rituals. It discusses how rituals are often passed down through generations, taught by parents or faiths, while also highlighting modern creations, such as those seen at cultural events like Burning Man.
• 06:00 - 06:30: Temptation Bundling and Habits The chapter discusses the concept of Temptation Bundling, which is a strategy for building habits by pairing enjoyable activities with less enjoyable tasks. It draws a parallel to communal activities such as those at Burning Man, which can resemble religious ceremonies due to their structured yet faithless nature.
• 06:30 - 07:00: Journaling and Rituals The chapter titled 'Journaling and Rituals' explores the theme of how cultural and personal rituals evolve over time. It discusses the idea that when certain elements or practices are lost, new ones are often created either at a cultural or personal level. These new rituals can emerge in families, groups, or individual lives. Additionally, the chapter touches on the increasing rates of mental health issues across society, noting that there are multiple reasons for this trend, and it remains neutral on the subject of religion, neither promoting nor criticizing it.
• 07:00 - 07:30: Candles and Symbolism This chapter explores the role of religious rituals and frameworks in providing structure to people's lives. It reflects on how these traditions, such as attending services on Sundays or observing the Jewish Sabbath, offer guidance and routine. The discussion raises the question of whether the move towards a more secular society is leading to a loss of these cultural rituals and frameworks.
• 07:30 - 08:00: Understanding Rituals in Daily Life In the chapter 'Understanding Rituals in Daily Life,' the discussion revolves around how modern life, with its abundance of choices, can leave individuals feeling adrift and without clear direction. One intriguing example mentioned is the Seattle Atheist Church, which juxtaposes the typically opposing concepts of 'atheist' and 'church.' The congregation finds value in the community and ritual of church, while not subscribing to traditional religious beliefs, highlighting how rituals can adapt to fulfill social and personal needs even in secular contexts.
• 08:00 - 08:30: Formal and Informal Rituals The chapter titled 'Formal and Informal Rituals' explores the perspective of atheists who find value in religious gatherings despite not believing in a deity. These gatherings are seen as beneficial for bonding with others, providing an opportunity to leave the house, especially for those struggling with depression, and gathering with people who share similar values. Additionally, the chapter highlights a church practice where individuals share their current states to receive social and emotional support.
• 08:30 - 09:00: Rituals in Relationships The chapter explores the importance and benefits of rituals and gatherings in relationships. The discussion includes an anecdote about a Bon Jovie concert that illustrates how shared experiences, like attending concerts, can strengthen bonds and create a sense of community.
• 09:00 - 09:30: Challenges in Ritual Research This chapter explores the concept of rituals in the context of modern activities such as attending concerts. It begins with a reference to 'Johnny's Church of rock and roll,' suggesting that these gatherings provide a communal experience that holds intrinsic value, similar to traditional rituals. The chapter raises the question of what truly constitutes a ritual and how contemporary events like concerts can fulfill similar social and emotional functions as more conventional rituals.
• 09:30 - 10:00: Rituals and Subjectivity The chapter opens with a discussion on the nature of rituals, routines, and habits, questioning whether the labels significantly affect our practices. It suggests a need to define what constitutes a ritual to better understand its role in our subjectivity and daily lives.
• 10:00 - 10:30: Rituals Marking Transitions This chapter delves into the concept of rituals marking transitions, particularly focusing on our daily routines and habits. It discusses how some activities, like brushing teeth and showering, are habitual and often follow a set order in our daily agenda. The chapter uses the simple example of the order in which we brush our teeth and shower in the morning to illustrate how these routines can be flexible, suggesting that switching the sequence of such activities might not be a significant issue for most people.
• 10:30 - 11:00: The IKEA Effect The chapter titled 'The IKEA Effect' delves into human behavior, particularly focusing on daily routines. It starts with an intriguing observation that half of the people prefer to brush their teeth before showering, while the other half do the opposite. This division highlights that there is no universally optimal routine. Moreover, it explores the reasoning behind people's preference or indifference towards the order of these activities. While some don't care about the sequence, others feel uncomfortable or unprepared if their preferred order isn't followed. The chapter emphasizes the distinction between a habit and a ritual, suggesting deeper psychological implications in our daily routines.
• 11:00 - 11:30: Commercialization of Rituals This chapter discusses the commercialization of rituals and how everyday actions can become ritualistic. It explores the idea that when one pays attention to the specific process and way of doing things, it transforms the act into something more meaningful. The chapter suggests that this heightened sense of ritual can provoke stronger emotions, especially when the routine is disrupted.
• 11:30 - 12:00: Rituals in Organizations The chapter discusses how rituals in organizations can impact individuals' feelings and productivity. A morning ritual, for example, when completed, makes an individual feel good, while interruptions lead to negative feelings. In contrast, habits provide more flexibility as interruptions are easily manageable. The text further explores personal routines such as brushing and showering habits, noting personal preferences rather than research findings.
• 12:00 - 12:30: Rituals and Mental Health The chapter explores the concept of rituals and their impact on mental health. It distinguishes rituals from mere habits or routines by emphasizing the meaning attached to them rather than the actions themselves. The author shares personal insights, highlighting a morning ritual that benefits both themselves and their family.
• 12:30 - 13:00: Final Insights on Rituals The chapter emphasizes the importance of personal rituals, especially for individuals with busy family lives. The author shares a personal anecdote of implementing a morning ritual for some quiet time before the family wakes up, highlighting how such practices can bring a sense of control amidst chaos. The idea is to find moments for oneself to better manage daily responsibilities and improve overall well-being.

Harvard Professor: How To Reset Your Life, Find Purpose & Make Life Exciting Again | Michael Norton Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 a lot of people listen to this show because they want to improve their health you've written this fantastic new book the ritual effect in your opinion how do rituals help us improve our health I think one of the key things with rituals is that they provoke a huge range of emotions so we did this research a few years ago we ended up calling it emo diversity which was a shame because people think emo Like Music but really it's just this idea it's like biodiversity almost but
• 00:30 - 01:00 with emotions so we we tried to show that it's true we all want to be happy but we also want to have a rich emotional life sometimes sadness is good we grow when we're sad we learn things when we're afraid and so the idea was that when you have this mix of emotions that can actually be very good for your well-being and one of the things that rituals do for us is they almost they're like a shortcut to many many different emotions in life you know marriages and funerals very different emotions that we're getting from those kinds of
• 01:00 - 01:30 rituals something like awe which is an amazing emotion that we can get again we can't get that easily but rituals are one of the ways we unlock it so for me there just this wonderful opportunity to unlock many many different emotions in our lives yeah if we think about health habits that people are trying to introduce into their lives let's say exercise movement meditation journaling you know whatever it might be do you think ritual or ritual izing
• 01:30 - 02:00 those practices can help people stick with them for longer you know it's funny I was talking to some um Elite Runners uh the other week and about their rituals first off if you ask any Elite person who does anything singer athlete whatever they will almost always have really really elaborate fascinating rituals that they do before during after their performances and one of the things they all talked about was their shoe tying very very specific very elaborate
• 02:00 - 02:30 shoe tying now shoe tying is probably the most boring thing we do I mean you know put your shoes on tie the laces and then you know you're off to go but they do it almost as a it's almost like a religious ceremony that they do before they run and one of the things it does is it makes them feel that they're ready to go so when you have these kinds of you know it's left foot then tie it twice then right foot then very very funny what they do with the socks which socks all this kind of stuff that really gets into it do they do that for practice or just for you know the main
• 02:30 - 03:00 events the main a race of the year or every time they go out amazing they often have little ones for practice and then really elaborate ones for races so and we see that in a lot of domains that you amp up your level of ritual as the stress increases yeah but they really do say that when they're doing that ritual that is a thing that gets them in the place they need to be to go and do it and I'm not an elite Runner unfortunately most people are not but there is something to that where when you have the ritual to get you going it
• 03:00 - 03:30 does make you feel now I'm at the moment when I can go and do that thing yeah when I think about that I think about the way I have often described morning routines to people why I believe certainly that for many people a morning routine or dare I say it a morning ritual might be really beneficial because it grounds you it means that no matter what is going on out there in the world
• 03:30 - 04:00 all of the uncontrollables there something that you can control what you do for the first 5 10 15 20 minutes each morning and I feel that that gives you a sense of control so that whatever you need to go and do that day you're better prepared maybe a bit like those Runners yeah I mean we're in many different ways we use these little things to try to get us to a place we want to go it can be many different emotions that we're unlocking when we're engaged in rituals but one of the key ones is this sense of control
• 04:00 - 04:30 that you're talking about where life is chaotic you know if you have kids the morning is chaotic the world is chaotic people will often go through their morning I would call them rituals but we can chat about the difference between routines and rituals in order to just get to a place where they feel that they're ready to leave the house without being completely stressed out of their minds or at the end of the day people have their bedtime rituals as well where they're trying to the opposite in a sense they're trying to wind down from all the stress of the day so that they
• 04:30 - 05:00 can actually get to sleep yeah I've been stuck in your book for the last 48 hours there's so many interesting stories in it and I think this idea of rituals is fascinating because there are annual rituals things like Christmas if you live in the UK or us I guess big whether you're Christian or not actually it's a big cultural celebration I guess if you lived in certain countries Ramadan each year for
• 05:00 - 05:30 one month where everyone around you is engaging in a communal practice of fasting these are all rituals that religion have given us for many many years we've also talking about perhaps daily morning rituals that we might engage in so there's a big variety isn't there but I guess there a wiing point for me which is as many societies are becoming less religious and more secular are we losing important rituals
• 05:30 - 06:00 or are we inventing new ones to replace them I think a little bit of both actually so you can think of the religious or cultural ones that are often received or inherited our our parents teach us how to do it or our faith teaches us how to do it then there are the ones that we come up with ourselves as well our little morning ritual that we might do but we also see people inventing new ones at a cultural level so one of my favorite examples is Burning Man which is if you really break
• 06:00 - 06:30 down what happens at Burning Man a group of like-minded people do a pilgrimage to the desert where they gather sometimes take some substances for example together for a while there's music there's a lot of communal activity at the end there's a giant wooden thing that they burn and that's the end of the if you didn't think it was burning man it can sound like a religious ceremony so we often actually are creating they don't have the faith element that other rituals might have but they have many of
• 06:30 - 07:00 the other elements as well so it's almost as though when we lose some of them we don't just say goodbye we either create new ones at a cultural level or we come up with these ones in our own lives or in our own groups or in our own families yeah or could it be if if we look across society and see these growing rates of mental health problems of course there's many different reasons for that and I'm not here to either be pro- religion or anti-religion I understand that religion
