The Ritual Effect: The Transformative Power of Our Everyday Actions

by Michael Norton

Rituals are also providing more meaningful ways for people to step away from technology’s drive toward optimization and captured attention. Rituals delineate a sacred space to keep people connected to the present moment,

Ritual, I was coming to understand, could be an individually designed experience.

Habit is the what. It’s something we do: brush our teeth, go to the gym, consume leafy dark green vegetables, face email, pay bills, go to sleep at a sensible hour (or not). When we succeed in replacing a bad habit with a good one, we want that good habit to become automatic.

ritual is not just the action but the particular way we enact it—the how. It matters to us not simply that we complete the action but the specific way that we complete it. Rituals are also deeply and inherently emotional. Unlike most habits, rituals provoke feelings, both good and bad.

Brain-imaging research by my colleagues and me shows that our rituals feel so right to us that observing other people perform rituals23 differently from the way we do activates regions of the brain associated with punishment.

Is it always a mistake to fail to execute on your good habits, or is the experience of savoring a decadent dessert simply a different kind of success?

Good habits automate us, helping us get things done. Rituals animate us, enhancing and enchanting our lives with something more.

Drawing from the same research methods used to quantify the biodiversity of ecosystems, we showed that the variety and relative abundance of emotions we experience—not just the predominance of positive emotions—predicts our well-being.

Ritual offers the possibility of transforming activities as ordinary as morning hygiene, household chores, or daily exercise from automated to animated experiences—conjuring up delight or wonder or peace.

participants consistently placed more value on objects that they had a hand in making.

the IKEA effect was featured on the television game show Jeopardy!8 as an answer to Final Jeopardy clue number 205641: “The ‘effect’ named for this company founded in 1943 refers to increased value of a product to a consumer whose own labor is needed.”

People’s reports that their newer, homemade rituals can hold as much meaning—and sometimes more—as the legacy rituals that come with chanting, candles, music, awe-inspiring architecture, stained-glass windows, and ancient texts was a revelation that opened up entirely new questions and new ways of investigating the role of rituals in our lives.

Harvard Business School Alison Wood Brooks show that telling ourselves to calm down11 in this way fails to work and can sometimes stress us out even more: “Not only am I still anxious about the performance, but now I’m also anxious that I am failing at the task of calming down … and then anxious about being anxious about that.” You can imagine how well this doom feedback loop works.

Some performers believe that it’s a matter of timing. They just need to wait until they “get in the zone” to achieve optimal performance. But there is little evidence that this strategy works, either. One study found that people who are allowed to throw darts12 only when they feel zoned in do no better than people told to throw darts at random times. Even prepping strategies that are logically related to the task at hand often fail to help.

Rituals seem to regulate the brain’s response to failure, helping us to bounce back more quickly after setbacks.

Taken to the extreme, preperformance rituals get in our way. If we can’t stop engaging in the ritual, then we can’t redirect our focus and move on to the actual performance. We’re stuck in the dugout, or backstage—while the world carries on without us.

the drinks and food are the props that set the scene for our experience of staying present in the moment.

There are endless ways to enhance and even enchant your day. If you have consumption rituals that punctuate your daily life, I encourage you to think about what you can do to make them even more resonant. If you can’t think of any, I encourage you to take this opportunity to add in a moment of pause and pleasure. Savoring rituals like the ones above can be small but powerful generators of everyday joy, an easily accessible and often inexpensive means of transforming the ordinary into something more.

rituals between romantic partners often have less to do with champagne, red roses, and violins and more to do with deeply personal gestures that catalyze and sustain an intimate and exclusive human connection.

our surveys showed that people who reported having rituals also reported being 5 to 10 percent more satisfied with their relationships.

couples with rituals expressed a greater sense of gratitude for their partner.

You don’t necessarily need the excitement of helicopter rides or trips to the other side of the world. The most ordinary of rituals—a walk in the park or a glass of wine on the stoop—repeated weekly have the potential to enchant. The key to creating magic is to share the same spell book.

Fishel’s vision, scripted, banal conversation topics such as “How was school today?” are banned. The Family Dinner Project turns that standard script on its head and transforms it into a Choose Your Own Adventure. Instead of conformity, Fishel encourages belonging by inviting members of the family to use conversational gambits that are designed to produce surprise, delight, and curiosity.

The satirical website ClickHole captured the problem with constantly telling people what else they need to do to improve their lives: “Why Are You Not Already Doing This: 41 Things You Need to Be Doing Every Day to Avoid Burnout.”

One taxonomy of apology3 used in the resolution of disputes between neighbors has no fewer than ten required elements: the statement of apology (this is where most of us stop); naming the offense; taking responsibility; attempting to explain the offense; conveying emotions; addressing emotions and/or damage of the other; admitting fault; promising forbearance; offering reparation; requesting acceptance—formally asking for the other party to accept the apology.

the high five11 is a recent ritual innovation, invented in 1977 by the baseball player Dusty Baker, who, after hitting a home run, saw a teammate with his hands up and decided to slap them.