Speaker 1: We ask couples, Hey, is there anything the two of
Speaker 1: you do that's kind of unique to you and special?
Speaker 2: And you make sure to do it regularly, you know,
Speaker 2: every day.
Speaker 1: Once a week, once a month, anything like that, And
Speaker 1: varies from study to study, but two thirds to three
Speaker 1: quarters of couples say you know what, yes, And then.
Speaker 2: We say, well, what is it?
Speaker 1: And they say the cutest, most endearing things you've ever
Speaker 1: heard in your entire life.
Speaker 3: Wow, welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great
Speaker 3: thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have.
Speaker 3: Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what
Speaker 3: you think, ring true, and yet for many of us,
Speaker 3: our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
Speaker 3: self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
Speaker 3: have instead of what we do. We think things that
Speaker 3: hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
Speaker 3: just about thinking. Our action matter. It takes conscious, consistent
Speaker 3: and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
Speaker 3: podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
Speaker 3: the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks
Speaker 3: for joining us, our guest on this episode, is Michael Norton.
Speaker 3: He's the Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration at
Speaker 3: Harvard Business School. He is also known for identifying and
Speaker 3: naming the Ikea effect, which is a cognitive bias in
Speaker 3: which consumers place disproportionately high value on products they partially created. Today,
Speaker 3: Mike and Eric discuss his new book, The Ritual Effect,
Speaker 3: From Habit to Ritual Harness The Surprising Power of Everyday Actions.
Speaker 4: Hi, Mike, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2: Thanks so much for having me on.
Speaker 4: I'm excited to have you on. We're going to be
Speaker 4: discussing your book, The Ritual Effect, From Habit to Ritual Harness,
Speaker 4: The Surprising Power of Everyday Actions. But before we get
Speaker 4: into that, let's start like we always do with the parable.
Speaker 4: In the Parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their
Speaker 4: grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves
Speaker 4: inside of us that are always at battle. One is
Speaker 4: a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery
Speaker 4: and love, and the other's a bad wolf, which represents
Speaker 4: things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops,
Speaker 4: thinks about it for a second, looks up at their grandparents,
Speaker 4: says well, which one wins and the grandparent says the
Speaker 4: one you feed. So I'd like to start off by
Speaker 4: asking you what that parable means to you and your
Speaker 4: life and in the work that you do.
Speaker 1: The first thing that I thought of was actually something
Speaker 1: that we started to do a few years ago with
Speaker 1: our daughter, who's eight years old. When we start dinner
Speaker 1: every night, we go around and everyone has to say
Speaker 1: something that happened that day that they're grateful for. We
Speaker 1: actually tried to do other things, but she kept refusing
Speaker 1: to do them. Eventually we got to a gratitude and
Speaker 1: she's willing to do that one. As I was thinking
Speaker 1: about the parable, I was thinking, you know why that,
Speaker 1: because we could do anything at the beginning of dinner,
Speaker 1: but we've chosen to do that, and I think it's
Speaker 1: for my wife and I. I think the idea of
Speaker 1: behaving in a way where people would be grateful for
Speaker 1: how you treat them, and also being very grateful for
Speaker 1: other people and how lucky you many of us are
Speaker 1: in life is really one of the core not just
Speaker 1: like a moral thing, but a core reason for happiness
Speaker 1: for our daughter. So I was thinking about what are
Speaker 1: we trying to feed when we have that little practice
Speaker 1: that we do at the beginning of every dinner, and
Speaker 1: it really is this idea of make sure you feed
Speaker 1: the other oriented part of yourself, not just the part
Speaker 1: that's for you only.
Speaker 4: Yeah. When I was growing up, dinner was with the
Speaker 4: nightly news on every night, So I can suspect that
Speaker 4: had we done gratitude every evening instead of the nightly news,
Speaker 4: I might be a different person.
Speaker 1: I had four siblings, so dinner for me was trying
Speaker 1: to eat as quickly as possible so that you could
Speaker 1: get more of the food.
Speaker 2: So I don't know what's worth.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I had two others. Let's jump in and
Speaker 4: start talking about the book. I guess to start, what
Speaker 4: made you interested in rituals as something to write a
Speaker 4: book about.
Speaker 1: So for quite a few years, I'm a social psychologist
Speaker 1: by training, and I was working on happiness, which is,
Speaker 1: I guess it's a pretty large and nebulous topic. But
Speaker 1: I was particularly interested in finding things that people could
Speaker 1: do to increase their happiness today, meaning not so much
Speaker 1: huge life decisions, you know, getting married and all this
Speaker 1: sort of stuff, but small things like if you had
Speaker 1: thirty minutes right now, do I have any advice for
Speaker 1: you on what to do to make yourself, you know,
Speaker 1: feel good. And the initial research was about using money
Speaker 1: for that, So how should we spend our money to
Speaker 1: get more happiness out of it? And speaking of gratitude,
Speaker 1: one of the things we showed is spending on other
Speaker 1: people is much better for happiness than spending on yourself.
Speaker 1: But from that research, I think I got this idea
Speaker 1: of what are the small practices we can do every
Speaker 1: single day of our lives that might have an impact
Speaker 1: on the quality of our lives.
Speaker 2: And I got from that to outside.
Speaker 1: The domaine of money, but to ritual, which is I
Speaker 1: kept seeing in so many places in life, and big
Speaker 1: events as well like marriage and funerals, rituals come into play,
Speaker 1: but also just in people's everyday lives. These small little
Speaker 1: practices that people have in the morning or with their kids,
Speaker 1: or with their spouse, or with their teams at work
Speaker 1: that seemed to be really important for them in the
Speaker 1: daily lives that I think we didn't know a ton
Speaker 1: about as researchers, at least in my field.
Speaker 2: And I was hooked.
Speaker 1: I kind of really wanted to understand these smaller, little
Speaker 1: rituals that people often come up with themselves from scratch
Speaker 1: and what role were they playing in our lives.
Speaker 4: So when we think about ritual, there are some other
Speaker 4: words that are close to it. We could think of ritual,
Speaker 4: you could also think of a routine. You could think
Speaker 4: of a habit. You could think of perhaps something that's
Speaker 4: even stronger than that, like a compulsion. What differentiates a
Speaker 4: ritual from those things.
Speaker 2: A couple of things.
Speaker 1: I think it's important question in part because the point
Speaker 1: of the research on this book is not to say
Speaker 1: that more rituals is better. You know, it's not like
Speaker 1: the ten secret rituals that you can do every day
Speaker 1: to be a happy person. That's not what it is.
Speaker 1: And the word compulsion is so important because we do
Speaker 1: see that rituals can go too far. You're trying to
Speaker 1: use them to improve your life, but they can get
Speaker 1: a hold of you instead. So one thing we always
Speaker 1: think about with rituals is it's not just more and better,
Speaker 1: but use them in the places where they might help
Speaker 1: you the most, so that they're not compulsions, but they're helpful.
Speaker 1: And then for habits, there's some rituals that are close
Speaker 1: to habits that are so usually don't make a habit
Speaker 1: out of getting married.
Speaker 2: For example, I guess some people might not.
Speaker 1: We're not trying to do it every day, you know,
Speaker 1: and get better at getting married, maybe.
Speaker 4: A couple more under my belt than I might like.
Speaker 4: But I wouldn't call it habitual.
Speaker 2: At least not publicly. Maybe it would be fair with that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, So some of the rituals that we do
Speaker 1: they don't have the property of habit, but some, for
Speaker 1: sure do. You know our morning routine and what people
Speaker 1: do before they exercise, you know, they tie their shoes
Speaker 1: in a particular way, and those things I think are
Speaker 1: closer to habits for me. The big difference between rituals
Speaker 1: and habits is that habits tend to be kind of
Speaker 1: dry and unemotional. There're sort of things we do to
Speaker 1: get them done. I got to go for a run
Speaker 1: today because it's good for me to go for a run,
Speaker 1: and when I finish the run, I check it off.