• 07:00 - 07:30 says a very important role for many people for others it doesn't but I do wonder sometimes what these religions often gave us was a Structure a framework on how we should live our lives you know let's say every Sunday you do this or on the Jewish sabbath you do this whatever it might be you have this framework and as we become more secular could it be that the loss of some of these cultural ritual
• 07:30 - 08:00 is perhaps making us feel a bit lost and rudderless in this kind of world where there are endless things that we could be doing I think that's probably right you know one of the funniest examples we encountered in the research uh on the west coast of the US there's this thing called the Seattle atheist Church which kind of is hard to parse because atheist and church don't usually go together but you can see exactly what they've done so they've said what's good about church for them they don't they happen to not believe in a higher power
• 08:00 - 08:30 so they're atheists but at the same time they recognize there's amazingly good things about religious gatherings they bond you together with other people they literally get you out of the house they give you an excuse to get out of the house and gather which when you're struggling with depression that's a big ask this is something that gets you there with people who care about you who share similar values and at this church they actually go around and share how they are doing in order to get Social and emotional support so they are it's true lacking the you know faith in a God
• 08:30 - 09:00 or God but they're getting all the other benefits of it because they recognize so many benefits from these kinds of gatherings yeah it's fascinating as you were describing that story I was taken back to my youth I used to be a mega Bon Jovie fan back in the day so sorry and I remember as a teenager maybe I don't know 16 17 maybe I can't remember when now being at a a big bon Joby concert in a stadium and at the
• 09:00 - 09:30 start of lay your hands on me John would come with age and he would say welcome to Johnny's Church of rock and roll which I thought was the coolest thing at the time but I think it speaks to this idea that these you know we gather together in community to you know to bond to experience something together it has real value doesn't it but I guess it speaks to this W idea as to what is a ritual because you could argue that well going to a concert is going to a concert
• 09:30 - 10:00 right is that a ritual you know um having a morning routine where let's say you I don't know you work out for five minutes or you write in your Journal is it a habit is it routine is it a ritual does it even matter so let's sort of really establish how you think about rituals what's the definition of a ritual maybe is a good place to start yeah I think about rituals and
• 10:00 - 10:30 routines as um routines and habits are kind of things that we do in order to get them done we kind of have to cross them off our list the example I always use even though it's silly is brushing your teeth and showering which order you do those in in the morning do you have an order by the way do you brush and then shower or shower and then brush your teeth I would brush my teeth and then shower and how would you feel if I said hey tomorrow can you flip the order of those two and do it in the opposite way yeah no problem if I to F the order
• 10:30 - 11:00 so to totally fascinating about first off half of people in the world brush and then shower and half shower and then brush so humans have not decided on the optimal order but more importantly half of people are like you they say why would I care I got to brush my teeth I got a shower I don't care the order and half of people will say I'd rather not and I say really why and they say well I don't like it I would feel weird I would feel uncomfortable I wouldn't feel ready to start my day and if you think about kind of a habit versus a ritual a habit
• 11:00 - 11:30 is really the these things I got to brush my teeth got to shower order doesn't matter as soon as you start caring about how exactly how things are done not just what you're doing but how you do it that's when they start to move toward being a little ritualistic not like people in robes and candles chanting that kind of ritual that's further away but it is this sense of when you do it the way you want to do it it provokes more meaning and more emotion and we know that because if it gets disrupted is when you start to feel
• 11:30 - 12:00 off so they both help us in the sense if I can do my morning ritual I feel good and if it gets interrupted I feel bad whereas if it's my habit if they get interrupted I can just do the other one later and it's not that big of a deal to me yeah it's an interesting example that okay so do you brush first and then shower or do you shower first and then Brush by the way some people do them at the same time I should say which I find very disturbing but that's just a personal op person that's not your research it's a personal opinion that's
• 12:00 - 12:30 not a scientific fact yeah so when I've thought about rituals or even written about rituals in the past I've always felt that they are habits or routines which have meaning okay so it's not necessarily the what it's the how right and so for example and I've spoken about this many times I do like to have a little morning ritual okay it works for me it works in my family it's
• 12:30 - 13:00 something I've put into place since I had young kids who would get up early and I realized that I'm a better human being when I have some time to myself before the rest of the family are up literally we often insert them in times of chaos I mean we well there you go we almost say I need to do something everything's out of control let me just try this before everybody wakes up and get a little handle on it yeah I love that because I can't now honestly say I can remember when it started but that kind of rings true like
• 13:00 - 13:30 if I didn't get up and I hadn't you know nourish myself in some way I didn't feel I was the best dad or husband or human being frankly right so my morning routine which at the moment Encompass as a few things like breath work and um coffee and you know I'm very ritualistic with how I make coffee and we can talk about tea ceremonies things in in a moment but I just want to compare that to this brushing and showering because I to me at least I don't feel the same
• 13:30 - 14:00 thing so I do my morning routine I do my morning ritual because I like what it says about who I am it says to me that no matter what's going on in the world I've found at least 10 minutes to nourish myself each day y okay I feel I've done a few things that are really good for me first thing in the morning so I feel calmer more present more productive if I'm traveling and I can't can't do it though I'm okay still M but
• 14:00 - 14:30 I would still call it a ritual so when I hear you saying if if you are someone who would feel slightly off if the order is flipped regarding you brushing your teeth and showering could you not argue that that's a little problematic so the Dark Side of rituals where they start to control us do you see what I'm getting at I do yeah so help help me understand that yeah I think first is um for you it sounds like coffee is a big part of it
• 14:30 - 15:00 and you said breathing as well is a part of your morning R yeah so look I have these three M's mindfulness movement and mindset at the moment it's this kind of breath wi meditation for 10 minutes I then come into my kitchen I weigh out my coffee right it's very you know it's it's it I don't just shove instant in and pour water in it's you know I'm very intentional about it whilst it's brewing for 5 minutes I'll do a little workout in my pajamas for five minutes and then what I do is I I have the coffee just
• 15:00 - 15:30 the way I like it and I drink it whilst writing in my journal uh okay so it's this little routine that you know depending on what's going on in my life at the moment probably takes around 20 minutes or so yep so that's just to give you a bit more color there in case it's helpful yeah and I think for some people listening they would say hey that sounds like kind of what I do or that sounds like that would that would work that feels like a nice sequence of events to get you to where you want to be and other people would say I don't like coffee mhm or I don't like breathing
• 15:30 - 16:00 exercises and so they might use something completely different yeah which is fascinating to me in and of itself that we freelance all the time with what we do but amazingly for some people it is like the order in which they brush their teeth and shower that's the thing that gets them that same feeling that you get from really a more elaborate ritual that you're doing that has more components to it but we see almost the base case is like what is the smallest sequence of events that we can start to say that's moved to be something as you said
• 16:00 - 16:30 that has more meaning in it than just actions and even something as silly as the order in which we do these kinds of tasks already starts to get us down that path but we also want to see because we're scientists like what is the minimal possible base case of something being a tiny bit ritualistic and then we build from there to say my gosh look at all these layers these personal layers these religious layers these cultural layers these family layers that get layered on top of it yeah it's so
• 16:30 - 17:00 interesting to me this you know where a habit ends and a ritual begins completely I would say for me and I've seen this with many patients over the years that if the Habit becomes more ritualistic so there is an attached meaning to it in some way I feel it helps them stick with that behavior for longer it's not just something I do me doing it says something about me and who I am I
• 17:00 - 17:30 certainly think that's the case for me is there any research showing that turning a habit into a ritual let's think about it through the lens of health and well-being does it make it more likely that you can stick with your new habits or your new behaviors in the long term If you sprinkle on a bit of ritual on top yeah one of my favorite uh studies in in the last little while
• 17:30 - 18:00 on exercise is by um Katie Milkman oh yeah who's at Wharton who's just does amazing research but she has this thing called Temptation bundling which is in of itself just a great name for anything but what she does is she wants people to ex people say I want to exercise more but I can't bring myself to the gym because I've got stuff to do and I lose the motive just like all of us humans and so what she does is she says well here's how it works anytime you go to the gym you can watch or listen to your trashiest preference like the worst show
• 18:00 - 18:30 the worst pot whatever it might be your guilty pleasure but you can only do it when you're at the gym exercising you can almost even think you can just leave the thing there and only be able to access that when you're there and the idea there is what you're doing is you're building this you know you might have a ritual where you listen to your favorite podcast every morning but you could do it wherever you want she's saying no no if you're going to have your ritual of listening to your podcast every morning you can only enact that when you at the gym exercising so it is
• 18:30 - 19:00 this case of trying to layer on a ritual that we already have onto a habit that we're trying to do and she shows in the research that actually does help people stick with it for longer because they've paired something else meaningful with a habit that doesn't necessarily have meaning for them quite yet so there's an extra reward element so you you let's say you're at the gym you're on a treadmill or a bike whatever you like to do and you're associating being at the gym was something maybe you struggle to
• 19:00 - 19:30 motivate yourself to go and do with your favorite trashier soap opera that perhaps you wouldn't watch at home so yeah so it's it's that reward it's the reward part of the Habit Loop for sure and you get this kind of um identity with it as well like this is my favorite show and I'm going to pair it with this habit that is not my favorite habit at all and see if I can link them together so that I can enact it even more so does that make it ritual would you say I
• 19:30 - 20:00 think it works best for people who are in a sense taking a ritual that they have in other words this is my favorite show and I watch it at this time every week you know we all have our favorite things that we do many people do have a favorite podcast they listen to every morning that's kind of their breathing exercise or their coffee making and so the idea is that you import that ritual onto something else that's a dry habit and see if you can pull some of the meaning of the ritual onto the habit and Link them together in a way that makes
• 20:00 - 20:30 you hopefully keep going a little bit longer if someone's listening to us Michael and they they're saying okay look let's pick a habit um I don't know I mean coffee is not a great one because people who drink coffee generally don't need motivation to make coffee or buy coffee right so but let's say um I don't know let's say journaling for example let's say someone has heard about the many uh benefits of jour journaling and they just can't get it going and they're
• 20:30 - 21:00 thinking you know I know I keep hearing about this journaling thing I've got a journal sitting there or someone gifted to me but I'm not in the habit of doing it I know your book's not on habit change per se it's more about rituals but I wonder is there anything you can advise that person to do to try and sprinkle a bit of ritual Magic on top of it let's say for the next s days to see if it changes their relationship with yeah no I love this I think um I was talking to
