The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton

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Speaker 2 Hi, Pod Squad. I've been waiting for this episode for a very long time, ever since I started hearing from our guest who is on today, who is going to be talking to us about ritual.

Speaker 2 And I am delighted about this conversation because I am completely obsessed with rituals. That's all I do all day.
So I cannot wait to get into this today. Obviously.

Speaker 2 When you think of rituals, you think of Michael Norton, who is a professor at Harvard Business School. He is the author of The Ritual Effect, From Habit to Ritual,

Speaker 2 Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions, and the the co-author with Elizabeth Dunn of Happy Money: The Science of Happier Spending. Oh, I haven't read that, Michael Norton.

Speaker 2 I need to read that one and already have you back for that. Okay, his research, most importantly, has been the answer to Final Jeopardy.
God, that is a dream of mine.

Speaker 2 I mean, I want to be the Final Jeopardy answer. That's legit.
Now, wait a minute. I have a follow-up question.
Did anyone get the answer right?

Speaker 2 They did.

Speaker 3 Oh,

Speaker 3 yeah. So that's like nerddom beyond belief.
I mean, that's

Speaker 3 peak, peak for me.

Speaker 2 Big time. Yeah.
I will admit, Abby and I have been the answers on Jeopardy three times, which all of a sudden you feel, oh my God, I am so very fancy and important.

Speaker 2 But all three times, nobody's got nobody gets the answer. So then

Speaker 2 that makes you feel suddenly like I am not at all fancy. No, it actually makes me feel I'm still niche, which is cool.
Okay, okay. Oh, like you're like edgy.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 You're like, you got to know to know. Okay.
Right. Got it.
Right. Like you want to get nominated for the award, but you want to be like, screw the institution.
Got it.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I could think of a thousand.
I like it.

Speaker 2 And his TEDx talk, How to Buy Happiness, has been viewed more than 4.5 million times. Michael, welcome to We Can Do Hard Things.

Speaker 3 So great to be here. Thank you.

Speaker 2 So this podcast is largely about how to make life more meaningful or how to notice that it already is. Okay.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 in this conversation, we really do want the pod squad to take away ideas about why ritual matters and how we can use it to add meaning to our individual lives, our relational lives, our families, and our communities.

Speaker 2 So to that end, can you first start by telling us, what is a ritual?

Speaker 3 Can I do that by asking you a kind of ridiculous question?

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 3 So in the morning when you're getting ready or at night when you're getting ready for bed, do you brush your teeth and then take a shower? Or do you take a shower and then brush your teeth?

Speaker 2 Well, this would require us to actually have to take showers in the morning and the night.

Speaker 3 So let's start on, do you bathe ever?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 If that's yes.

Speaker 2 Why are you looking at me, Michael?

Speaker 2 Okay. Well, I understand, like when I wake up, I have all kinds of morning rituals, but I do brush my teeth first.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 2 I would say the same.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Same.

Speaker 2 I have to have my coffee before I do anything.

Speaker 2 So it's coffee and then teeth. You drink your coffee.
You go upstairs. You make your coffee and drink your coffee before you brush your teeth.
Kind of makes sense. Absolutely.
Makes sense.

Speaker 2 I'm like thinking that you're lying right now, all of you, that you brush your teeth before you get your coffee. I brush my teeth.
Also, John told me that that makes your teeth get stained more.

Speaker 2 So I just use that as my fake answer when really it's just, I'm so chemically dependent. Okay.
All right.

Speaker 3 I have to say, when you gave different answers, the looks on your faces, it was disgust.

Speaker 3 It was like, what kind of a person

Speaker 3 could ever do it in that way?

Speaker 3 And that I think is really important, actually.

Speaker 3 So if you think about for some people, if I said do it differently tomorrow, For some people, they say, I don't, sure, I don't care like teeth, shower, whatever, coffee.

Speaker 3 But other people care they say i don't i don't want to do it differently and i say why and they say i don't know exactly but i would feel weird i would feel off i wouldn't feel ready but if i do it my way i feel amazing i'm ready to tackle the day ready to get out the door and that i think is kind of what it's the basic element of a ritual which is the actions themselves are pretty boring i mean brushing your teeth is probably the most boring thing we do, but even that simple action can get imbued with more emotion, with more meaning, and actually really affect how we feel about big things, like our entire day, based on these little actions.