Speaker 1: And rituals often it could be the exact same thing,
Speaker 1: but it's not dry. There's something more emotional or meaningful
Speaker 1: about it. And so you see athletes who say, you know,
Speaker 1: I always tie my shoes, and I put this shoe
Speaker 1: on and I tie it like this, and then I
Speaker 1: put this shoe on and I tie it like this,
Speaker 1: and then I do this, and then I do this.
Speaker 1: You know, these very elaborate rituals that they do, and
Speaker 1: they're turning running from just something to get done into
Speaker 1: something more for them. And I think are rituals, the
Speaker 1: little ones that we do every day, they often take
Speaker 1: us from going through the motions of life and add
Speaker 1: sometimes to those motions a little bit more emotion, meaning
Speaker 1: other things I think that are helpful for us.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you say rituals are emotional catalysts that energize, inspire,
Speaker 4: and elevate us. And you also go on to say
Speaker 4: that habit automates and ritual animates.
Speaker 1: By the way, let me just say good habits are good. Sure,
Speaker 1: I never mean to say don't have good habits.
Speaker 2: They're not. There are ways of.
Speaker 1: Time I wish I had better habits. You know, I
Speaker 1: should exercise more too. But I think if you had
Speaker 1: a life of perfect habits, So imagine starting today, you
Speaker 1: always had perfect habits for the next thirty years, every
Speaker 1: single day perfect has I think at the end of the.
Speaker 2: Thirty years you'd probably be very, very healthy.
Speaker 1: But would you look back and say what an interesting
Speaker 1: and rich life I lived, or would you say, maybe
Speaker 1: I spent too much time counting my steps? And that
Speaker 1: really was where it came for me, was to say,
Speaker 1: of course, we need to have these better habits, but
Speaker 1: life is not all about executing on our good habits.
Speaker 1: There's much much more to it. And I think for
Speaker 1: many people, rituals play a role in kind of making
Speaker 1: life more interesting and more emotional. I mean holidays that
Speaker 1: we have in part you know, we have like one
Speaker 1: or two a month. Most faiths and most cultures have
Speaker 1: a couple of month, And I think it's partly because
Speaker 1: life gets kind of boring, and so we insert these
Speaker 1: reminders to gather with family, for example, or celebrate something
Speaker 1: that's important to us. I think they serve this really
Speaker 1: important role in enriching our lives.
Speaker 4: You tell a story in the book about how even
Speaker 4: as you were paying attention to ritual you were a
Speaker 4: little like, I don't know, do I really have rituals
Speaker 4: or do I need rituals? And then you discuss when
Speaker 4: your daughter was born. You say, I instantly and unthinkingly
Speaker 4: transformed into a shamanic madman. Tell me more.
Speaker 1: I think anybody who's had a kid resonates. You know,
Speaker 1: when you have a kid, you go to the hospital
Speaker 1: or you can advocate at home and maybe somebody is
Speaker 1: there for a little while, and then they basically say,
Speaker 1: why don't you take this thing and take care of
Speaker 1: it for the next twenty year with no guidance, you know,
Speaker 1: nobody with you often And the number one thing with
Speaker 1: new parents is it's all they talk about and I
Speaker 1: did too, is sleep.
Speaker 2: You know, are you sleeping? Is the baby sleep being?
Speaker 1: How's the sleep as an app And it's like the
Speaker 1: most central thing in your life is to get this
Speaker 1: little creature to sleep because you know that it's good
Speaker 1: for them. And what do you do when you're left
Speaker 1: to your own devices with this thing that you really
Speaker 1: want to sleep?
Speaker 2: What do people turn to?
Speaker 1: And what we found is that and us as well
Speaker 1: as people, very often turned to ritual. Now they don't say, hey,
Speaker 1: let's sit down and make a ritual and you know,
Speaker 1: write it out. I don't mean it like that, but
Speaker 1: what happens is you start to have specific books that
Speaker 1: you read, specific songs that you sing, like you do
Speaker 1: the bath at this time, and then the book and
Speaker 1: then the song. My daughter For some reason she was
Speaker 1: a little bit older, started saying good night to the
Speaker 1: stairs as I walked up the stairs with her, and
Speaker 1: if we skipped it, we'd have to go back and
Speaker 1: say good night to the stairs. So I'm you know,
Speaker 1: I'm a scientist saying good night to the stairs. But
Speaker 1: at some point I realized, you know, why are we
Speaker 1: doing all of this, And of course it was we
Speaker 1: were trying to help her transition from awake self to
Speaker 1: a sleep self. And one of the things we thought
Speaker 1: we might do, just like we do with ourselves at
Speaker 1: night sometimes, is have a little bedtime routine or ritual
Speaker 1: that we go through to try to get us from
Speaker 1: being awake to being asleep. I will say later I
Speaker 1: realized it's completely unclear if it helped her sleep at all.
Speaker 1: We never really tested it, but I know that it
Speaker 1: helped us feel like we had some control over a
Speaker 1: situation that was really, really stressful and something we really
Speaker 1: cared a lot about. So even if it didn't quite
Speaker 1: do the sleep thing that we were hoping, I think, yeah,
Speaker 1: it had benefits for us. And rich will sometimes do
Speaker 1: that they have an unusual benefit that isn't exactly what
Speaker 1: we thought they were going to do.
Speaker 2: For us.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think it's interesting you talk about rituals as
Speaker 4: a response to uncertainty and stress, and so obviously for you,
Speaker 4: there was some uncertainty and stress in getting a child
Speaker 4: to go to sleep. As I was thinking about that,
Speaker 4: I was also wondering. I wonder with children. I was one,
Speaker 4: But I don't know what it's like to be your
Speaker 4: first couple years of life, right, I can't. I have
Speaker 4: no recollection of that, But seems like it might be
Speaker 4: uncertain Maybe children are drawn to this repetition, this ritual
Speaker 4: for the same reason certain adults might be. And that's
Speaker 4: just a theory completely.
Speaker 1: Everything must be a complete surprise and shock to them
Speaker 1: all the time.
Speaker 2: I mean, for one thing, they don't even know that when.
Speaker 1: Objects disappear, they still exist, so you know, right, if
Speaker 1: you put something in their field of you and then not,
Speaker 1: it's like you're a magic person having this thing reappear.
Speaker 1: And so yeah, they're really struggling to understand the physical world.
Speaker 1: And I do think the same sounds and the same words,
Speaker 1: and the same people and the same smells do probably
Speaker 1: help them feel a sense of regularity so that they
Speaker 1: can actually regulate themselves down enough to maybe take a nap.
Speaker 4: Let's stay on this topic of rituals helping with uncertainty.
Speaker 4: You tell a story of Bef Skinner, who's known for
Speaker 4: lots of behavioral things, but you tell a story about
Speaker 4: him in pigeons, and I was curious if you could
Speaker 4: share what these pigeons started doing and why this is.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen fifties, a guy who most of his
Speaker 1: research was about people sometimes know these words like operant conditioning,
Speaker 1: classical conditioning. He worked with pigeons and rats, and he
Speaker 1: would do things like have a machine with a bunch
Speaker 1: of buttons and levers on it, and if you pecked
Speaker 1: this one button three times, if you were a pigeon,
Speaker 1: you got a piece of food. And what he wanted
Speaker 1: to see is how quickly pigeons could learn that. So
Speaker 1: he's looking really at how do you reinforce behaviors and
Speaker 1: things like this. It was very practical in a sense,
Speaker 1: you know, if I want something or someone to do
Speaker 1: a behavior, how do I encourage them to do that behavior?
Speaker 1: Except he did this one funny piece of research where
Speaker 1: he decided to same thing like a big box with
Speaker 1: buttons and levers and stuff, pigeons pecking at it, and
Speaker 1: he decided that he would just have the food come
Speaker 1: out completely randomly, so no matter what they pulled or
Speaker 1: pushed or pecked or anything like that, at random interval's
Speaker 1: food would come out. So what pigeons should do is nothing.
Speaker 1: They should realize that it's random and just sit back
Speaker 1: and wait for the food. Right, That's not what they do.
Speaker 1: They start to peck and pull the levers and things
Speaker 1: like that. And what was so fascinating was they developed rituals.