• 21:00 - 21:30 um a journalist a couple weeks ago who was saying uh I don't have any rituals uh and I was a skeptic in rituals too so that resonates with me like what is this guy talking about this ritual stuff but she said I don't have any rituals at all and I said oh well let's you know let's explore that a little bit and she said well look I have coffee every morning but it I'm just having coffee there's nothing to it and she said well how would you help me make it a ritual according to your research and I said um well I don't know you that well but I'll
• 21:30 - 22:00 give you some examples of what other people you know have done and I said you know for example some people the coffee or tea that they drink has an emotional tag to it it's what their grandmother drank or their grandfather drank and then I said other people the mug that they use has meaning to them it's it's a family mug or it's something they made it themselves for example and she cut me off and she said oh my God I just realized I use the same mug every morning it's a mug that I got with my daughter when we were seeing elant seals giving birth and I use the same mug
• 22:00 - 22:30 every morning since then and last week my husband brought me in in a different mug and I made him take it away and bring it back in the right mug right so what has she done she's taken this it's coffee I mean it's literally you can think about it's liquid that you drink it's the most boring you know I mean if you really boil it down and she's built onto it unknowingly in a sense until you really start to think about what you're doing all of this extra meaning and extra emotion into it and so even the most mundane little things that we do we
• 22:30 - 23:00 find ways to build ritual into it so for journaling for example one of the first things I always encourage people to do is think about what are you already doing when you're getting into it even something like the pen that you use yeah can be very very important right what is the pen which pen are you using do you use the same pen all the time it's almost like a magic lucky object that you can use and we see people saying you know what what I do is whenever I Journal I always drink this I sit there I do this then I have this pen and then
• 23:00 - 23:30 I write for exactly this long and they're trying to build it into not just I have to put words on paper because that's very boring that's like liquid in a cup yeah but I'm journaling you know I'm expressing something about myself through how I'm doing it and then we see people start to build more meaning into it yeah it could also be I guess if let's say The Habit is meditation lighting a candle just before you do it for example if that appeals to you that also is
• 23:30 - 24:00 potentially ritualizing the practice of meditation yep and you get there you get also a visual you get a a sensory experience because there's flame there's smell and things like humans use candles across an insane variety of rituals actually it's one of our favorite things is to use fire with ritual wow and we are in a sense it's got nothing to do with it like you can meditate without a flame you can have a birthday cake without a flame also but we've decided
• 24:00 - 24:30 no let's build this into it to make it more than it actually is yeah this is I can't remember which chapter is in your book there's this gorgeous section where you write about I don't know if she's called an a lady just looking around in her kitchen for candles but you I think you paint two scenarios one is where the lights have suddenly gone off she can't see so of course it makes sense that she's looking and trying to find the matches and the candle to give her light but you then contrast it with the same
• 24:30 - 25:00 situation but all the lights are on so she doesn't need to do it there's already light there but she's probably doing it is that right am I remembering it correctly exactly right yeah we our minds go if someone's doing a behavior that doesn't seem to have a purpose our minds immediately start to think why why is that happening because if it's dark and she lights a candle we're done we said oh that's for light if it's light and she lights a candle we say hm it's not for light and then our minds are built so we start circling around why
• 25:00 - 25:30 would she be doing that why would she be doing that and one of the reasons that we come up with it must have a deeper purpose or meaning it's something that we're actually very prone to do as humans is try to figure out what's going on and attribute meaning to it and then we say maybe it's a religious ceremony maybe it's a birthday it must be something other than just light what is it let's pursue that there's a section the book which I I noted down right because it for me it really spoke to
• 25:30 - 26:00 such an important point that I often think is getting missed when we talk about health or happiness if you don't mind I just want to read to you a section from your book is it always a mistake to fail to execute on your good habits or is the experience of savoring a decin and dessert simply a different kind of success Michael I love that I absolutely love that can you explain what you meant when you wrote those words I thought
• 26:00 - 26:30 about a person I mean let me say I am very Pro habit I wish I had better habits we all should have good healthy habits just to be very very clear at the same time if I think about imagine starting today you had perfect habits for the next 40 years you know you got up at the same time every day you exercised you did everything exactly as you wanted to do if you ask people what kind of life would that be they say well I would definitely be very healthy for sure but I'm not sure that would have been a rich and interesting life or if
• 26:30 - 27:00 you ask people imagine being married to someone who has completely rigid habits that they execute the same way every single day forever does that sound like a fun relationship or does that sound like a problem and people say yeah no I guess they'd be healthy but you know I want to mix it up I want to travel I want to do all these other different things and so it really started to occur to me that for sure good habits are good but is that the life that we want to lead more broadly if we look back at our life do we say I'm so happy that I
• 27:00 - 27:30 always ran at 6: a.m. or do we say I'm so happy I had a range and variety of experiences in my life and I do think sometimes rituals are the thing that remind us to do more than just habits and that's true both of our own private rituals that we come up with but even cultural rituals you can think about you know it just gets to be every day is the same we do the thing we go to work we just hum drum over and over culture gives us punctuated things they say not today today Christmas yeah and on Christmas you do something very very
• 27:30 - 28:00 different for example you have to gather with family on Christmas whether you like it or not but they're telling us family is important you got to take some time for it so that day maybe we can't do all of our habits exactly the way we usually do but I think that's a positive thing so both culturally we get these punctuations to remind us if you think of marriage you know you have a wedding that's one day and then you're married for 50 years what do you do all the other days well we have Valentine's Day we have anniversaries we punctuate them with hey don't forget this person's
• 28:00 - 28:30 really important to you you should celebrate this relationship yeah they do serve as reminders to do more than just go through the motion we have this phrase going through the motions and it's a very negative phrase rituals are always more than just going through the motions yeah thank you for explaining that I mean I think the point about this phrase that really speaks to me is I think sometimes with science we have reduced things down so much and we draw conclusions that aren't
• 28:30 - 29:00 actually that relevant in real life some of the time and I I'll explain what I mean by that so we could for example look at all of the blue zones these areas around the world where people are living to a rip old age apparently in in really good health and you know with with high levels of happiness as well and you know dan bu writes about this in his books about that they these guys drink coffee they have uh probably a glass of wine every evening in some of
• 29:00 - 29:30 them and then so often the conclusion is I would say in the west is that oh well coffee is good for you then because of that you know there were lots of correlation studies showing some benefits of coffee consumption however I really feel that if you're if you're overly stressed and you're overly committed and you're drinking coffee to keep you going so you can keep up with that
• 29:30 - 30:00 workload I just not sure that the research on the blue zones is relevant for you like your nervous system is fried you're in a completely different state you're not using it as a way of bonding it's not it's not necessarily a ritual for you you're literally grabbing it as you run to the train you're just going yeah get me a a latte takeaway and again no judgment of people doing that but it's not the same thing right if you're drinking alcohol to numb your loneliness at night by yourself it's not the same thing as in the blue zones where you're doing it at
• 30:00 - 30:30 5:00 p.m. in community and when it's just half a glass there is something about the meaning of what we do that is so relevant to the impact it has on us I completely agree and I think about this a lot I mean the um you know there's this phrase the Mediterranean diet and what we take from that is the diet part but it could be the Mediterranean that's causing the you know so we I think we we do try to boil it down into some actionable steps that we can take in our lives and as you said those can
• 30:30 - 31:00 be really beneficial and often the science supports that as well but it doesn't mean that's the whole thing that's happen you know I used to study um how people could spend their money to be happier and one of the things that we found very robustly is that uh you tend to be happier when you spend money on other people than when you spend it on yourself not every single time but on average spending on others makes you happier than yourself and that could be giving to charity it could be giving to a home person it could be buying a gift for a friend treating your mom to lunch
• 31:00 - 31:30 whatever it might be just outward instead of Inward and of course it's not really the money that's the thing it's the intention that you have you know you use the money to enact the intention but what really matters is and we show this in the research you feel like you're having a positive impact on somebody else in the world that's not you don't need money to do that right so it's not that you should take your bank account and start deying it up into 25 you know and all this kind of stuff it's that the intention really matters and so even
• 31:30 - 32:00 with the research that we've done sometimes the the Practical advice it's true but there's a larger thing surrounding which is do you have meaning in your life are you having an impact on the people you care about or are you just focused on yourself all the time yeah it also makes you think about there's a there's a cost to everything we do I think I spoke about this about six months ago on one of my podcasts but this idea that there's only so much time that you have in your day and yes you could argue
• 32:00 - 32:30 and and it's not you could argue it is true that physical activity is exceptionally good for your short-term and long-term Health but so are relationships and so in your limited time if you're going off for a 2hour walk by yourself you also have to factor in well what else you not doing in that time maybe it's time with your kids maybe it's time with your wife or your husband or your partner and yeah for me it's
• 32:30 - 33:00 always about looking at these things holistically and taking a 360° approach to make sure you're taking action after watching this video I've created a free guide to help you build healthy habits we can all make short-term change but can those changes become a fundamental part of our life often they don't and that's why in this free guide I share with you the six crucial steps you need to to take that're really really effective if you want to get hold of
• 33:00 - 33:30 that free guide right now all you have to do is click the link in the description box below so yeah thank you for sharing that we had a project a few years ago that uh we were calling the curse of counting and uh in the domain of well-being and the idea was that um we'd like to feel that we're making progress in life and sometimes that's very hard to know if we're making progress in life so uh we use things that we can count because then we can say it's more or less so
• 33:30 - 34:00 salary is a great example if I making more money then I'm probably doing better than I was before step counts are a great one if I'm taking more steps that's better than taking fewer steps so these things that we can measure we really start to rely on them because of we're human we want to know where we stand but a lot of the most important things and you just reminded me of this are you a good dad mhm there's no metric you know there's no scale it's 1 to 10 and your KS have aob and they rate you
• 34:00 - 34:30 every day and you can track your progress It's just something that has to matter to you or not and you could say well I'll increase the hours I spend with my kids I'll count them that's not it either right it's it's not about the amount of time you spend it's what you're bringing to it when you are with your kids and I do get concerned actually that when we measure things we start to focus on the measured ones instead and those can be really really important I mean steps are good like exercise is good as you said but what about the fuzer things that we don't have good metrics on do we lose sight of
