Something You Should Know
Why Rituals Are So Important & Healthy Living Made Simple – SYSK Choice
11 Apr 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: Where do you do your best thinking?
Today on Something You Should Know, why you probably don't do your best work at work and how to fix that. Then, rituals. You have a lot more of them than you realize, and they really do help.
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.
Also, why revenge can be so sweet. And how to be healthy, what's proven to work, and the myths to avoid.
For example... There's this idea that, for example, you have to do 10,000 steps a day. That's the magic number to be healthy. And if you look into where that number came from, it was actually made up by a Japanese company that was trying to sell pedometers, those things that measure how far you walk.
All this today on Something You Should Know.
Hey, it's Hillary Frank from The Longest Shortest Time, an award-winning podcast about parenthood and reproductive health. We talk about things like sex ed, birth control, pregnancy, bodily autonomy, and, of course, kids of all ages. But you don't have to be a parent to listen.
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Chapter 2: How do rituals impact our daily lives?
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Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hey, hi, welcome. And thank you for taking time out of your day to listen to another episode of Something You Should Know. We start today with a question. Where do you get your best ideas? Or where do you do your best work?
it's probably not at work. Most of us work in an environment that is full of distraction, and distraction saps our creativity and concentration. This is according to Edward Halliwell, who is one of the real gurus on distraction. He's written several books on the subject.
Chapter 3: What role do rituals play in reducing anxiety?
And Edward says that when people are asked where they do their best thinking, the number one answer is in the shower. And usually you don't have any distractions in the shower. When you're distracted from doing something, it isn't just the distraction that's the problem. Once you go back to whatever you were doing before, it takes a while for your brain to get back to where it was.
And sometimes it never gets back to where it was. So in order for your mind to work well, you need uninterrupted time, away from all the distractions of everyday life. And that is something you should know. Your life is full of rituals, even if you don't know it. You shake hands? Ritual. You celebrate holidays? Rituals. Pray? Ritual. In fact, religions are full of rituals.
Chapter 4: How can rituals strengthen relationships?
Graduation day? Ritual. Weddings, funerals, ritual, ritual. And there's more. Many of us have daily rituals we perform. Humans seem to like rituals. Maybe we need them. What role and function do rituals serve? Should we have more rituals? Well, that's what Michael Norton is here to discuss.
Michael is a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, and he is author of the book, The Ritual Effect. Hi, Michael. Welcome to Something You Should Know.
Thanks so much for having me.
So I'm curious, first of all, you're a professor of business administration and you wrote a book about rituals. So bridge that gap for 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.
Are rituals solving problems or are they just a comfortable kind of guardrail?
We do see people turning to ritual in particular in times of need.
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Chapter 5: What are simple ways to improve your health?
And where, I imagine a million places, but where do rituals tend to come from? Like when you see an athlete do his little pre-run ritual, where do you get that?
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. We still rely on those for a lot. But we also can come from the ground up and make up our own.
It seems that rituals tend to be...
solitary some are and then some are with the goal of connecting so we use them you know to calm myself down for example if i have to go give a presentation but teams also will use rituals for example before a big sports match a soccer team or a football team will have their own rituals and there what they're trying to do is actually bond together so again interestingly we use them in very different ways in different aspects of our lives
It seems a lot of rituals get passed down, traditions I'm thinking of particularly. But also I think there's a lot of rituals going on in people's heads and things that they do that they don't talk about. I don't talk about it.
know rafael nadal can stand uh in public and do his unusual pre-serve rituals on television and we think nothing of it for ourselves we're sort of aware that we shouldn't do that in front of a crowd because they might say something is wrong with mike and so we do in fact often do them privately i mentioned going into the bathroom
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Chapter 6: How does mindset affect healthy living?
The idea of ritual, I imagine goes back forever, right? I mean, this is just kind of a human coping thing.
The earliest known text Gilgamesh actually has rituals in it. So from the very first time that we can see people recording things, we see that people are reporting on their rituals. And in fact, if you think about with archeology, how we identify that a group of people had a culture,
it's very often we look to see if they bury people ceremonially or not so dinosaurs the bones are just all over the place we know that dinosaurs did not have funerals for each other there's no pattern to it but with humans even thousands and thousands of years ago we see them burying people very carefully with treasured objects
and with care and that tells us really that that was a very early ritual and that means that that was a culture or that was a group that mattered to each other they do go very back very far back and they are very deeply embedded in human psychology but are rituals also inherent in other creatures The experts are mixed on that for sure.
The closest species that many people believe have rituals are elephants who have what appear to be mourning or grieving rituals. Not all elephants do this, but if you observe some elephant groups, they will when one of the elephants dies, they will mourn in a sense. They will gather and they will mourn publicly in order to grieve the elephant that's gone. Other people say that's just an instinct.