Speaker 1: Like one pigeon would be like, I know what it is.
Speaker 1: It's three taps over there and then pull the lever, right,
Speaker 1: But a different pigeon would say it's four levers and
Speaker 1: then two pecks over there. So they actually pigeons we're
Speaker 1: talking about very quickly developed little superstitious rituals in the
Speaker 1: effort to control what we know to be a completely
Speaker 1: random process. And I think humans are a little more
Speaker 1: sophisticated than pigeons, but I think we sometimes do the
Speaker 1: exact same thing, which is, I mean, the older you get,
Speaker 1: the more you realize very few things are in our control, unfortunately,
Speaker 1: and so how do we feel at least a sense
Speaker 1: of control. I think just like pigeons. One of the
Speaker 1: things that we do is use rituals to try to
Speaker 1: have that sense of control.
Speaker 4: You also talk about that fishermen who fish in choppier
Speaker 4: and more dangerous waters, those cultures are known to have
Speaker 4: more ritual than cultures who are fishing in safer waters.
Speaker 1: So anthropologist, of course have been studying rituals for long,
Speaker 1: long before I started studying this topic, and they identified
Speaker 1: this idea that in the face of uncertainty, there seems
Speaker 1: to be this natural correlation where the more uncertain something is,
Speaker 1: the more rituals are brought to bear. One of the
Speaker 1: things they show is that if you do kind of
Speaker 1: risky occupations like fishing in uncertain scary places, you're more
Speaker 1: likely to have these rituals than if you fish on
Speaker 1: a calm surface where there's no uncertainty whatsoever. And across
Speaker 1: many domains, actually they were able to show that there
Speaker 1: is this natural relationship between uncertainty and ritual For example,
Speaker 1: rain rituals, rain dance rituals, which have emerged many times
Speaker 1: in human history. On the one hand, you could say,
Speaker 1: I think we know that something we do on the
Speaker 1: ground here is not going to cause it to rain,
Speaker 1: so why would they emerge, And of course where they
Speaker 1: emerge is in cultures where there's unpredictable drought. So you
Speaker 1: can easily see why, in this face of this uncertainty,
Speaker 1: I mean, this is life uncertainty, why some cultures would
Speaker 1: be more likely than others to develop practices to have
Speaker 1: them feel at least that they have some control over
Speaker 1: this very risky and upsetting event.
Speaker 4: So there's two ways to think about that. I think
Speaker 4: one is to think, well, that's just ridiculous superstition and
Speaker 4: we should do away with it, like why dance if
Speaker 4: it doesn't do any good. I think you're making a
Speaker 4: deeper point, though, which is not that the rituals that
Speaker 4: we do necessarily cause the thing to happen that we want.
Speaker 4: They help us psychologically deal with the uncertainty that is
Speaker 4: there in a way that truly just staring down the
Speaker 4: uncertainty might not do.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 1: And you know, if we were feeling a lack of
Speaker 1: control and we were incredibly stressed and anxious, if research
Speaker 1: showed that if we snapped our fingers it would go away,
Speaker 1: and then people still did rain dances, I would say
Speaker 1: you don't need to do those anymore because I don't
Speaker 1: know if you knew this, but you can magically snap
Speaker 1: your fingers and all your anxiety goes away.
Speaker 2: But that's not how we're built.
Speaker 1: I wish we were, that we could just decide not
Speaker 1: to be anxious and worried, but we can't. We need
Speaker 1: to do something often to change how we're feeling. And
Speaker 1: one of the things that we do to change how
Speaker 1: we're feeling is we turn to ritual to help us
Speaker 1: go from one state to another state. And if you
Speaker 1: think of rain rituals in particular, it's true that they
Speaker 1: probably don't make rain come down. But what they do is,
Speaker 1: if you think of a time of drought, what happens
Speaker 1: is conflict starts to develop in groups because of a
Speaker 1: scarce resource. We start to you know, I'm not going
Speaker 1: to share anything with you now because I have to
Speaker 1: keep it for me. And what these rain rituals do
Speaker 1: is they bring us all together as a community and
Speaker 1: remind us that we're a community and remind us that
Speaker 1: we have a shared history. And by the way, people
Speaker 1: were doing this three hundred years ago and they got
Speaker 1: through this drought. So by doing this practice now or
Speaker 1: actually providing real evidence that we can together get through this.
Speaker 1: So a skeptic, as you said, could say, stop doing
Speaker 1: those things. You know it's not making it rain. Anyone
Speaker 1: who understands humans would say, I think it actually is
Speaker 1: very very valuable use of time in terms of helping
Speaker 1: people through these really difficult times.
Speaker 2: Hi.
Speaker 4: Everyone, One of the things that I know many of
Speaker 4: you struggle with is anxiety, and very recently I shared
Speaker 4: some tips on managing anxiety in our newsletter. Specifically, I
Speaker 4: shared a practice on clarifying your values. In the practice,
Speaker 4: you write down one or two of your core values
Speaker 4: and then identify one action step that aligns with them.
Speaker 4: I find that taking one positive action towards things that
Speaker 4: matter to me really helps reduce anxiety. Also, I have
Speaker 4: a reflection question, what positive experiences have you had today
Speaker 4: that you could focus on instead of your anxiety. Every
Speaker 4: Wednesday I send out a newsletter called a Weekly by
Speaker 4: to Wisdom for a wiser, Happier You, And in it
Speaker 4: I give tips and reflections like you just got, And
Speaker 4: it's an opportunity for you to pause, reflect, and practice.
Speaker 4: It's a way to stay focused on what's important and
Speaker 4: meaningful to you. Each month we focus on a theme.
Speaker 4: This month's theme is anxiety, and next month we'll be
Speaker 4: focusing on acceptance. To sign up for these bits of
Speaker 4: weekly wisdom, go to Goodwolf dot me slash newsletter. I've
Speaker 4: got a question. I can't quite compose it here, but
Speaker 4: it's something along the lines of is a ritual still
Speaker 4: valuable in times of uncertainty even if you know that
Speaker 4: it doesn't impact the outcome? So we know why rituals
Speaker 4: make sense for people doing a rain dance. Now we
Speaker 4: can look back anthropologically and we go, oh, what did
Speaker 4: all these things for the culture, etc. They didn't know
Speaker 4: that at the time. We do. So if I know
Speaker 4: that whatever the thing is I'm about to do isn't
Speaker 4: going to affect the outcome, are there still ways for
Speaker 4: it to be valuable for me?
Speaker 1: It's interesting because the nature of rituals, of course, change
Speaker 1: over time. I think of something like a rally cap
Speaker 1: at a baseball game, which is, you know, you take
Speaker 1: your baseball hat and turn it inside out and put
Speaker 1: it back on because you're rooting for your team, and
Speaker 1: every fan can do it. You know, you got thirty
Speaker 1: thousand people all with a hat on inside out or
Speaker 1: whatever it might be. On some level, you're aware that
Speaker 1: turning the hat inside out does not guarantee victory. Of course,
Speaker 1: we're not completely clueless, So why do we do that
Speaker 1: for example? And I think again, it's we really want
Speaker 1: our team to win, and we have this shared thing
Speaker 1: now right, we're all doing this to root for them together.
Speaker 1: So we're getting this feeling of solidarity that I think
Speaker 1: is a really useful, powerful feeling to get that we
Speaker 1: can't really get unless we're doing something ritualistic together. The
Speaker 1: wave is, of course, is another amazing example. We're literally
Speaker 1: working together with this thing to feel more connected to
Speaker 1: each other. So yeah, it's true, it's not going to
Speaker 1: affect the performance of the players, but it's going to
Speaker 1: affect our experience and sometimes in a very big way,
Speaker 1: to make us feel more connected and a little less worried.