Speaker 3 So, habits are kind of like automatic things that we do that are pretty dry.

Speaker 3 Ritual brings more into it, more emotion, because we care how we get it done. And when we start to care how, that's when all kinds of interesting things can happen.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 How? Oh, I love this conversation so much. Okay, so

Speaker 2 I know this is a complicated answer, but but why

Speaker 2 do we need

Speaker 2 ritual?

Speaker 2 Or do we do human beings need ritual? And if so, why? What's the why beneath it?

Speaker 3 There are lots of people who are extremely skeptical of rituals. I think I was probably one of them at some point in my life, but you really can't escape them.

Speaker 3 So, I mean, if you think about Have you ever had a cake where before you ate the cake, you put wax candles in it and lit them on fire.

Speaker 3 So the wax dripped all all over the cake and then put it in front of like a seven-year-old with a cold and they blow all over it.

Speaker 3 Of course, we've all done this a birthday cake, but they're so, so ubiquitous rituals. Even if you're not thinking of yourself as that kind of person, we really can't escape them.

Speaker 3 We really use them to pattern our years. So how do we know to celebrate our friendships?

Speaker 3 Well, a nice thing is that people have birthdays. And so once a year, it's almost like we're required to say, or Valentine's Day, or Mother's Day or Father's Day.

Speaker 3 Culture gives us these moments in order to remind us of the close relationships in our lives. That's one reason I think they're so important.

Speaker 3 But the other one is the little ones, like again, the brushing your teeth or those silly ones, I think they help us on a day-to-day basis as well.

Speaker 3 So we're trying to get through the whole year and have relationships and things like that. But every day when we get up, we're trying to get through the day.
as best as we can.

Speaker 3 And we need to get motivated and we want to connect with people at work. We want to connect with our family.
And we use little rituals in those places as well.

Speaker 3 So it's almost like when we're faced with some issue or problem, we can do all kinds of things, you know, to solve those.

Speaker 3 But one of the things that humans almost always turn to is little or big rituals as one solution.

Speaker 2 Hmm. Okay, so I've been trying to think about why ritual is important for me since I started listening to your work.

Speaker 2 And one of the reasons is that I think that ritual for me is the closest replacement that I have had to drugs and alcohol. Now,

Speaker 2 I know that sounds weird, but I'm an addict, so I can't, I've lost my privileges, okay?

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 I have always felt like

Speaker 2 the world we are living in, the day-to-day,

Speaker 2 the meetings, the situations, the adulting,

Speaker 2 all of it is so effing

Speaker 2 insufficient.

Speaker 2 Okay. I don't know if boring is the right word, but it's just like, I always have this feeling that I want to say, do you all know what's going on here?

Speaker 2 Like, we're on a planet and we're all going to die and we're going to lose each other. And oh my God, dogs and rainbows and death.
And okay.

Speaker 2 So there's this feeling.

Speaker 2 When you first start drinking or you first start doing drugs, this feeling of like, exactly.

Speaker 2 like drugs gets it. Yes, drugs gets it.

Speaker 2 Okay, Michael, first of all, just, is this sounding insane to you? You can stop me at any time. Sounds perfectly smart to me, actually.
Okay.

Speaker 3 It does not. It absolutely does not sound insane at all.
We're all looking for those feelings that you're describing and there's lots of ways to get them.

Speaker 2 Yes. Like this reminder or proof or unveiling of magic.
That's how I feel. It's like that quote, either nothing is a miracle or everything's a miracle.

Speaker 2 We're all walking around like, this is just normal that we live on this place with all of these things. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So like with drugs or hallucinogenic or whatever, every drug intensified falsely and then I ended up in handcuffs, whatever. But for a moment, for one brief moment, we were gods, Michael.
Like we

Speaker 2 saw the magic behind the ordinary. We loved each other more.
Nature was as gorgeous as it is.

Speaker 2 Spiritual, you know, the closest I would come to the feeling of it was when I was little in church and all the incense, even the fire and brimstone and the stained glass. And I was like, oh, shit.

Speaker 2 Like,

Speaker 2 I can feel the magic here.

Speaker 2 Ritual

Speaker 2 is how I

Speaker 2 remember magic.