• 34:30 - 35:00 them because we can't measure them instead of thinking actually I really need to invest in that 100% I'm so on board with you and I I would say I'm now starting to prioritize the unmeasurably you know I realize now that a weekend with no work if I'm able to with my wife and kids we go out for walks and have meals together I can't measure that in any way but the feeling it gives me is it's just you know you know it's like nothing else
• 35:00 - 35:30 yeah we don't have words almost yeah yeah and so I've from having made mistakes in the past I'm now very clear on a few things that whenever I'm weighing up a new offer engagement speaking whatever it might be I'm always going okay that's the upside what's the downside yeah and because most things have got a downside as well we just we're very good at looking at the upside so yeah fascinating let's get back to this idea that rituals are subjective or I think
• 35:30 - 36:00 they are at least how do you then as a scientist go about trying to study rituals it's very annoying and frustrating okay fine is the short answer um in part because uh as you said two people can be doing the exact same thing and for one of them it's a meaningful ritual and for the other person they couldn't care less so even with something like um religious services for example if I'm taking a bird's eye view I'm Irish Catholic so imagine I'm watching a Catholic mass
• 36:00 - 36:30 everyone's doing the exact same thing at the exact same time you know they're kneeling when they're supposed to and standing when they're supposed to and singing when they're supposed to and talking when they're supposed to you know so everyone understands for some people in that church what they are doing is an incredibly deep expression of their faith it's connecting them to their parents to their grandparents to their shared history other people are there because their parents made them and I can't tell who's who by looking they're doing the exact same thing it appears to be that they're engaged in
• 36:30 - 37:00 this kind of ritualistic behavior the only way I can really know is if I ask people straight up hey what were you doing in there and some people will say I was practicing my faith and feeling this connection to a higher power and other people will say I was literally counting the minutes until we could leave because I wanted to go play football and so we have to actually get these subjective Impressions from people in order to understand is what you're doing more than just the action or is it just the actions and what we
• 37:00 - 37:30 what is particularly frustrating is you could imagine that what we would find is that if you clap three times and stomp 10 times that's a ritual but two claps and 11 Stomps is not you know so we can actually figure out these are the Motions that make it a ritual and these are the ones that make it not a ritual and that that it there may be some sequence of actions that works for everybody but we never have seen that in other words it's not that the spefic specific actions are the ones that are the key it's actions that you have
• 37:30 - 38:00 imbued with more meaning if you imbue brushing your teeth and showering with more meaning other people do not like you if you imbue your coffee with more meaning because it connects you to things that works for you as well but the only way to know are you just drinking coffee or are you enacting something is for me to say hey how are you feeling when you were drinking that coffee yeah this this idea isn't there in your book about rituals or a way of turning ordinary
• 38:00 - 38:30 events into extraordinary moments and you give a really beautiful example I think of two couples and their Saturday shopping perhaps you could explain that very sad so we um one of them was very sad actually yeah we did this research um Hima Garcia was the lead author she studies decision-making in couples which in and of itself was just an incredibly fascinating topic for sure we worked together on this research on rituals in romantic couples and if you ask couples you know is there
• 38:30 - 39:00 anything you do we usually don't say do you have a ritual because people think people in robes with candles so he say is there anything you do that's special to you that has meaning for you that you make sure to do every day or every week or every so often and uh people say yes or no and then they tell us about them and what we see is most couples have something like that usually between 2/3 and 3/4 but when we ask people so what I can do is I can interview you and ask you about it and then I can interview
• 39:00 - 39:30 your spouse separately so they can't hear what you said and ask them about it and what we find is very often both people agree they say yes we do have something like that and they tell us about the same one a smaller number of people say no we don't have one but at least they agree they both say no we don't have anything like that but the very sad to me the very sad couples are the one where we ask one person and they say oh my God yes we have this wonderful thing you know that we do every week it's very special and here's why and we go to the other room and ask the other
• 39:30 - 40:00 person and they say no we don't have anything those are ones where there's a mismatch and we see even on something like shopping on the weekend we see some couples who say you know every Saturday morning we go to the market and we explore together you know we explore new foods we explore new Cuisines we're Foodies so we love to do that together and then bring it home and cook together and it's really important part of our weekend and other couples say yeah we got to go to the market every weekend to get food there nothing and it's a pain nothing else in it at all and so
• 40:00 - 40:30 technically again if we look at them they're both going to the market to buy food but for one couple it's this amazing expression of their bond and for the other couple it's just nothing at all and again the saddest are one person says oh we go to the market and we're Foodies and we express our the other person says yeah I guess we go to the market I don't know yeah it's not the what it's the how and the and the agreement is so critical right that we both are in this together together we both see those actions as more than just actions since you started studying
• 40:30 - 41:00 rituals is there anything you learned that you wish you knew sooner I think actually um so when I started studying I mean as as you know I am a scientist from Harvard so I'm supposed to be very objective and things like that and when I started studying rituals I had a sense that they were uh very ubiquitous human life uh and I kind of knew they were in my life too because
• 41:00 - 41:30 you know that's birthday parties and things like that that I was doing but I really didn't think that I was a ritual person I wouldn't have said like I'm the kind of person who's into that and speaking of the chaos of the morning when you have kids so the the moment when it really hit me was when my wife and I had our daughter eight years ago now uh when you have a kid if you've ever had a kid what happens is um you go to the hospital and then a a little while after that they give you a baby and they say go go away and take care of
• 41:30 - 42:00 it forever you know it's a very very stressful moment uh in life and so what do parents do I mean it's about as chaotic and stressful as as you can have in your life and so what parents do and we did it too but I didn't realize it until in retrospect was we bring rituals to Bear almost immediately just intuitively it's not in a book or anything like that but we start to do things like when you ever talk to a couple with new it's like is the baby sleeping are you sleeping who's sleeping when are they sleeping you know that's
• 42:00 - 42:30 the conversation about it and what parents do is they develop rituals around sleep almost instantaneously it's you know and it's this book and then this song and then we do the bath and then these two songs and then we do the swaddle and then it's these songs in this book and with this person and then that and then these three stuffed animal I mean it's very very elaborate sequence of events in order to try to get the kid to sleep and we did that but I didn't know I was doing it at the time until later it hit me talking to parents all parents developed their own special
• 42:30 - 43:00 sleep ritual for their kid and I think what was so important for me that even after that realization was that it wasn't that um it was necessarily helping her it might have been but it might not have been in other words we didn't try 12 different rituals and figure out which one was the best we just ended up with one that seemed to work and I think what it was is it was helping us not so much helping her giving you a sense of control exactly and that I think was Insight which is sometimes we're doing a ritual for a
• 43:00 - 43:30 seeming purpose but in fact it might be helping us in a completely different way and that started to pop up in more places that I had never thought of until I got into the research yeah that that's fascinating it also to me speaks this idea that we're now creating rituals that maybe we didn't need to before because of the way culture has changed and and if I think about that specific example the nuclear family is it's quite a modern invention really the way the
• 43:30 - 44:00 way many people now live certainly in Western countries is not the way that we've ever raised kids for years you know it's always been in groups there's been a community a tribe there's been a family there so I guess maybe a hundred years ago babies's born and the grandma is providing that wisdom and insight as to this is what you do this do you know what I mean all those things are there but now because for many people that's
• 44:00 - 44:30 been lost because their parents live miles away or they've moved for opportunity for work actually it is chaos and if you don't know what you should be doing you're going to create something to give you that sense of control aren't you completely and you know we have it is one of the hardest things hardest shifts that we make in our life and there are people who are really expert at it there's like doctors and nurses and people who' have had kids before and grandparents all these people and we remove all of them from the environment just say let's have two
• 44:30 - 45:00 rookies without any support at all just try to figure this out I mean we rarely do that in life where we say here's something that's very very important let's get a couple of novices on it and see what they can do instead of getting an expert in the room who says that's not how you know do it like this instead what are you doing I like the way you call yourself a ritual skeptic you write about that in the book as well that you you approach this you started off as a skeptic and now you're a full-on Believer if I can say it getting there getting there
• 45:00 - 45:30 getting there um you mentioned the Sleep routine with your daughter I'm interested as to what else might have changed in your life you've studied rituals for many years now you've written this wonderful book on them do you think that writing that book or even just studying this subject area has changed anything about the way you go about your day-to-day life have you started to introduce rituals to things
• 45:30 - 46:00 that previously were just routines for sure I think um in two domains one is for sure at home and the other is at is at work I think um we have this lab group um that we call nerd lab because we're nerds and it's a lab group we're not that creative on the naming but it's professors and PhD students and posts who we all work together and in the lab we always had kind of unstated norms about what what we valued in the lab and what was important in the lab but after
• 46:00 - 46:30 I started studying rituals I started really thinking about more what are the key things that make this group different from other groups and make it distinct and one of the things that was so important was um to really value ideas for their own sake not because they would work or because they're practical or because they have any basis in reality but just value creativity and ideas and so started thinking about about implementing rituals in a sense to try to make sure
• 46:30 - 47:00 that we were enacting that value that was so important so we have we literally have something that's called random ideas where every so often we just come in and you have to have random ideas and you're not allowed to study them in other words you may not study your random idea you just have to bring it as an idea we do things like if you just take Beetles songs you can say come up with a research project based on a Beatles song and they're all like really really great like Can't Buy Me Love I mean Beatles song is a fantastic social science project right there we're not
• 47:00 - 47:30 going to do the project right but it's this idea of instituting this practice that really shows over time what we care about here is ideas and no idea is bad because we're just trying to pull ideas and instead of just vaguely valuing that creating practices actually that make sure we bring that to Bear yeah again this idea that rituals are about meaning so you're talking about values and your lab and how can you ensure that those values are upheld so I guess it could be
• 47:30 - 48:00 like every Wednesday lunchtime for example we're having random ideas hour or whatever you know or something like that to to ensure that that value is being um acted upon for sure I mean you go to any organization and they they all have different mission statements but they're all the same in the end underlying it a little bit and the question is not you know and it's things like um you know inclusivity and