Speaker 4: Yeah, my brain is like the hitter is going to
Speaker 4: glance up here to a right field just for a second,
Speaker 4: and he's going to see that I do not have
Speaker 4: my hat turned inside out, exactly, and he's going to
Speaker 4: inside feel sad and exactly Like, as much as I
Speaker 4: know it, it doesn't affect it. And yet we're always trying
Speaker 4: to just grasp for like it just seems natively wrong,
Speaker 4: that the way we do something just doesn't matter in
Speaker 4: the grand scheme of things, and yet we know that
Speaker 4: rationally be true.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 1: And we also think, you know, even people at home
Speaker 1: will turn their hat inside out who are watching on TV.
Speaker 1: And you know they can't see you then, but there
Speaker 1: we're thinking some kind of karma or something is watching
Speaker 1: me right now to see if I turn my hat
Speaker 1: inside out, and somehow that will get into the batter's head.
Speaker 1: And you know, I mean, in the one hand, what
Speaker 1: a weird thing we do. On the other hand, it's
Speaker 1: actually perfectly sensible, and we do stuff like this all
Speaker 1: the time.
Speaker 4: Yep, yep. So one of the things that I think
Speaker 4: about when I think about ritual, particularly the types of
Speaker 4: rituals that you do regularly. So there's rituals that you
Speaker 4: do ideally once in a while, like being married. I
Speaker 4: assume you know, you don't do it often enough that
Speaker 4: that ritual is boring. But a lot of things that
Speaker 4: become rituals we do them regularly. And if the goal
Speaker 4: of a ritual is to sort of catalyze emotion to
Speaker 4: some degree, is there anything that you've learned about how
Speaker 4: we can keep those rituals that we do very regularly
Speaker 4: filled with emotion, because repetition often drains emotion out of something,
Speaker 4: which then renders the ritual effect of it less useful.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's right.
Speaker 1: I mean many many things that we do in life,
Speaker 1: the more we do them, the sicker we are of them.
Speaker 2: In a sense.
Speaker 1: You know, if you eat chocolate cake, the first bite's amazing,
Speaker 1: and by the tenth bite you're still gonna eat it
Speaker 1: because it's chocolate cake, but it's getting a little bit
Speaker 1: worse and worse over time. Yeah, And so there is
Speaker 1: this sense that for lots of things in life, repetition
Speaker 1: leads to less enjoyment or less good feelings. But there's
Speaker 1: something about rituals actually where the more we do them,
Speaker 1: the more they get imbued with meaning. So it isn't
Speaker 1: quite enjoyment in the sense of, you know, I'm happy
Speaker 1: that I'm eating cake. Sometimes rituals do fill us with joy,
Speaker 1: but the idea of meaning actually is a little bit
Speaker 1: more elusive. And one of the things that does produce
Speaker 1: meaning for us is in fact repeating things. Over time,
Speaker 1: they can become imbued with more and more meaning, even
Speaker 1: if they're not as exciting as chocolate cake.
Speaker 2: More and more meaning over time.
Speaker 1: And so the fact that I'm doing this, you know
Speaker 1: I've been doing this for years. If it's a religious practice,
Speaker 1: for example, I know that my parents and grandparents did this,
Speaker 1: and I know in some faiths people have been doing
Speaker 1: this for thousands of years. That means that every time
Speaker 1: I do it, it's an enormously meaningful act. It's connecting me
Speaker 1: to my ancestry, to my parents, to my family. And
Speaker 1: so when I do it again, it's not actually getting worse,
Speaker 1: it's getting more more meaning because it's being even more
Speaker 1: built into something that's really important to me.
Speaker 4: It seems to me that we need to cultivate that though,
Speaker 4: right because I can think of certain things that I've
Speaker 4: done again and again in life that could have meaning
Speaker 4: and also could not. I'll just give a couple examples.
Speaker 4: I'm a recovering addict and alcoholic, and I went to
Speaker 4: more meetings in my early years of recovery than you
Speaker 4: could shake a stick at, and they read the same
Speaker 4: thing at the beginning of every meeting, hundreds of times,
Speaker 4: thousands of times of hearing the twelve steps read. There
Speaker 4: is a way in which that could become progressively more meaningful.
Speaker 4: There are ways in which it could make me insane.
Speaker 4: I've also spent a fair amount of time practicing zen Buddhism,
Speaker 4: and zen Buddhism is a very ritualized thing. You do
Speaker 4: certain things in a certain way every time and again.
Speaker 4: That can be something that has meaning, and it can
Speaker 4: also be something where you know the phrase going through
Speaker 4: the emotions. So it seems that there is something we're
Speaker 4: bringing to it that is allowing it to remin meaningful
Speaker 4: and not become habitual.
Speaker 1: I think that's right, and I think we didn't discover
Speaker 1: in the research, for example, that there are some rituals
Speaker 1: that work on everyone. Imagine we discovered that if you
Speaker 1: collap six times and stop twelve times, it works on
Speaker 1: every single human. It does something, And that really isn't
Speaker 1: what we see. It's much more idiosyncratic than that. So
Speaker 1: the same behaviors could mean nothing to you and be
Speaker 1: part of a very important ritual to me. And we
Speaker 1: see people who in one domain say these rituals are
Speaker 1: doing nothing for me, might in another domain really get
Speaker 1: a lot of benefit out of rituals. So even if
Speaker 1: you're some if the twelve steps being read doesn't do
Speaker 1: anything for you, it may be that there are other
Speaker 1: things in life that are ritualistic that do.
Speaker 2: Something for you.
Speaker 1: And so partly I think what people do over time,
Speaker 1: not necessarily consciously, but they try to figure out in
Speaker 1: what domains of life are these kinds of practices helpful
Speaker 1: for me? And which ones I see that they land
Speaker 1: for other people, but for me, they just they don't
Speaker 1: really do anything, so I'm not going to keep doing them.
Speaker 1: Is actually for me very interesting about rituals, because it
Speaker 1: means it isn't just that there's a cookie cutter ritual
Speaker 1: that we know works for all humans. It's much more
Speaker 1: complex than that. It's really a very individual thing what
Speaker 1: works for me. And of course then people also make
Speaker 1: up their own completely from scratch, and those can become
Speaker 1: very meaningful to us as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I was going to say the examples I just gave
Speaker 4: were rituals that by being part of those groups, I
Speaker 4: inherited those rituals, right, And your ritual for putting your
Speaker 4: daughter to sleep was one that you made up, and
Speaker 4: throughout the book you sort of make this distinction. Yeah,
Speaker 4: there are some rituals that are tradition based, but a
Speaker 4: ritual doesn't have to be tradition based. It can be
Speaker 4: completely made up, as you.
Speaker 1: Said, and often we use both kinds in different situations
Speaker 1: in life. When we've asked people about grief. For example,
Speaker 1: you know, think of someone you love who passed away,
Speaker 1: and we ask people what did you do? We don't
Speaker 1: say which rituals did you do? We say what did
Speaker 1: you do? And people will say, you know, there was
Speaker 1: a funeral, whatever their faith or culture is, they say, yeah,
Speaker 1: we did that. Everyone got together and we did that
Speaker 1: practice and it was incredibly helpful. These legacy rituals that
Speaker 1: are handed to us play an incredibly important role in
Speaker 1: our lives. So I'm never saying those aren't useful, because
Speaker 1: they really are useful. But then people would say, but
Speaker 1: I also did this other thing actually to honor that person.
Speaker 1: One woman said, I washed his car every.
Speaker 2: Weekend, the way he used to do.
Speaker 1: There's definitely no two thousand year old text that says
Speaker 1: wash a car number one. There weren't any cars right, right,
Speaker 1: But what is she doing? And of course you can
Speaker 1: see what she's doing. Obviously her husband loved his car
Speaker 1: and took good care of it. Now he's gone, she
Speaker 1: went to the funeral and got the social support, but
Speaker 1: she's doing this private thing that she came up with
Speaker 1: entirely on her own that's very idiosyncratic and special to
Speaker 1: their relationship. And we see that in domain after domain.
Speaker 1: You know, people get married and there's a wedding, and
Speaker 1: then couples tell us about the little things that they do,
Speaker 1: so that we always see this combination. People are sort
Speaker 1: of looking between the official ones that are handed down
Speaker 1: and the ones that kind of are bottom up that
Speaker 1: we come up with ourselves, and most people use both
Speaker 1: in some different situations.