It gets to be kind of a discussion and a debate. But it does seem that humans are the most likely to use them across the most contexts. As is very often the case, we're very, very creative and innovative. So we'll take a tool and then use that tool not just for the original purpose, but for all sorts of purposes.
The rituals that are, you know, the tennis player who bounces the ball so many times or those kind of rituals, if you ask the people who do them why they do them, my sense is that there would be some element of good luck in it. And it isn't about thinking about something else. It's like, you know, if I don't do it or maybe it's that if I don't do it, it'll bring bad luck.
But it seems that luck plays a role or perceived luck plays a role in this.
That's right. And I think that that also points to the fact that it isn't just that rituals are good. So I wish I could say, add 50 rituals to your life and you'll be happy from now on. That really isn't the function that rituals serve. When you ask athletes, for example, about their rituals, they do say, you know what, when I do it, I feel like I'm ready to go or I feel like I'm in the zone.
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Chapter 7: What common health myths should you avoid?
They feel like they can't do the thing that they're supposed to do. So when we have rituals, they have a lot of meaning and emotion built into them. And if we do them the way we wanted to do them, they can be very positive. But they also have this risk where if we can't enact them the way we had hoped, they can, in fact, have negative consequences.
Yeah, well, I hadn't thought about that. But yeah, I guess so. But that means you better plan time to do your ritual if you want to do your ritual.
Exactly. And you saw, you know, in baseball, they instituted a pitch clock and some of the pushback against the pitch clock was, well, I'm not going to be able to do all my tapping and glove adjusting in time for the next pitch. You know, people really want to make sure they have time to enact those rituals that matter to them.
We're talking about the importance of rituals in our lives. My guest is Michael Norton, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of the book, The Ritual Effect.
So, Michael, ultimately, as important as rituals seem to be, I think if you ask people, you know, if you do that thing when you do, you know, bounce the ball or whatever it is, we all know it doesn't really do anything, you know, scientifically. And yet we cling to them.
If you look very broadly at the function of rituals, it's sometimes the case that we are enacting a ritual with some goal in mind, and sometimes we actually achieve that goal, but at other times we're enacting a ritual and it ends up actually helping in a different way. So one example of this that I find very interesting are rain dances, rain rituals.
In cultures where there's drought, many independent times humans have come up with the idea of some sort of dance or ritual to try to encourage rain. Now, we know that it is unlike we at least we have no evidence that our movements on the ground will cause it to rain. So why would so many cultures engage in these sorts of activities?
And of course, one reason is that in times of drought, what happens is social conflict starts to happen with scarce resources. I don't take care of you. You don't take care of me. And the kind of fabric starts to fray of our society. When you engage in these rituals together, what you're saying is we have a shared history together. We are a people.
And by the way, people have been doing this for hundreds and thousands of years, and they got through it also. So maybe we can get through it as well. So you can see that they're trying to make it rain, and that's probably not going to work.
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Chapter 8: Why is revenge considered sweet, and what does science say?
Hey, Jacob, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thanks for having me. Glad to be here. So before we get into the specific advice, what is the general outlook, your philosophy? What are you saying to people about getting healthy?
so i think there's broadly speaking two different ways of framing the idea of health if you say jacob tell me about your health i could say well i'm a 52 year old guy with mild asthma and that's true that's accurate uh because i'm answering in terms of what i am but it's not very useful because i cannot change what i am but if instead i say well I got a good night's sleep.
I had a healthy breakfast. I took a 30-minute walk after lunch and had more energy when I was done than when I began. Then I'm framing my health in terms of not what I am, but what I do. And I find that a much more useful way to look at it because I can change what I do at any moment. So I think if there's one big takeaway people take, I'd like it to be that.
But the goal is what? To be healthy is always a journey? Or, I mean, obviously you can't stop, but what does it mean to be healthy?
Well, the funny thing is that, you know, I said don't frame it in terms of what you are, but if you do enough, if you frame it in terms of what you do and you do enough of those things, then it does change what you are. You become healthier. You have more energy. You live longer. You're less likely to get a heart attack or a dementia.
So for me, the ultimate goal of anything you do to be healthy is to get more pleasure out of life. And that might be from living longer, and it might be from being healthier and more with it while you're there.
So how does someone decide what to do first and what to do that will actually sustain them, that will allow them to keep doing whatever it is they're doing so that they do become healthy?
I'll dive into the nuts and bolts, but let me give you two big picture things that guide me. One of them is to think of health as an ongoing experiment. So if you're supposed to eat vegetables and you eat a vegetable and you don't like it, don't conclude you don't like vegetables. Conclude, I don't like this specific vegetable prepared in this specific way. I'll give you a really...
Maybe this is a weird example, but apples. You might think you don't like apples, but there are a bazillion different kinds of apples. There's Cox, Pippin, Gala, Delicious, and having one apple doesn't tell you anything about whether you like even other apples. let alone whether you like fruits. Same with exercise. If you try some sort of exercise and you don't like it, that's an experiment.
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