• 48:00 - 48:30 Innovation and words like this that are really important and valuable but what are the practices being put into place to actually bring those values to Bear you have to actually Institute not just the words but what are really you're going to do day-to-day or every Wednesday in order to surface those values so that means I guess that there has to be a practical component to rituals I think you do in other words you have to do it you know what I mean the actions are just the actions so you could do whatever you want in any meeting but you need to bring this set
• 48:30 - 49:00 of actions together in order to live out that value but I guess because it's subjective let's say there's 10 people in the lab right let's say five people are coming and go this is great because this is what we value and so you know I can't wait for a random idea Wednesday lunchtime again because that's my favorite part of the week or whatever but the other five might be man I didn't join this SL for this what drag right so again that could mean that for 50% of
• 49:00 - 49:30 the lab that is a ritual but for the other 50% it's more a routine uhuh is that fair to say almost a a distraction even more than just a routine like why don't we get to the science instead of doing this random idea thing and in fact that's such an important point because when you have these practices that enact values they help people sort you know you can say oh this is not the research group for me or this is not the company for me because these practices that
• 49:30 - 50:00 everyone around me seems to Value very highly they don't resonate with me at all that's not what I'm looking for and we do see even over time in our own research Community people will filter in yeah try it and some of them will say oh my God this is what I've been looking for and other people will say I don't know why we're doing this Beetle song stuff we got to get to work and they'll go to a different lab group and so they are I mean and we should talk about rituals can be very connecting and binding but they can also cause difference and division because the way
• 50:00 - 50:30 that we do it is the way that we do it and we like other people to join in or we start to get a little suspicious of them yeah especially within relationships I guess you know um one of the things that I guess has concerned me over the last few years particularly since covid I would say is how many in-person Gatherings have just Fallen away there's almost like this passivity that has taken over Humanity where we just can't
• 50:30 - 51:00 be bothered anymore if we could do it over Zoom or a WhatsApp group well why bother to go in person because you can kind of get the same thing done without I guess a really specific example of that might be and the reason I bring this up because I've I've heard about this and seen this with so many people that they used to go to things like yoga classes or Pates classes or you know martial arts whatever it might be preco during the lockdowns and the way
• 51:00 - 51:30 people live for a few years a lot of those things went onto Zoom yeah and so people are now used to well I can just just do it on Zoom or I can just watch my 10minute YouTube video and do yoga yeah and I'm always encouraging people to go that's cool if you want to do 10 15 minutes yoga each day on YouTube great but don't neglect if you can the weekly class where you go interact with other people I think it's a great way to tackle loneliness for some people it's a
• 51:30 - 52:00 great first step I should say but through the lens of ritual can we say then for some people their weekly yoga class is a form of ritual I think for sure and you know it relates to our earlier conversation which is it's true that yoga itself has health benefits whether you're doing it in your house or doing it at a yoga studio but that's not all the benefits of yog there's more to it than that there's these social benefits there's these connecting benefits there's these
• 52:00 - 52:30 gathering with people who share some similar values with you and maybe having a coffee or a tea before or after those interactions are Inc even if you're never going to see the person again those kinds of interactions are a real source of Happiness even small talk you know research shows it's much better than no talk because at least you're connecting with someone and smiling and making some jokes so it is true that we can get a lot of the benefits but again we're missing the broader context of well it's not martial arts isn't just
• 52:30 - 53:00 doing these movements by myself it's actually connecting with people and creating something larger yeah so many patients tell me that life just feels like a blur because of the pressures so many of us face the busyness the overwhelm the endless to-do list I've heard it time and time again why haven't things changed why can't I bring these healthy habits into my life and make them stick I've been a medical doctor for over two decades and I have to say one of the most transformative practices
• 53:00 - 53:30 I have ever seen is the practice of journaling because it breaks the loop we have these unconscious patterns these subconscious patterns running our lives we don't realize how many anxieties and worries and concerns we have worrying around and journaling is a very simple way to get the stuff out of your brain you get it down onto paper and you see it and that does something really really powerful when does the new diet that you were following Fall by the
• 53:30 - 54:00 wayside when does the new healthy habits that you were sticking to start to fall off track that's the self-awareness that journaling is going to give you when people ask the right questions they get the right answers and those right answers allow them to change their life take up journaling today and watch your life start to change let's talk about rituals for per performance there's a section on this in the book and I mean I guess some famous
• 54:00 - 54:30 examples of athletes we might know like Rafael Nadal um Tom Brady Serena Williams these guys all have quite particular rituals certainly habits and routines and perhaps you could explain what they are and why you consider them to be ritualistic I gave a um Talk a couple weeks ago that was maybe 60 or 90 minutes or something my daughter came my wife brought my daughter and uh she sat actually very patiently sat through it
• 54:30 - 55:00 which I was shocked how you actually both my wife and my daughter patiently sat through both were shocking my daughter's eight okay and uh and I talked about all kinds of almost like we've been talking you all these different domains of life richual and all stuff holidays all stuff and at the end my daughter had one piece of feedback she said does that tennis guy really pick his wedgie that was the only the only thing she took from the whole thing so Rafael and Nadal if you're a tennis fan you know you can already Envision what he does before he serves every time I mean extremely elaborate tugging and wiping
• 55:00 - 55:30 and all this kinds of stuff how long does it take it takes quite some time doesn't it it depends on whether it's his first or second serve and how stressed he is but it does take he often runs into the clock for people who aren't tennis fans and have never seen Nadal play can you just sort of put some color on what it looks like when he's doing this I mean with the doll he um he's got a headband that he likes to play with he's got his hair he likes to play with to wipe his sweat off he does stuff with his shorts he does stuff with his racket with the ball basically any
• 55:30 - 56:00 object that's around him he incorporates into his preserve ritual and why does he do that he said it's so interesting because he has said he knows he doesn't need to do it but when he does it he feels like he's ready to go so it's a feeling it's a feeling for sure so we don't know if you know if if he doesn't pick his wedgie we don't know if he's going to double fault every time we don't know that right right but for him it's this way of I mean he's got to do
• 56:00 - 56:30 one of the hardest things that humans do physically and he's got to do it over and over and over again perfectly so for him he's got this very elaborate sequence so that he feels at that moment every time I can do this I've got this yeah it's interesting isn't it because at what point do at at what point does a ritual does a helpful ritual start to tip over
• 56:30 - 57:00 into being something unhelpful now I obviously can't speak for Nal his success speaks for himself it's clearly working for him but let's say that routine currently takes 30 seconds and let's say it start to edge up to being 5 minutes which is probably not allowed I'm guessing there is a time limit which you know I'm sure five minutes between each serve is going to cause problems you know if we think about you know there's a tension isn't there where we
• 57:00 - 57:30 can use a few things to ground us and give us a sense of control let's say my morning routine for example what it does for me and I suspect 10 years ago I may have struggled without it but I've tried to become less attached to things in a variety of ways over the last four or five years so I I feel it's good to have it but I feel it's also good that it doesn't control me so if I'm away and I can't have it then I'm still able to function because otherwise it's
• 57:30 - 58:00 something helpful that then becomes something that weighs me down if I can't have it so I guess what I'm getting at is what's the dark side to these rituals or is there a dark side where they start to become controlling rather than helpful yeah I think that's exactly the way to think about it which is we're we're often using them to feel a sense of control but we can overuse them and they start to control us instead you can think of something like a obsessive compulsive disorder where um so typically in our research what we show
• 58:00 - 58:30 and you think of Nadal Serena Williams whoever what we're doing is we're doing a ritual in order to then do something else in other words the ritual is in the service of another goal that we might have our morning ritual is in the service of feeling calm and ready to start our day leave the house go to work spend time with family for Nadal Serena Williams the ritual is in order to then serve at a high level what can happen with obsessive compulsive disorder is you lose the link between the ritual and the goal that you had so even something
• 58:30 - 59:00 like um checking to see if your door is locked before you leave in the morning M many people double check it just to double check it and they're doing that so that they feel all day my house is fine my flat is fine no no problem so the ritual is in the service of with obsessive compulsive disorder the ritual becomes the goal so you're checking the lock in order to check the lock and then you're going to keep checking the lock and keep checking the lock because you've lost the link between that and what you wanted to get done and that is when we start to see that you've you've
• 59:00 - 59:30 moved too far now we don't know the exact point at which it becomes too far but the really the the standard is when it starts to interfere with other goals in your life that's when we say the ritual has come too far and needs to be backed up so with Nadal if his serve ritual was five minutes he'd lose every match he'd be thrown out because you're not allowed to do that because there is a clock so he knows he's got this amount of time and he's constructed his ritual to fit in that amount of time oddly enough so that he can still do what he
• 59:30 - 60:00 needs to do and we see that very common Even in our own lives you know if I'm stressed about a meeting or people very commonly say um at work if they're stressed about something they go in the bathroom always to the bathroom look under the Stalls to make sure nobody else is in there and talk to themselves in the mirror like number one strategy for our ritual at work to get going and you can feel why people are doing that but if they go in there 5 minutes before the meeting starts and they talk to themselves for 3 hours it's not going to work out very well right so we also have
• 60:00 - 60:30 this sense of I need to do this thing to feel in control but I also know that it needs to stop at this time in order to accomplish the other goal yeah Serena Williams I think you said in the book I think she bounces theable five times for her first serve and only two times for her second serve that's right so in the spirit of trying to become less attached to things okay that works for them right are there any examples of where people thought this is great it works but I want to be less dependent on this so are
• 60:30 - 61:00 there any athletes for example who used to have a ritual that worked and they thought you know what I want to get rid of this so I'm free of it that would be quite interesting actually yes there was a um a a baseball player who developed so research on baseball players in particular there's there's a bunch and uh if you videotape baseball players and then code their movements before each swing the average is 83 movements that's like a lot of movements that they have
• 61:00 - 61:30 but the range is very wide like 50 to 150 so this particular player started develop a ritual that was so elaborate that it was getting into this space where thinking about doing it correctly was distracting him from actually what he needed to do which was hit a baseball and so teams have actually Sports psychologists who monitor this you know they want you to be able to do the thing that you need to do like Nadal in order to get in the zone but they want to make sure that it's not so elaborate that now you're stressed about whether you're even going to
• 61:30 - 62:00 finish it and you can't even get to the thing you were trying to do yeah it's fascinating absolutely fascinating Tom Brady what's his ritual he did this amazing this is years ago but um when the Patriots were struggling this was after they were a dynasty they were struggling and they lost a couple games and uh the coach Bill bich and and Tom Brady gathered the team together they dug a hole dug a hole and and put the football in it and buried the football and they literally said we're leaving that part