Speaker 4: So i'd like to talk about a couple of those
Speaker 4: different situations. We're going to get to relationship rituals a
Speaker 4: little bit later on, but first i'd like to talk
Speaker 4: about you've alluded to it a little bit, the rituals
Speaker 4: of high performing people.
Speaker 1: If you want to waste, well, maybe not waste an afternoon,
Speaker 1: spend an afternoon. Type in an athlete's name or a
Speaker 1: musician's name, or a singer's name, and the word ritual,
Speaker 1: and it's extraordinary how many of them have very elaborate rituals.
Speaker 1: And in fact, if there's a celebrity that it doesn't
Speaker 1: come up, it's not necessarily that they don't have one.
Speaker 2: It's just nobody reported on it yet.
Speaker 1: I mean, they're really really common for high performers that
Speaker 1: they have something that they do before they go on stage,
Speaker 1: before the match, before the game. Tennis players, before every serve,
Speaker 1: you can conjure them up. Actually, I can show the
Speaker 1: steps of different tennis players rituals, and tennis fans can say,
Speaker 1: I know exactly who that is. So I can put
Speaker 1: up Raphael Nadal's ritual and by the third step people
Speaker 1: say that's Rafa because it's the headband, and then he
Speaker 1: picks his wedgie. He does all these specific things. Serena
Speaker 1: Williams has the thing with bouncing the ball a specific
Speaker 1: number of times. You know, these amazing performers, and it's
Speaker 1: funny because, for example, Nadal will say, I know I
Speaker 1: don't need to do it, it's just that when I do it,
Speaker 1: I feel like I'm ready to go. And a lot
Speaker 1: of high performers explain.
Speaker 2: It exactly that way. It's almost like the rally cap.
Speaker 1: We know it's not going to cause a victory, but
Speaker 1: when we engage in these practices it does something for us.
Speaker 1: And these high performers, if you think of the stress
Speaker 1: that they are, I can't even imagine what it's like
Speaker 1: to play at Wimbledon. The stress that they are under
Speaker 1: is so profound that you see them very very often
Speaker 1: turn just like the choppy water fishermen. They're turning to
Speaker 1: these rituals to try to get a little bit of
Speaker 1: calm befo. They have to engage in this incredibly difficult behavior.
Speaker 4: Yeah, many of our guests have to engage in great
Speaker 4: amounts of ritual to feel confident enough to come on
Speaker 4: this show. So I'm really impressed with how you've just
Speaker 4: kind of showed. I don't know what your pregame was
Speaker 4: for this. It's really interesting that we know the ritual
Speaker 4: isn't doing anything externally for say Nadal or the basketball
Speaker 4: player who spins the ball X number of times bounces
Speaker 4: it three times before a free throw. It's not magic
Speaker 4: on the ball, right, and yet it is profoundly doing
Speaker 4: something internally for them that actually does affect their performance.
Speaker 4: So to say that it doesn't do anything is not
Speaker 4: quite accurate. It doesn't do anything externally.
Speaker 1: Researchers have suggested that if you think about anxiety everyday,
Speaker 1: anxiety but a clinical anxiety as well. One of the
Speaker 1: properties of anxiety is that it spirals. So you know,
Speaker 1: if you have a big meeting at work and you're
Speaker 1: worried about it. First you're worried about the meeting, but
Speaker 1: then anxiety has this property where it just keeps going
Speaker 1: and going, so your word, you know, the meeting isn't
Speaker 1: going to go well and probably going to get fired,
Speaker 1: probably gonna get a divorce because I get fired.
Speaker 2: You know, that's what anxiety is. It really spirals out
Speaker 2: of control.
Speaker 1: And these researchers have suggested that one thing that rituals
Speaker 1: do for us is they occupy enough of our mental
Speaker 1: space that we can't spiral as much. So it's not
Speaker 1: as though if we do them, we're not nervous anymore.
Speaker 1: We're still nervous about the meeting. I bet Nadal is
Speaker 1: still nervous about serving, but it's kind of contains the
Speaker 1: anxiety a little bit.
Speaker 2: For me.
Speaker 1: I think it's not that these rituals make you perform better.
Speaker 1: I could do in the Doll's ritual, and I still
Speaker 1: stink at tennis. The ritual itself is not going to
Speaker 1: make me good at tennis. But I think it allows
Speaker 1: people to perform to their potential. It gets some things
Speaker 1: out of the way at least so that you can
Speaker 1: do what it is that you're good at.
Speaker 4: So you've just described ritual as a way of working
Speaker 4: with anxiety, and we sort of started off by talking
Speaker 4: about compulsions, and OCD appears to be that mechanism gone awry.
Speaker 4: I believe that if I do these things that then
Speaker 4: I will feel settled or it will do something, and
Speaker 4: I do them, but it doesn't really work. So what
Speaker 4: did you learn about where that goes awry or how
Speaker 4: to know when it's gone awry.
Speaker 1: If you think about what people are often doing with
Speaker 1: rituals is they're engaged in the ritual in order to
Speaker 1: then do something else. So Nadal is doing his wedgie
Speaker 1: picking in order to then serve, or musicians are doing
Speaker 1: stuff backstage in order to then go on stage and perform,
Speaker 1: or even something like when you leave the house in
Speaker 1: the morning, if you double check if the door is locked,
Speaker 1: you're doing that in order to feel okay about leaving
Speaker 1: the house and you don't have to worry about it
Speaker 1: all day. So there's this the ritual in order to
Speaker 1: accomplish other goals in life. And what can happen with
Speaker 1: OCD is we lose the link between those two. So
Speaker 1: instead of checking the lock in order to leave the
Speaker 1: house and go to work or hang out with my friends,
Speaker 1: I'm checking the lock in order to check the lock
Speaker 1: instead of the link to another thing that we're trying
Speaker 1: to do. It becomes a circular loop. And one of
Speaker 1: the ways to say that a ritual has gotten too
Speaker 1: compulsive is, in fact, is it interfering with other things
Speaker 1: in your life? And if it starts to interfere with
Speaker 1: other things in your life, you know, we don't know
Speaker 1: exactly the point at which but you can see when
Speaker 1: it starts to interfere with other things in your life,
Speaker 1: that's when clinically you might say we need to pull
Speaker 1: that back. People who use them helpfully in a sense
Speaker 1: they leave enough time and space to do them, but
Speaker 1: they finish them. I mean, if Nadal picked his weggie
Speaker 1: the entire match, he'd lose six those six six zero. Right,
Speaker 1: we have to perform them at a time and place
Speaker 1: and then accomplish the other things we wanted to accomplish.
Speaker 4: Right, Right, If mid volley he was like, hang on
Speaker 4: a second, I gotta check this reggie, he would have
Speaker 4: a problem.
Speaker 2: Yeah, be a good viral moment, though, I think.
Speaker 4: But yeah, it's interesting because as I was reading your book,
Speaker 4: I started thinking about rituals that I might have for performance.
Speaker 4: And there's one that I do before podcast interviews usually,
Speaker 4: which is it actually serves a real purpose. It's called
Speaker 4: the announcers Test, and it's this very sort of complicated
Speaker 4: one hand, two ducks, three squawking geese for limrick oysters,
Speaker 4: five corpulent porpoises, six I could go on, it goes on.
Speaker 4: So on one hand, it warms up my mouth, it
Speaker 4: connects my mouth in my brain, and I think it's
Speaker 4: also slightly ritualistic in that I do it before I
Speaker 4: do that, and it helps, you know. I think when
Speaker 4: I sit down to do focused work, there's a playlist
Speaker 4: that I put on that's always kind of the same,
Speaker 4: and I just think it primes my brain in some
Speaker 4: way that this is now time for concentration. So I
Speaker 4: think if we all look, we have some of these things,
Speaker 4: and I've actually thought about after reading the book, would
Speaker 4: I actually do better with even more of them?
Speaker 1: You know, thinking about the discussion about compulsion as well.
