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Rituals
A ritual is an ordered sequence of behaviors that you rigidly perform the same way each time. And it’s a set of behaviors that are infused with meaning. Engaging in that sequence of behaviors is really important to you in some fundamental way. And what we know about rituals is that they provide you with another kind of tool that you can use to manage your chatter. Human beings, you, me, we love having control. We love to know that there is order to the world. When you experience chatter, you often feel like your thoughts are in control of you. Your chatter is in control. One of the things that we’ve learned through science is that we can compensate for this feeling out of control by creating order around us, and rituals are one way to do that, right? By engaging in the same sequence of behaviors every time, the same way, that’s giving you a sense of order and control. That can feel really good when you’re mired in chatter.
Interestingly, rituals have been prescribed to people for managing chatter throughout time. If you go back in time and you look at different cultures many cultures have developed idiosyncratic rituals for dealing with chatter-provoking situations. Think about stressful experiences like losing a loved one. Cultures around the world prescribe mourning rituals for dealing with those kinds of situations. At the other end of the lifespan, when it comes to birth, cultures also prescribe birthing rituals. Giving birth to a new baby is also a very stressful experience. Our culture gives us rituals to deal with that as well.
Creating Your Own Ritual
Many people develop their own highly idiosyncratic rituals to deal with chatter, and research suggests that those unique idiosyncratic rituals are effective tools for managing rumination and worry, just as the culturally prescribed ones are.
So in terms of creating your own ritual, the keys to keep in mind are you want to come up with a sequence of behaviors that you do the same way each time. What the behaviors are doesn’t really matter. Some people may throw salt behind their shoulder, tap their watch three times, and then take four deep breaths before giving a public speech, and they may do that every single time. That’s their ritual. For someone else, it may be reciting in their head what their high school wrestling coach told them to do before a big match and then tapping their kneecaps.
A great illustration of just how idiosyncratic yet effective rituals can be comes from the tennis great Raphael Nadal. He said the hardest thing that he struggles to do on the tennis court is manage the voices inside his head. In other words, he’s talking about chatter and his focus is on not letting his chatter get the best of him when he’s competing. How does Nadal manage his chatter? He engages in rituals. So if you watch him play, you’ll find that the moment he enters the arena, he’s engaging in a ritual. He walks into the tennis court the same way every single time, with a bag of rackets on one shoulder, holding a racket in the other hand. He approaches his bench, puts his rackets down, then he turns to the audience, always bouncing on the the balls of his feet, as he slowly undoes his jacket. He engages in that rigid sequence of behaviors in that order every single time. And he continues doing rituals of that sort throughout the tennis match. During breaks between play, he goes over to his bench. He sits down. First, he takes a sip out of one water bottle. Then he takes a sip out of another. Then he puts each water bottle back exactly where he picked them up from on a diagonal to the court.
The Power of Group Rituals
Rituals aren’t just relevant to individuals. They’re also highly relevant to groups of people working together, whether they be teams of athletes or organizations that have teams within them. You can see athletes doing rituals all the time on the basketball court, in baseball, and so forth. And so one thing you can do if you are a leader of a team is to come up with a ritual for your team. Have a ritual that you engage in during particularly stressful times. You don’t necessarily wanna haphazardly be doing rituals at any given moment of time. You wanna be reserving those rituals for times when stress is high, when you need to help refocus the group and give them a sense of order and control. Engaging in a ritual collectively can also strengthen cohesion between the group. So not only does doing a ritual as part of a team help provide individual members with a sense of order and control, it also strengthens the connections between those people on the team, which is another important tool for managing stress and having high performing teams.