Michael Norton

One of the things that researchers suggest rituals help us with, if you think of them, they're very orderly, they're very familiar.

Rituals give us a sense of being in the here and now and help us to get ready for what's coming instead of often our own minds stressing.

Thanks so much for having me.

I'm a psychologist by training.

And so my favorite thing to do is observe very weird things that humans do.

And it turns out we do lots of them all the time.

So my job is pretty easy.

But about a decade ago, I started thinking a lot about a particular type of unusual thing that we do, which are rituals.

And I started seeing them in many different places in life.

So for sure, we can think of things like holidays and

weddings and funerals are all times when rituals bring us together.

But I also started to think about the role of rituals in our own daily lives, the way we get together in the morning, the way we might wind down at night, what we might do at work when we're nervous for a big meeting.

And it really started to feel like across all of these domains of life, we were turning to ritual as one solution to solve all of these different problems.

We do see people turning to ritual in particular in times of need.

So for example, speaking of being nervous for a big meeting or a big presentation, or if you think of athletes or musical performers who often have extremely elaborate rituals that they do before they serve or before they sing, it does seem to be the case that humans, as the stress level goes up, we are more likely to bring rituals to bear.

And we're more likely to have more and more complicated rituals.

So in the world, we can observe really that when we have this problem of anxiety, one of the things, and we can do lots of things, of course, we can meditate, we can take medication.

There's lots of solutions to that problem.

But one of the things that people seem to do is turn to ritual as one solution.

One of our solutions when we feel anxious that is extremely ineffective is we try to tell ourselves to calm down.