Speaker 1: So one risk of rituals is that they can become compulsive,
Speaker 1: but another one is actually you have those things that
Speaker 1: you do pre show, and if you do them, you
Speaker 1: feel more ready to go for the show. But there's
Speaker 1: a risk as well, which is if you get interrupted
Speaker 1: and you can't do it, you actually feel worse. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, you feel even less ready to go then
Speaker 1: probably if you never had any ritual at all. So
Speaker 1: they're funny in the sense that it's not just that
Speaker 1: rituals are good. It's that they provoke emotion in us,
Speaker 1: and it's risk and reward. It can either make you
Speaker 1: feel great and ready to go, or you can feel like,
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna be able to do this at all
Speaker 1: today because I couldn't say the whole porpoise is thing,
Speaker 1: you know, the way that I wanted to do. Kids
Speaker 1: ruin every single ritual we've ever had because they always
Speaker 1: come in and interfere with everything. So I think that's
Speaker 1: important as well, that it isn't that rituals just you
Speaker 1: do them and it's great. You do them and they're
Speaker 1: going to make you feel, but what you feel is
Speaker 1: very very variable.
Speaker 4: I want to change direction just a little bit here,
Speaker 4: which is something that you and a colleague found in
Speaker 4: your research that you call emo diversity. Share with me
Speaker 4: what Emo diversity is.
Speaker 1: I mentioned earlier that for a few years I was
Speaker 1: studying happiness and how to help people be happier. And
Speaker 1: partly that's because if you ask people, they say, I'd
Speaker 1: like to be happier, so we try to and help them,
Speaker 1: you know, be happier. But I think just as the
Speaker 1: older you get, the more you realize nothing is in
Speaker 1: your control, the older you get, you realize that life
Speaker 1: is much more complicated emotionally than just trying to be happy,
Speaker 1: that there's all kinds of emotions that we're trying to
Speaker 1: get that aren't necessarily happiness.
Speaker 2: They're different things.
Speaker 1: So if you think of something like pride, for example,
Speaker 1: we'd like to feel proud of ourselves and want to
Speaker 1: feel proud of our kids, but also something like sadness.
Speaker 1: You know, I don't hope that I'm sad today, but
Speaker 1: if I think of times that I've been sad in
Speaker 1: my life, I've learned a ton and I've grown through
Speaker 1: those times as well. So just trying to be happy
Speaker 1: doesn't really capture the full richness of life. And this
Speaker 1: idea of Emo diversity, which is a silly name, and
Speaker 1: we wish we'd come a different name to be honest.
Speaker 1: But the idea of it is to look at the
Speaker 1: whole universe of emotions that you have, sadness and fear
Speaker 1: and happiness and joy and all of these emotions, and
Speaker 1: see if the mix of those emotions predicts your feeling
Speaker 1: that you're having a good life. And that's what we
Speaker 1: find in the research actually is that it isn't just
Speaker 1: having positive emotions is good, although that's nice, it's actually
Speaker 1: this mix sometimes that makes us feel like our life
Speaker 1: is going the way we wanted it to go.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you say that it's associated with measurable benefits in
Speaker 4: our well being. What sort of benefits to overall well
Speaker 4: being were you measuring that people who had more diversity
Speaker 4: of emotion? I agree, Emo diversity is like the worst
Speaker 4: name for a nineties band.
Speaker 2: Ever, exactly exactly out of no ask.
Speaker 4: On the Bright Eyes label or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, not even signed to Bright Eyes.
Speaker 4: No, No, they would never have been that good. You're right,
Speaker 4: you're right. Okay, that's a niche joke right there, for sure.
Speaker 4: But what were the well being measurements that you were
Speaker 4: sort of seeing in people who had more emotional diversity?
Speaker 1: People who study happiness, there's many flavors of happiness, but
Speaker 1: two that I think we sometimes conflate them, but they're
Speaker 1: quite different from each other. One is happiness in the moment,
Speaker 1: from how do you feel right now? Do you feel
Speaker 1: happy right now? But another question is more your life overall?
Speaker 1: How happy are you with your life and the way
Speaker 1: it's going. So I could be very unhappy all day
Speaker 1: today and still tell you no, no, my life overall
Speaker 1: I still feel really good about. So they're correlated with
Speaker 1: each other, but they're actually quite different from each other. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And what we were looking at actually was the day
Speaker 1: to day kind of emotions, the happiness today, the sadness today.
Speaker 1: What does the mix of those add up to for
Speaker 1: that larger feeling of life satisfaction. So it isn't so
Speaker 1: much that a variance of emotions helps you right now.
Speaker 1: It's that when people tell us they experience more of
Speaker 1: these emotions in this mix, they also tell us that
Speaker 1: they're more satisfied with their life overall. And that feeling
Speaker 1: is a great, great feeling to have. You know that
Speaker 1: on some scale from one to ten, that if I'm
Speaker 1: a one and I feel like my life is going
Speaker 1: that badly, all kinds of negative things are associated with that,
Speaker 1: and the higher I get on that scale, of course,
Speaker 1: the better off I'm feeling about my life.
Speaker 4: It's funny. I had this conversation with the psychologist Paul
Speaker 4: Bloom recently, actually, and I was saying that, as somebody
Speaker 4: who has a naturally more diverse emotional system, meaning prone
Speaker 4: to some lower moods right me, that maybe my way
Speaker 4: of measuring satisfaction I should stick with ask me about
Speaker 4: how my life is in general. Question that that's a
Speaker 4: better way for me to measure than moment to moment,
Speaker 4: because I have a tendency towards melancholy at times. And
Speaker 4: so we had a little lively discussion about, well, you know,
Speaker 4: there's certainly people that argue that you're deceiving yourself, right,
Speaker 4: that the way you know whether you're happy is what
Speaker 4: you just ask often enough, and for you to tell
Speaker 4: me later that you're happy even when you weren't happy
Speaker 4: is just deception. But I think there's more to it
Speaker 4: than that, And he wasn't arguing that point. He was
Speaker 4: just saying that's the way some people view it.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: We started a project years ago that I don't remember
Speaker 1: why we didn't follow through on it, but The idea was, so,
Speaker 1: imagine we have this ten point scale of happiness with
Speaker 1: your life overall, this life satisfaction, and somebody says they're
Speaker 1: a ten, They're having the best life in the world.
Speaker 1: The idea was to ask them, you know, every day
Speaker 1: for a month about all the different emotions they were feeling.
Speaker 1: And the point of that was to say, you might
Speaker 1: think that someone who says they're a ten out of
Speaker 1: ten on life overall, that every minute of every day they're.
Speaker 2: Saying it's great. Life is great. I'm happy, I'm happy,
Speaker 2: I'm happy.
Speaker 1: But that's not what happens, right, So even people who
Speaker 1: are the happiest with their life overall have some days
Speaker 1: where they're really sad, or really afraid or really anxious.
Speaker 1: So sometimes we have this wrong theory. I think that
Speaker 1: in order to have that high life satisfaction, if I'm
Speaker 1: feeling sad today, it must mean that I'm not satisfied
Speaker 1: with my life because I'm feeling sad. But in fact
Speaker 1: it's all a distribution, right. So of course the happiest
Speaker 1: people with their lives feel these negative emotions too. They
Speaker 1: might feel them less than some other people, but humans
Speaker 1: feel a range of emotions no matter how they're doing
Speaker 1: in their life overall. So we thought maybe people had
Speaker 1: almost like an unrealistic expectation of what it would look
Speaker 1: like to feel really good about your life overall, and
Speaker 1: we wanted to help people see that.
Speaker 2: No no, no, no, no no.
Speaker 1: Even for people who have the very best life according
Speaker 1: to them, still a lot like you have these moments
Speaker 1: and days that are really tough.
Speaker 4: So people actually would rate their life attend.
Speaker 1: Some people will, yes, yeah, I find them disturbing to
Speaker 1: be me too.
Speaker 4: I mean, I just feel like if this is again,
Speaker 4: I think some of this is temperament. If you asked
Speaker 4: me how my life was in almost any time in
Speaker 4: my life, I would probably say about a seven and
Speaker 4: a half, regardless of what's happening, which I don't know
Speaker 4: really even what that says about me, but I think
Speaker 4: it's kind of true.