• 62:00 - 62:30 of the Season behind and the story is that Brady went back and kind of like kicked the dirt and muttered something almost like an exorcism of the football from what they were going to do next and that example is interesting to me too because you think about we use rituals before you know we're getting ready to serve people often use them during the performance itself and then we even use them after the performance so if it didn't go well we sometimes use rituals to try to feel better so even just in the domain of performance we're using
• 62:30 - 63:00 rituals for very different reasons and very different purposes very commonly yeah I love that example I think you were writing about failure in that part of the book and the idea that they had a really bad match I think against their Rivals but this idea that then when all the players came to the next practice there was this big hole with the with the match bore from when they got you know demolished was buried as a symbolic way of saying right that's it we're moving on from that and I think they went on to have a really good season after that they did again that speaks
• 63:00 - 63:30 to this idea it's not the what it's the how right it's this idea that they're all great football players American football players you know they're playing for one of the top teams right so they know how to play but you know I don't know if any of them have spoken afterwards about that and have any of them said that actually that they remember that that was a key really for sure that was a key moment and you know it's funny because if there were a
• 63:30 - 64:00 way so imagine that when we lose whatever it might be we have a loss that we feel badly about imagine that science had shown that if you snap you feel fine about it you know there's some magical thing you can do and you feel fine about loss well then if people did this ball burying stuff and digging holes I would say what are you you're wasting your time why don't you just do the snap thing that science has shown but we don't have anything like that for loss we don't have anything that we know helps people get over loss and so when people do these things like Berry
• 64:00 - 64:30 footballs and things like that it's almost like well compared to what you know I mean if we had a magical solution for trying to move on from a devastating loss I wish that we did but we don't have one so people do turn to rituals because there's uncertainty how are we supposed to move past this we don't know how to move past it and humans pretty much typically say let's at least try some kind of ritual in this case a collective group ritual to see if that can help us on the way to getting over this and starting again yeah there's also rituals aren't there around you
• 64:30 - 65:00 know negative emotions and you write them on a piece of paper and then you burn the piece of paper and I actually I can't recall the studies at the top of my head but I'm pretty sure the studies shown that that actually works it does help but it kind of makes sense doesn't it why such a powerful visual representation of these negative emotions and thoughts you're then burning them and allowing the paper just to disintegrate into Ash it's pretty powerful you know as humans are we we we like attaching meaning to
• 65:00 - 65:30 things don't we for sure and we see you know there's amazing amazingly funny heartbreaking and funny stories about when people end a romantic relationship typically if you've been broken up with people will say well what I did was you know I took all the letters that we ever exchanged or I took all the pictures of us one one person at one point said I took all the pictures of us together I took them to the park where we met in a coffee can tore them up and burned them in the park where we first kissed I think it was
• 65:30 - 66:00 what it was and again on the one hand you could say that's an unusual kind of behavior to to do although many people say well I kind of did something like that once too but you know an unusual behavior but again when somebody breaks up with you we don't have a magical solution to make you feel fine about it you know I mean you need social support you know you can exercise and eat right you know we have things that help us when we're depressed but we don't have anything that just says I'm over it and so again people turn to this tearing up and burning as one way to try to again
• 66:00 - 66:30 start the process of moving on from something painful I don't think until I read your book I was aware of this this new term is it divorce aeri is that right perhaps you could explain what it is and because this really speaks to rituals doesn't it or us inventing rituals when they don't exist that's right I mean if you think of the the practice of divorce it's relatively new in human history or at least wasn't practiced very widely which is a problem but we can leave that discussion aside for why we weren't allowed to get divorced but it is the
• 66:30 - 67:00 case that we don't have thousand-year-old rituals about what cultures do when two people get divorced they're just they don't exist and we still don't have them actually even though people get divorced quite commonly now and you could say well maybe that's because we don't need them at that moment so we don't have them there but that's not what happens because what people do when there's nothing official you know there's no Valentine's Day or divorce day they make up their own come up with their own in all kinds of fascinating ways which again speaks to the the
• 67:00 - 67:30 impulse that we have to turn to Ritual but two of the amazing ones are this um there's there's a good ver well they're both good versions one is you get divorced from somebody and you want to be amicable and stay friends and so on the anniversary of your divorce you get together and celebrate the two of you who got divorced to say you know what this was still an important relationship if you have kids together you might involve them so you're you're kind of trying to own the divorce from not being negative but there's another version
• 67:30 - 68:00 that people have done which is you get divorced and it didn't go that well and then um typically women will on the anniversary of that day get together with their girlfriends and basically just slag the guy off for the entire time but again one year you could do it at any date any time you want but we we decide you know what let's take that date and make that date special and make sure we do something on that date forever from now on we just are turning to Ritual in order to again try to help us with these really really difficult
• 68:00 - 68:30 situations yeah this morning I was thinking about rituals and I was thinking about this idea that control they give us a sense of control they also give us direction if and when we don't know what to do if they are cultural rituals that have been passed down and the example that came to mind this morning was when my dad died in 2013 so when someone dies obviously there's a lot of emotion tears the grief process starts all that
• 68:30 - 69:00 kind of stuff and it's actually very reassuring to know like Mom and Dad you know grew up in India so as a family they would probably describe themselves as Hindu yeah so there's a set sequence of things that you do you call the priests you know you send the invites out you get someone for the food afterward you know and after the actual cremation you know you pray to your ancestors that there's a set sequence of things to do now whether you believe in
• 69:00 - 69:30 that or not in many ways it's kind of irrelevant or I shouldn't say irrelevant it's not only whether you believe in it or not that's right there's also the fact that there is meaning there is a system there is a sequence of things so when you're struggling and you're going through grief you don't have to think and make all these choices it's there laid out for you yep the moment when you're most overwhelmed is the moment when you most need some existing structure to help you through it because you're just you're
• 69:30 - 70:00 not capable when you're you know intensely in grief of making any kinds of decisions I do think they help us in that way and I think there's another thing that these kinds of rituals do which is um when you are experiencing grief especially acute grief one of the feelings is that it it will never go away you know this will never get better it's too powerful it's too intense and that can last for quite some time and what these established ceremonies do among other things is they say um well
• 70:00 - 70:30 other people have gotten through this actually for thousands of years other people have used this exact thing and they were okay with it including some of the people at this funeral right now who lost their parents years ago they did this and I can I can literally see that they're okay so they provide almost like proof to us that even when it feels there's no possible way I could ever feel any better something about this has worked over time and so perhaps There's Hope for me as well yeah super
• 70:30 - 71:00 powerful really really powerful I mentioned before about rituals as a way of helping us get through failure and I really like this section that you wrote about I think it was a 2017 study done in Tonto then if you remember it or not and you sort of concluded that perhaps rituals help regulate the brain's response to failure they dampen our negative response to errors perhaps talk us through that study because I thought that was quite powerful yeah so if you think about um there's kind of having
• 71:00 - 71:30 lost what do we do you know bury the football or whatever it might be there's also the when we're performing as we're performing things go slightly wrong all the time you know if you're acting you slightly miss miss a word or something like that it's not enough to stop you know you can keep going but your mind can start to ruminate on the mistake so you're still trying to act or sing the way you were supposed to but a little part of mind is saying oh you blew it you know everything's terrible now and so the question is are there ways to
• 71:30 - 72:00 help us not get so stuck in the rumination as we're still performing and one of the things that this research shows actually is that when you train people to do rituals to make things ritualistic the ritual itself helps them not to go as much to that ruminating place where I feel terrible about what I did wrong and you can think about it with anxiety as well where where when you're anxious what happens is you start to spiral you know first you're anxious about the presentation but then you're anxious about your job and then you're anxious
• 72:00 - 72:30 about losing your job and how it's going to affect your family you know I mean anxiety has this property of spiraling out of control in the same way that rumination about negative things can spiral out of control This research shows that one of the things that rituals do it's almost as though they literally take up enough space that we can't it's like we don't have enough resources left to spiral quite as far or to ruminate quite as much because the ritual is bringing us back into the moment and helping us get reentered yeah that is absolutely
• 72:30 - 73:00 fascinating we'll be back to the conversation in just a moment now many of us struggle to find time to eat all of these incredible Whole Foods that's why I'm a big fan of good quality Whole Food supplements like this one that's been in my own life for over three years now it contains over 75 Whole Food Source ingredients vitamins minerals pre and probiotic and can help us support our energy focused digestion and our immune system
• 73:00 - 73:30 ag1 are giving my audience a fantastic offer oneyear supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first order you can see all details at drink a1.com more or just click on the link below and now back to the conversation I'm drawn back to the example of Nadal so we were saying that it's a way of
• 73:30 - 74:00 giving him a sense of control and getting him ready but you just said something there which made me think well it's also taking up a lot of real estate in his brain right so instead of stressing out about the scores or the back can he put out in the last rally which he may be doing but if if you've only you know if there's only so much space in your brains to be thinking about things the idea that well I've got these 23 things to do before I can do my next serve you have no room left to ruminate so that kind of makes sense the
• 74:00 - 74:30 the the study you you I think you outlined in your book it was quite a bizarre ritual was it when you hit your chest and put your hands up and inhale and like for me I read that I thought wow does that really help people deal with failure better and obviously that study showed that it did one of the funny things about um when we give people I wasn't involved with that research but in another research we've done we can make up rituals and have people engage in them uh like tap your chest raise your
• 74:30 - 75:00 hands clap whatever it might be and um the ritual they're not real rituals in other words we can say we made it up but what can happen when people engage in these rituals is they start to have meaning to them remember we talked about the candle in the room yeah where if it's already light we start to wonder what's going on when we engage in actions that have no purpose part of us also says h i wonder why would I be throwing my hands up like this and clapping like this and part of US starts to say perhaps there's some meaning or
• 75:00 - 75:30 usefulness in it it's something that's built into US ironically where we start to imbue even random things with meaning again like brushing teeth and showering they don't matter that much but we imbue them with meaning and we can show in fact that when we have people do these rituals especially in groups where it's communal and you see other people doing it at the same time it does start to have some meaning Beyond just mere actions not the same amount as you know a ritual with long history and tradition of course not but even the very basic
