Michael Norton

So I can say, you know, Mike, this isn't that big of a deal.

Just calm down.

It's going to be fine.

And what the research shows is that that is really one of the worst things you can possibly do, because unfortunately, that's not how we're built.

we can't just tell ourselves to feel a certain way and then magically feel that way that's the problem that we're trying to solve so how do we get out of this sometimes doom spiral of anxiety and i'm going to blow it and now i'm anxious because i tried to calm down and i can't even calm down one of the things that researchers suggest rituals help us with

If you think of them, they're very patterned, they're very orderly, they're very familiar.

They actually just take up some mental space so that we don't have all of our resources brought to bear on spiraling out of control.

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.

Interestingly, so the word ritual itself, I think, and this was true for me as well, makes us think of traditions and cultural practices and religious practices with a long history.

And those are for sure rituals that have enormously important meaning in our lives.

At the same time, what we see in the research is when we ask people about their own rituals, they come up with them themselves pretty often, actually surprisingly often.

So even with something like grief, we'll say, you know, you lost someone you love.

What did you do?

People will say, well, we went to the funeral or whatever their faith, you know, prescribes for them to do.

But I also did this thing privately to honor them.

One woman said for a month she listened to her mom's favorite song every morning.

Now, there's no historical sense that you should listen to your mom's favorite song.

This was something that this woman came up with on her own.

And we see that very, very often that what people are doing is freelancing, thinking of things that are meaningful to them and then building those into their own rituals.

It doesn't mean they're not using the cultural rituals and the religious rituals as well.