Speaker 1: You know, well, I'm Irish Catholic, so if I said,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm a nine out of ten, my family
Speaker 1: would say, what do you think you're better than us?
Speaker 2: Now?
Speaker 1: I think we've got some caps for various reasons on
Speaker 1: our numbers exactly.
Speaker 4: I think I'm in that category of I can always
Speaker 4: imagine better, and I can certainly imagine much worse, right,
Speaker 4: given that I think I'm happy to be in the
Speaker 4: upper realm, not the forty percent, yeah, or four four
Speaker 4: out of ten. So let's talk about another thing that
Speaker 4: contributes to a good life, which is the ability to
Speaker 4: actually appreciate the moments in life that are good. One
Speaker 4: term for this that has been used as savoring. What
Speaker 4: did you find out about rituals and savoring or the
Speaker 4: ability to appreciate the actual good linfe moments of our lives.
Speaker 1: Savoring is one of my favorite words because it's typically
Speaker 1: completely free, and yet it has an enormous impact on
Speaker 1: our happiness and our enjoyment of life. Because if I'm
Speaker 1: eating chocolate, I can either just shove it down my
Speaker 1: throat or I can savor it a little bit as
Speaker 1: I eat it. In any case, the chocolate costs the
Speaker 1: same amount, it isn't going to take me that much
Speaker 1: longer to savor it. But I'm going to take from
Speaker 1: the very same food way more enjoyment if I just
Speaker 1: take a beat one beat to savor it instead of
Speaker 1: just scarf it down. And I think that is something
Speaker 1: that rituals do for us, is they bump us out
Speaker 1: of let's just eat, let's just move on, let's just
Speaker 1: quickly get to the next task. And they remind us
Speaker 1: to slow down a little bit and appreciate things. So,
Speaker 1: I mean, if you get a cake on a bad day,
Speaker 1: what I would do is just eat the cake by myself,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean.
Speaker 2: I wouldn't save it.
Speaker 1: I would just say I'm having cakes. But then we
Speaker 1: do things like birthday cakes. It's still just a cake.
Speaker 2: But what are we doing.
Speaker 1: We're saying no, no, no, We're not just gonna eat this cake. Everybody,
Speaker 1: hold off, nobody eat the cake yet. Kids are like
Speaker 1: trying to get the frosting. Don't touch the frosting until
Speaker 1: we put candles in the cake, sing a song, blow
Speaker 1: out the candles, make a wish, all of these things
Speaker 1: because we're trying to help people savor this cake and
Speaker 1: make it more than just cake by inserting a ritual
Speaker 1: around it. Now it's a celebration of a write of
Speaker 1: passage for you. It's a celebration that we all love
Speaker 1: you and support you. It's just cake and a couple
Speaker 1: of candles, but by adding ritual, we savor it, we
Speaker 1: elongate the meaning that we can get out of these
Speaker 1: otherwise very simple experiences.
Speaker 4: I think about this often because I love to eat
Speaker 4: and read at the same time. And there's a part
Speaker 4: of me, particularly the part of me that's practicing a
Speaker 4: lot of Zen Buddhism that's like, you should just eat,
Speaker 4: give all your attention to your food. And yet I
Speaker 4: think for me the combination of those things is ritualistic
Speaker 4: in its way. The two of them together, to me,
Speaker 4: are better than not doing it. At least, that's my
Speaker 4: justification for quote unquote not eating mindfully.
Speaker 2: And they're not taking away from each other. It sounds
Speaker 2: like for you.
Speaker 4: Right, yeah, I mean I probably might pay a little
Speaker 4: bit more attention to the food if I wasn't reading.
Speaker 4: But again, it's the whole thing is deeply satisfying to me.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: It's almost as if a ritual involves singing and dancing.
Speaker 1: You wouldn't say, well, singing and dancing at the same
Speaker 1: time is ruining the ritual. You would say, No, singing
Speaker 1: and dancing is the ritual. Yeah, in fact for this person.
Speaker 1: So these different elements can be additive rather than taking
Speaker 1: away from each other.
Speaker 4: What is conceptual consumption?
Speaker 1: This is an idea that we had a few years ago.
Speaker 1: Which is, of course, when we consume, we're consuming actual
Speaker 1: things like music or food or drink or whatever it is.
Speaker 1: But very often when we consume, we're also consuming ideas
Speaker 1: and emotions at the same time. One of the examples
Speaker 1: that I think about a lot is my daughter and
Speaker 1: I make a apple pie that my grandmother made, who's
Speaker 1: no longer with us. So I make this pie with
Speaker 1: my daughter and we eat it, and it tastes exactly
Speaker 1: the same because we have her recipe.
Speaker 2: So what am I eating? You know? What am I consuming? Really?
Speaker 1: When my daughter and I make this and eat it. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's a pretty good apple pie. I bet it's not
Speaker 1: the best apple pie in the world, right, that's not
Speaker 1: the point. I'm actually bringing back my grandmother all the
Speaker 1: way down to my daughter and sharing that with her.
Speaker 1: I don't know the word for what it is that
Speaker 1: I'm consuming, but it's nostalgia, it's memory, it's meaning. And
Speaker 1: if I don't have the pie, I can think about
Speaker 1: my grandmother for sure, and I can tell my daughter
Speaker 1: about my grandmother. But there's something about these rituals of
Speaker 1: consumption that bring us, I think, a little more close
Speaker 1: to it. They're a little more present when we do
Speaker 1: these kinds of rituals from the past. It allows us
Speaker 1: to bring the past into the present and I think
Speaker 1: really really valuable ways. And we could buy an apple
Speaker 1: pie that's way better from a store, sure, but we
Speaker 1: lose all of the other concepts that we got to
Speaker 1: consume by making this particular one ourselves.
Speaker 4: Well, I think the word conceptual is the interesting part
Speaker 4: of that. We hit on this a little bit earlier
Speaker 4: when we were saying that part of what keeps a
Speaker 4: ritual from becoming just something you go through the motions
Speaker 4: is you're bringing something to it. You're consciously conceptually imbuing
Speaker 4: it with something. And that's kind of what you're saying here.
Speaker 4: You could make your grandmother's recipe apple pie, but if
Speaker 4: you weren't conscious of what you were doing, it wouldn't
Speaker 4: have the same thing, right. It's the fact that you
Speaker 4: are conscious of the fact that I am doing something
Speaker 4: that ties me back to my grandmother and all that.
Speaker 4: So again, I think it's this thing.
Speaker 2: That you too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's right, because I could have discovered
Speaker 1: the same recipe and not known the source.
Speaker 2: Then I might say this isn't very good apple pie. No,
Speaker 2: you know what I mean?
Speaker 1: But because this link exactly as you're saying, it's not
Speaker 1: about the pie, it's about all of this other emotion
Speaker 1: meeting that we're bringing to it.
Speaker 4: You also described like going to a pizza parlor you
Speaker 4: and your family have gone to forever and there being
Speaker 4: a link there, So are you when you're there, sort
Speaker 4: of intentionally choosing to cultivate that relationship with the past.
Speaker 1: In the North End of Boston, which used to be
Speaker 1: a very Italian neighborhood, so it's amazing Italian food there.
Speaker 1: There's this kind of hole in the wall called Regina Pizzaia.
Speaker 1: It's been there for a very long time. My parents
Speaker 1: went there when they were teenagers because they grew up
Speaker 1: in Dorchester and Boston, and so I take my daughter
Speaker 1: there now. Again, it's the taste of the pizza. I
Speaker 1: went there with my parents as a kid, so I
Speaker 1: have that in me, but I also have this idea
Speaker 1: of them as teenagers going there. I wasn't with them there,
Speaker 1: but it's so interesting and it's interesting for my daughter
Speaker 1: to think about, Hey, your grandparents when they were seventeen
Speaker 1: sat right over there, and the smell of the place
Speaker 1: and the pizza is important to get those memories out,
Speaker 1: it brings them back into the present again, no idea.