• 75:30 - 76:00 level we can in fact get some of these rituals to start to have a little bit of meaning so that they can start to affect things like uh your anxiety or your rumination over failure yeah doing rituals together is obviously really really powerful have you ever watched much rugby before yeah I mean the the pre- rugby pre any sport but pre- rugby especially is like uh extraordinary the all black set exactly that mean I don't think that was in the book but I was thinking I must ask you about that because to me it seems one of the most
• 76:00 - 76:30 powerful examples of rituals being used in sports and has that been studied at all there is research on um one of the things that team rituals do in general um is the ritual itself comes to have meaning to us you know this is what we do we've done it for years when new players come in they do it and become part of us and there is a sense that the meaning that we attach to that can translate a bit to the work that we do
• 76:30 - 77:00 as a group after that so there's something in them where by doing this activity that's meaningful that by the way is not related to the actual task in other words if they kept doing the pre thing the whole match they would lose every time because you got to start playing but there's something in there where we do it together that gets us all in this moment where now we're going to go perform yeah I mean for people who who don't know what we're talking about we're talking about I think it's called The Hacker the hacker yeah um which the New Zealand rugby team do before every
• 77:00 - 77:30 rugby game I I read yesterday that actually they didn't do it before every single game I think until 1986 when they realized how powerful it was and how important it was now it's every game before it was I think maybe on just home games or or something else and I'm not a huge rugby fan but it I've always noticed that and I think I've heard some players on opposing teams before saying it's pretty scary like before they they see these powerful men doing this war tribal
• 77:30 - 78:00 routine and please excuse me or forgive me if I've described it incorrectly but it's it's a beautiful site to see which you think of course it's going to help improve their performance of like this is who we are we go out we win rugby games we play with aggression and if you're on the receiving end of that it's probably quite scary to watch it yeah and you know we see I mean almost any sports team you've ever been on in your life there's something that you do together before the game starts not as elaborate as that typically but you know you bring
• 78:00 - 78:30 it in you stand in a circle and you all shout something or you put your hands all together and throw them up and then you're ready to go we don't do it as elaborate because we're not as good athletes as those guys are but the rest of us also before we do these things we do our own little version of it because we're still feeling like hey we got to go do something together let's do this first in order to try to do that thing better once we get started love it talk to me about the Ikea effect what is it and what is its relevance to rituals
• 78:30 - 79:00 we've a few years ago uh started noticing in myself but also in others uh if you ask people or their actually their romantic Partners especially is there something in the house that is homemade that is ugly people will say yes there is and you say well who made it and they say well my my spouse or partner made it and it's this watercolor or this terrible that they made in a pottery class or a terrible bookcase or whatever it might be nobody has one of
• 79:00 - 79:30 themselves of course it's just their partner has one that's their partner and then the question was sort includ I have this terrible terrible stone sculpture that I made it probably thir 25 years ago now that I still have every time I move I pack it up very carefully you know this whole thing it's terrible but I made it I chiseled it and all this kind of stuff and this question was like well what's what's going on there why do we keep OB objectively not so great things if we made them ourselves we ended up calling this the Ikea effect
• 79:30 - 80:00 because of course you make your own furniture at Ikea and it's funny actually because people say but I don't like my Ikea furniture after I make it and the test is actually not so much you know do you love your Ikea furniture but the same looking thing that somebody else made so you know yours is lopsided and you lost some of the screws and it doesn't hold together very well what you talking about exactly but and you don't you don't think this is the greatest one ever but if I said would you trade with me for the one I made that looks the same people say no I'd like to keep the one that I even though it's not good I'd like to keep the one that I made because
• 80:00 - 80:30 I made it and they actually imbue it with some of their identity that's me that's something that I did and we even do I mean I do this funny thing with um when I teach Executives at the Harvard Business School which is very fancy place these are very accomplished Executives I'll have them I'll give them Lego sets that are meant for small children six 10 piece Lego sets and I'll have them build little things like a little dog or a little frog or and they're you know they're thinking what I'm paying all this money for this guy to make a bu Lego at and then they
• 80:30 - 81:00 put them together kind of grudgingly and then I say okay can you everybody take them back apart and turn them back in and I mean the the rage you know the horror like what do you mean this is my little frog that I made I'm not going to take it back apart and you know I can even have them bid on it and stuff and they'll pay money to take the frog with them and of course you know they could afford Legos anytime they want but it's only after they put it together that they say no I'm going to keep it this one's mine and if I say well will you trade your frog for someone else's identical frog absolutely not I mean you just wouldn't right there's no it's
• 81:00 - 81:30 believable it's totally believable this this one's mine it's obviously better in some way and so we again again we call this the Ikea effect because we have this thing where when we imbue things with our self more is attached to them maybe more than is deserved like my sculpture is very ugly but who cares it's something that becomes valuable to us that really gives us a lot of meaning yeah I love that I mean I don't know if this is necessarily the same thing or not you can tell me afterwards if it is but this kind of links to what we were saying before about the unmeasurable in life
• 81:30 - 82:00 so let's take this podcast for example now I'm very meticulous with how I do my research and preparation for each conversation like I fully invest in every single conversation and many of the other big podcasts out there have got researchers not all of them but I know a lot of them do have researchers so they'll you know compile the the guest's book and their work and give them some sheets now I've never done that I've always done the research
• 82:00 - 82:30 myself at every single conversation why I think this is relevant or perhaps relevant in this conversation about rituals and the Ikea effect is You could argue that it's a more efficient use of my time to have someone do the research so instead of me spending almost two days which is often what I spend researching a guest one to two days you know I could maybe spend an hour reading the research notes and then
• 82:30 - 83:00 have the conversation so in terms of the measurables I'm saving time but I've never been interested in that because I've realized that I want to do the research I enjoy doing the research and so the question for me has been how do I want my experience of life to be yeah well I don't really care if that saves me time the experience of life that I want leading into this podcast is to myself
• 83:00 - 83:30 immerse myself into the life of my guest watch some videos read their articles read their book and really tap into who they are so hopefully I can have an interesting conversation when they show up in the studio and so to me you know and I have a few things that I do and about an hour before the guest arrives I sit in my kitchen T I like it all clean frustrates me if it's not clean so you know sort of clean all the kids breakfast stuff away
• 83:30 - 84:00 and it's there and and I've I have this Blue Book now where I've got all my notes in scrap form and then in this blue book about an hour beforehand with colored pens and the colored pens is really important I write down some key ideas that I may want to talk about not questions but ideas maybe some quotes that sort of thing so I guess my question to you is that feels quite ritualistic how I write these things down about an hour before the guest comes in y but the wider point
• 84:00 - 84:30 is you know would you call that a bit of the Ika effect the fact that I don't want someone else to do the research for me it wouldn't feel like my podcast if someone else did that does that does that make sense Mike it sure does I mean I think you're also you have you're not just trying to churn out podcast you have a learning goal yeah I mean you're trying to not just ask questions but actually deeply engaged with all the material that comes across so that's that can be very very different and you are then investing yourself in the topic
• 84:30 - 85:00 and I'm sure it becomes actually much more rewarding because it really when we put effort into things we really do come to own them we literally own them psychologically much much more I was praying you would explain the the blue binder in front of me with all the colorcoded uh writing because I knew that that was going to be a ritual very very often people do exactly the same thing you know right before the meeting clear the table really buckle down I have a a black binder that I use before
• 85:00 - 85:30 I teach that has yellow lined paper only I only use yellow line paper to write down what I'm going to teach about very very common that we have these things and I do think again the act of making it changes it as opposed to just printing it out or getting a print out from somebody else that we really show in the research we value it more highly and we invest it with more meaning yeah it's interesting because this speaks to another idea that rituals can evolve over time right because I didn't used to do this the show's been going for maybe six and a half years now and this blue
• 85:30 - 86:00 um I don't know if I like it being called a binder actually and now now a maybe this is a ritual you know I feel it's I feel it's a gorgeous sort of I don't know what I would call it this book with thick paper in it but I specifically went I remember I was with my daughter I think in January we went to the stationary shop and I wanted something special for the podcast and I always put the gu name you'll see always in blue with a red underline at the start love it and the idea really was that instead of having
• 86:00 - 86:30 all these scrap pieces of paper I thought wow when this is full and I look back on it I've got some incredible guests on the show and I'm putting the key points and ideas that I want to discuss or the ideas that I think are important or interesting yeah thought wow that would be a great resource at the end of the year as well to look back on I go oh wow yeah I forgot about that I forgot about that so it had multiple there were multiple reasons why I did it but certainly that's a ritual and I like the way that even the way I prepare is
• 86:30 - 87:00 indicative of the Ikea effects yeah it's so great my uh colleague Ting Jang has this research on um she actually decided to study why humans make time capsules right you know and we take stuff and put it in a thing and bury it in the ground for some reason and then later we dig it up and look at it again it's very unusual behavior if you think about it but really common and one of the things that she shows is when we do things like that what it helps us do is ReDiscover the past and it's particularly mundane
• 87:00 - 87:30 things that are exciting to ReDiscover so so she has people literally write about Valentine's Day or the day before Valentine's Day and people think oh later on I'm going to really want to read about Valentine's Day that was an interesting day with my partner or whatever but when it comes to it and they look back they say oh yeah I knew that I mean I remember Valentine's Day we went out for that thing but the day before Valentine's Day which is a random day with random people fascinating you know oh my God I forgot about that sandwich that I had or that person that I talked to I think you'll have this too if you look back you'll remember the key
• 87:30 - 88:00 key highlights you know the really memorable moments but you're going to see little things jotted down when you say I completely forgot about that we had that little conversation about that and you're giving yourself through a ritual the opportunity to ReDiscover which is really an amazing powerful feeling we can give ourselves yeah let's just look about rituals that Mark transitions or coming of age as it were because that kind of getting lost in certain cultures a lot of cultures used to have these you know Boy turning into
• 88:00 - 88:30 a man for example you go and do something don't you we have um sometimes when people are I mean I I'm admited I'm a ritual skeptic at heart but some people who say I have no rituals I don't do any ritual they have no role in my life I'll say um well have you ever on a certain day put on a very long robe and a very funny looking hat like maybe it's a square or maybe it's kind of poofy and walked up on a stage and walked across the stage and grabbed a scroll of paper and then walked off the stage sat back