Speaker 1: If it's the best pizza in the world, I couldn't
Speaker 1: even begin to figure out how to remove all these
Speaker 1: meanings and emotion from it and actually just try to
Speaker 1: taste the pizza because we got to and view it,
Speaker 1: and I.
Speaker 2: Think it's a gift. It's just pizza.
Speaker 1: But we can imbue it with all of these other
Speaker 1: things if we really, as you said, are mindful about
Speaker 1: it and thinking about what we're doing when we consume.
Speaker 4: When you said that, it made me think of the
Speaker 4: fact that we just will claim like that this is
Speaker 4: the best pizza in the world, as if like we've
Speaker 4: had more than like ten different kinds believe.
Speaker 1: And of course the best pizza in the world is
Speaker 1: always a restaurant that's within thirty minutes of where.
Speaker 4: You live, which is amazing, amazingly. Yes, yes, but you're
Speaker 4: right to you. When we say best, we don't mean best,
Speaker 4: we mean favorite. You know, but it's a funny word choice.
Speaker 4: So let's talk in our remaining few minutes here about
Speaker 4: rituals in relationships. Talk to me about what you found
Speaker 4: about the value of relationships that have rituals in them.
Speaker 1: We can ask couple very simple questions about, you know,
Speaker 1: how satisfied they are with their relationship, how committed do
Speaker 1: you feel to your relationship. We get a sense of
Speaker 1: how well they're doing as a couple, how they feel
Speaker 1: about each other, and then we can try to figure out, well,
Speaker 1: what are the things that predict whether they're feeling good
Speaker 1: or bad about the relationship. And of course, feeling listened
Speaker 1: to is an important element of feeling like you're in
Speaker 1: a good relationship. So there's many, many factors. But one
Speaker 1: of the things that we see is when we ask couples, hey,
Speaker 1: is there anything the two of you do that's kind
Speaker 1: of unique to you and special? And you make sure
Speaker 1: to do it regularly, you know, every day, once a week,
Speaker 1: once a month, anything like that. And varies from study
Speaker 1: to study, but two thirds to three quarters of couples say,
Speaker 1: you know what, yes, And then we say, well, what
Speaker 1: is it? And they say the cutest, most endearing things
Speaker 1: you've ever heard in your entire life. One couple that
Speaker 1: I love said, every time before we eat, we clink
Speaker 1: our silverware together. Another couple said, we always kiss in threes.
Speaker 1: I don't know when we started, but we've been doing
Speaker 1: it for twenty years, But another couple will say we
Speaker 1: always kiss in twos. Yeah, the specifics of these little
Speaker 1: rituals vary pretty widely from couple to couple, but what
Speaker 1: we see is couples who say they have one of those,
Speaker 1: it's predictive of how they feel about the relationship overall. Now,
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that if you start clinking forks with your
Speaker 1: partner that you're going to be amazingly happy instantly. That's
Speaker 1: not really how they work. But this idea that these
Speaker 1: shared little practices are a signal of the broader relationship
Speaker 1: for us, it was very interesting and very powerful.
Speaker 4: As I read that, I got to thinking, well, Digini
Speaker 4: and I have rituals, and I thought of like one,
Speaker 4: and I sort of mentioned it to her, and she
Speaker 4: then rattled off like eight others, which I was like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 4: I hadn't been thinking of them. But there's a lot there.
Speaker 4: The saddest part in the book is and I'm not
Speaker 4: going from where I just was to this saying that
Speaker 4: this is us right, because I actually the minute she
Speaker 4: said it, I recognize indeed they are rituals and are meaningful.
Speaker 4: But the saddest part of the book was describing where
Speaker 4: one partner thought there was this really meaningful ritual and
Speaker 4: the other part or just thought it was just something
Speaker 4: they did, and that was a really sad part of
Speaker 4: the book.
Speaker 2: It is.
Speaker 1: You know, if we get both members of a couple
Speaker 1: and interview them separately, you know, independent reports of the relationship.
Speaker 2: Most of the.
Speaker 1: Time both people say, yes, we have something, and yes,
Speaker 1: here's what it is, which is what you did as well,
Speaker 1: you had one that you both identified, Yes, this is ours.
Speaker 1: There's a small percent of couples where they both say no,
Speaker 1: we don't have anything. I don't know what to make
Speaker 1: of them exactly, but as you said, for me, the
Speaker 1: saddest thing is where we interview one person and they say,
Speaker 1: oh my god, we have this wonderful thing. You know,
Speaker 1: we've kissed in threes forever and something in the other
Speaker 1: person says, we don't have anything like that. And those couples,
Speaker 1: I think, luckily, they're not less happy than couples who
Speaker 1: agree they have none, but they're no happier. Meaning it
Speaker 1: isn't the thing where if one of you has it,
Speaker 1: you get halfway there. It's unless you both share it together.
Speaker 1: There's no benefit at all in the data, and I
Speaker 1: think that's sad that people disagree about that, but also
Speaker 1: telling in terms of what it means really to have
Speaker 1: a relationship ritual and why they might actually be so
Speaker 1: predictive of our overall feelings.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I found it helpful to think about some
Speaker 4: things that we do that could go either way. When
Speaker 4: she mentioned one of them being a ritual, and I thought, well,
Speaker 4: I mean, we'd do that, But all of a sudden,
Speaker 4: the next couple times I did it, it was imbued
Speaker 4: with something different. Yeah, I was able to go, oh,
Speaker 4: this could be something that I just do, or this
Speaker 4: could be something that I could put meaning behind a
Speaker 4: voke emotion by turning it into something that's a little
Speaker 4: more ritualized, which I found a really helpful takeaway from
Speaker 4: the book.
Speaker 1: A lot of relationship rituals involve coffee and tea in
Speaker 1: the morning, you know, one person makes it and brings
Speaker 1: it to the other person.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 1: And there was a couple le chat of a while
Speaker 1: ago where they had been can't remember actually if it
Speaker 1: was the husband or the wife who'd been bringing the coffee,
Speaker 1: but the bringer of the coffee didn't see it as
Speaker 1: a ritual. They just saw it as well, this is something
Speaker 1: I do in the morning for them because I love them.
Speaker 1: But when their partner said, you know what, he always
Speaker 1: does this thing in the morning, it really means a
Speaker 1: lot to me, just like you. Now it changes the
Speaker 1: meaning of the action. He's doing it all along and
Speaker 1: it's important to him, but now by owning it and
Speaker 1: recognizing it, it can have a little bit more residence.
Speaker 1: You know, the next time we clink our silverware, there's
Speaker 1: a little more to it now where we say, oh
Speaker 1: my gosh, this is actually our ritual that we've been
Speaker 1: doing forever.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, it's exactly that. It's bringing enough coffee. And
Speaker 4: I think it goes back to something we've said several
Speaker 4: different times, which is, in certain cases, for rituals to work,
Speaker 4: takes us bringing something to them. You know, I mentioned zen,
Speaker 4: there's a thing we do at the end, right, there's
Speaker 4: a certain way that you bow and do this stuff,
Speaker 4: and when I consciously think about what it means, it
Speaker 4: suddenly is something that has importance. When I, on the
Speaker 4: other hand, I'm just like, it's the thing I do
Speaker 4: at the end of this and now I can get
Speaker 4: out of here and go it's gone. And so the
Speaker 4: same thing with the coffee. The minute I realize like, oh,
Speaker 4: I am doing it out of care and love, but
Speaker 4: let me own that, like, let me consciously choose it again.
Speaker 1: And one thing I love about this is that again,
Speaker 1: it's not like add thirty rituals to your life tomorrow,
Speaker 1: right right. A lot of it is that, in fact,
Speaker 1: just seeing where they're already operating and appreciating it a
Speaker 1: little bit more. And that in and of itself actually
Speaker 1: people say, like you say, I'm getting more out of
Speaker 1: it now, I'm glad that I recognize it.
Speaker 4: Well. I think that is a beautiful place to wrap up.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much, Mike for coming on. I've enjoyed
Speaker 4: the conversation, I enjoyed the book, and thank you, thank
Speaker 4: you so much.
Speaker 2: It's really fun.
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