• 88:30 - 89:00 down more stuff happens then everybody claps and maybe even throw your hat in the air and they say well yeah of course I've done that that's graduation but I never do any rituals I say okay well let's unpack that because obviously we do we have these things to Mark these transitions from school still quite common but you're right that some of the other ones do get a little bit lost over time different faiths have more or less elaborate rituals in it sense that people will go through different cultures do as well but there's to my knowledge there's not a culture that
• 89:00 - 89:30 doesn't have typically between the age of 12 and 16 something at least traditionally that happens where you go from being a kid to not necessarily an adult but a full member of the community in in your book there was a fascinating one about Norwegian boys do you remember that one yeah they the thing that they do in Norway is they it's basically almost like they dare people to do pranks so you do like very outlandish pranks like uh one of them was um walk up to a stranger in the mall and give them a condom which is not again like a
• 89:30 - 90:00 Thousand-Year old tradition I don't think but they have these thing the one that I love is actually take a go for a swim in the ocean before March I think something like that which in Norway means cold very very cold uh they do this in order to kind of if you think about what these rituals do they often require something of you which could be reciting a text from memory it could be shaving your head it could be embarrassment actually a lot of the rituals in this Norwegian one are you
• 90:00 - 90:30 have to be embarrassed in order to get through it but there's some cost most often associated with it that you have to do something in order to then qualify to go through it and most rights have passed and it could again physical pain social pain emotional pain but something in it that is a challenge and it's a little bit like the Ikea effect in order to feel like you've gone past the threshold you got to put something of yourself into it so that you feel once you're through it I'm a different person yeah it's interesting one of my friends
• 90:30 - 91:00 as part of an organization who are now recognizing that a lot of boys in the UK don't have this kind of ritual passage into adulthood and so they're introducing it so I think they're teenage boys they go for a weekend they're out into the forest with you know this is a male ritual so there's male elders and the teenage boys and they do things with
• 91:00 - 91:30 fire and they discuss things and they have to do certain things it's a weekend I think it's only been running for two years but what he tells me is that the results have been fantastic in terms of what they have done for those kids and the the sense of who they are um I'd be interested to know what that's done for their mental well-being and all those kind of things which people are struggling with but maybe the loss of some important rituals is coming at a huge cost you know and I do think again it's um you might you might say well I
• 91:30 - 92:00 don't know about going into the woods and lighting fires and stuff I don't see why that would be helpful but again compared to what you know if we had something in place that was helping these kids through this transition we would use that yeah you know I mean if there's something that already works there's no need to go in the woods and have fire but often it's lacking and so this is another case where when something seems to be lacking one of the things that we turn to is ritual because how else are you supposed to know that you were something different yesterday than than you are today I mean marriage
• 92:00 - 92:30 is a great you don't have to have a wedding in order to be married many people don't why do we keep having them they're very stressful and all the sort partly of course is because how do I know that I'm no longer a single person but I'm a completely new person as part of a couple we could just decide or we can try to do a ceremony that marks it so that we have this before and after period what I think about human behaviors and What Makes Us tick I always think about big business
• 92:30 - 93:00 because these guys understand human behavior very well so for example when Amazon brought in oneclick ordering you know many years ago now the rumors are that profits went up by over $300 million a year I.E instead of having three or four different steps to take before you make an order you reduce the friction the behavior happens easily so therefore we can apply that go wow Amazon understand that that so if we want to bring a new Behavior into our life we've also got to make it easy and simple and not have lots of different
• 93:00 - 93:30 steps where I also have to think ritual can help here it can help us reduce choice and go now this is what I do each morning so for me I'd have to choose every morning I know what I do and I made it really really simple but through the lens of ritual now I'm thinking what are companies doing because if they know rituals are important and they help us do stuff well I'm pretty sure they must be hijacking it somewhere and so the the ideas that comes to mind for me are popcorn at Cinemas right maybe it started off with
• 93:30 - 94:00 something but now it's like a thing that you you go to the cinema and you eat popcorn again I'm not criticizing I'm just putting it out there you know that it seems to be a thing I think you write in the book about Starbucks and one of their logos about it's about rituals is it not take comfort in rituals take comfort in rituals right so that's become a thing where you know you know for for Starbucks lovers out there it it becomes your ritual I think about things like you mentioned Valentine's day before I don't know the history of how
• 94:00 - 94:30 that started but many people choose not to celebrate it like myself because it feels like a big commercial right um experiment basically right so I know a lot of people who won't do anything on balance it's like no I'm not going to celebrate my love for my partner on this day and buy all this these overpriced roses and all that kind of stuff you can even apply Christmas hair right and and I tell you where I'm going with this i' definitely want to hear your thoughts on this it's said we were in Egypt a few months ago
• 94:30 - 95:00 as a family and I spoke to this lovely chap who is a member of the Coptic Orthodox Church which I believe is the oldest form of Christianity but their Christmas day is at the start of January okay so it's not on the 25th of December it's at the start of January but leading up to Christmas day they have 40 days I guess a bit like length where uh they're restricting so I think it's very simple food I think it's vegan I think there's no alcohol there's you know
• 95:00 - 95:30 there's 40 days and then they have the Christmas Day celebration loads of food maybe wine and you know the kind of feast as it were and I remember when he told me that I thought wow I've grown up in the UK and yes there's of course a religious element to Christmas but it has also become very very commercial now as well and I feel December in the west has become a decadent month so it's more decadence and more um comfort eating or
• 95:30 - 96:00 whatever it might be and then you have Christmas day which of which often leads to these restrictive New Year's resolutions to try and rebalance and I thought wow you see the point so I guess my wider question is are rituals as helpful as they are for us as individuals have they been commercialized by big companies who want more profit one of the um like there's been an explosion literally in the last even five years in the number of companies that have the word
• 96:00 - 96:30 ritual in the title really there's a there's a skincare company that's ritual something there's a non-alcoholic beverage company that's ritual something there's more more more and more ritual ritual ritual because there's some awareness that the word itself has a little bit of a magical kind of connotation and a little bit of a you know if you think about consuming a project product ritualistic Al there is this it it feels very different than just consuming it my one of my favorite examp is Stella Artois has this very
• 96:30 - 97:00 elaborate sequence of how to create how to pour the perfect Stella or Tua and the steps are called like the sacrifice the purification you know the beheading actually is when you take the head off so they're using almost religious language it's a little tongue and cheek obviously but at the same time you watch the bartender perform you know prepared in this way and it does feel very different when you receive the call it the Chalice The Chalice of of this beer so for sure I think marketers are onto this one of my
• 97:00 - 97:30 favorite uh case studies ever it's a case study in the development of skin care regimes over time and if you look I'm I'm going to have the numbers completely wrong just to be clear but if you look at the course of human history there's there's like no soap and then there's soap just soap you use it everywhere hair Face Body whatever and then a little while after that it's like well maybe we need different kinds of soap for different parts of the so maybe we need shampoo and soap and then it's like well maybe we need different soap for the face than we do for the body so then we need three
• 97:30 - 98:00 then we need conditioner after the shampoo you get four and then you know maybe we need soap for the eyes it's different from the cheeks it's different from so you just see this insane exponential growth in skin care products and it it's true I guess that we do need we we could use different soaps for different things but it's also marketers saying hey how can we in the morning ritual skincare ritual how can we keep building in new steps to sell more product and the coolest thing really is that the curve for women went up sooner
• 98:00 - 98:30 than the curve for men for number of skincare products but in the last 10 to 20 years the curve for men has been shooting up as well that we're getting more and more skin products for men as well to try to get the same curve up of you got to have 73 things every morning you're not going to look good before you leave the house yeah once you start seeing it and a lot of the things you took for granted and you start to go where did this actually come from right like ah there's a lot of profits being made here you know maybe this isn't necessarily what I need it's what I'm
• 98:30 - 99:00 being told and so yeah fascinating look like I think you've written just a a wonderful book about a topic that I'm so fascinated by rituals right at the end of our conversation I guess for people who I've heard what you had to say I thought yeah you know what I think I'm missing Ritual from my life I think ritual would help me with my health with my happiness with my
• 99:00 - 99:30 relationships what are your final words to them I think um it isn't the case that adding 71 new rituals tomorrow is is the way to go number one who has the time to be to be adding all this stuff I think actually a really helpful first step is to take an inventory of what you're already doing so I find when I talk to people about this topic like we've been talking what happens is people will say oh you know I actually am doing something in that or you know I actually do do something with my spouse or I do do something with my kid it'll
• 99:30 - 100:00 kind of occur to you that you have these special practices that you're already or I do something in the morning that's important to me and so the first thing actually is is literally just take inventory of what's already happening because when you do you can appreciate them a little bit more you know if you have something cute that you do with your kids now that you see that it's a regular practice each time you do it it actually can get a little more meaning in you might even laugh at yourself a little bit like here we go doing this this thing but it enriches it I think so looking just to see where they are now
• 100:00 - 100:30 and if you don't think you have any you can ask your spouse you can ask your kids you can ask your co-workers hey do I have any and they'll say oh my God you do and here's 19 things that you do so you can get some social information as well but I do think actually that this is a wonderful first step is just to see the role that they're already playing and then if there's domains in life where you think you could use a little bit more think about trying them there so if you don't get nervous at all before performance you don't need to experiment with a pre-performance ritual because that's not something that
• 100:30 - 101:00 matters for you but if you're worried about your connection with your family think about trying something at dinner you know it it may or may not stick it may or may not work but when they do stick they really do work and add meaning so it's kind of a think of domains in which a little something extra might be needed and think about experimenting in there yeah I love that it could be as simple as lighting a candle before you have your evening meal or maybe a simple gratitude exercise that you do that I've spoken about many times on the show that I do with my family each night over Den a Mike I
• 101:00 - 101:30 really appreciate you're writing the book appreciate all your research into rituals thanks for making the journey up to the studio thank you so much it was really great to chat if you enjoyed that conversation I think you are really going to enjoy this one about five simple things you can do that will improve your health and happiness immediately I want to share with you some really practical effective tools if you can start implementing them into your life it's going to help you with your health your happiness and the quality of your relationships