Speaker 2 So when I wake up in the morning, every morning, I go to this little teeny table in my living room, and I light a candle

Speaker 2 and I sit there and I do my little morning pages.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I have to smell the candle. It's like everything is magic for a little bit.

Speaker 2 And it's like that moment where I'm like, there is more going on here. I am not just a robot adult who's going to do my to-do list and blah, blah, blah.
There is more going on.

Speaker 2 Is this

Speaker 2 a thing?

Speaker 3 For sure. So I'm a behavioral scientist.
So one of the things we try to do is help people, if they say, I want to have better habits, we try to help them.

Speaker 3 Like if you said, I want to exercise every morning, we would try to figure out ways to help you exercise every morning. And one of the ways we do that actually is to try to make things a habit.

Speaker 3 And in fact, we even try to make them a little bit automatic. So you don't even have to think about going for a run in the morning because it's just something that you do.

Speaker 3 With kids, we teach them to brush their teeth. They don't think every day, should I brush my teeth or not? We want it to be almost a mindless thing.
I'm brushing my teeth. I should brush my teeth.

Speaker 3 And those are great. But if you think about, I mean, imagine you had a life of completely perfect habits.
Every minute of every day, you were doing the thing that is the thing you're supposed to do.

Speaker 3 I think after 50 years, you'd be. super healthy, you know, great smile, really in shape.
But I'm not sure you would look back and say, that was a great life.

Speaker 3 That was a life filled with meaning and emotion. One of the things I always think about is habits kind of automate us.
And that can be really good for us, but I think rituals can animate us.

Speaker 3 And we're all looking for something more than just doing the thing that we're supposed to be doing and checking stuff off our list.

Speaker 3 We're looking for other experiences that make us feel alive, animated, connected. And as you said, there's many different ways to get that feeling that humans have come up with over time.

Speaker 3 But one of them, I think, that we always see coming up in different places is this idea of these little small practices that people do that turn the morning from just putting clothes on and getting out the door to taking a beat, taking a moment with a candle or with a book or with tea or whatever the thing is that you care about.

Speaker 3 And that can change the emotional tenor of your day.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I want to repeat what you just said. You said, habits automate us, but rituals animate us.

Speaker 2 So that's this idea that the animation is like you are actually

Speaker 2 not automated. You are not a robot.
You are a human in a long line of an ancient, ancient humanity who can smell things and hear things and feel things, which you might forget if you are just.

Speaker 2 automated all the time. So that's why the candles and the incense and the smells and all of it is is because that grounds you in being a human being.

Speaker 3 One thing I always found so interesting. So first off, humans love fire with rituals.
That goes as far back as you can see.

Speaker 3 Probably as soon as we got fire, we started thinking, hey, how can we use this in our rituals? We use sound, we use scent, we use all of these things in our rituals.

Speaker 3 And in fact, if you look, to see what people use in their rituals, it's kind of obvious, but kind of funny that, of course, we can only use the things that are around us.

Speaker 3 So, for example, it used to be really hard to have the color blue. It was difficult to create.
So, there's no blue in rituals.

Speaker 3 But as soon as humans figured out how to have blue, we're like, hey, let's have blue in all of our rituals.

Speaker 3 It's almost though we're looking around our environment for things that we can use to get these feelings.

Speaker 3 And it could be drugs and it could be colors and it could be candles, but we're casting around almost to try to find these things to bring them in and give them more meaning.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And it's like, if you're using ritual,

Speaker 2 yes, to evoke a certain feeling, or the way I would describe it is to remember a reality. That's how I feel about it.

Speaker 2 It's like, I want to remember that there's more going on here than just what I'm seeing in front of me in adulting land.

Speaker 2 Then rituals inside of relationships. So that would be the individual for me the morning.

Speaker 2 But rituals inside of relationship are how we stop and say, there is more going on here here than what we're seeing. Like the cake is, I'm not just, this is magic.

Speaker 2 We love each other and we are marking this time of like letting go of who we were and going towards who we are. Or I'm sitting with my partner.

Speaker 2 I mean, I've heard you tell the story about the couple that just clinks their forks before every single meal. Abby and I started doing it.
We just started stealing other people. Oh, I love that.

Speaker 3 I love them.

Speaker 2 But it's like this little second of like, there's more going on here. We are not just people running this household together.

Speaker 2 There's another reality that let's remember it every once in a while, which is that we are these two souls who've come together to do this ridiculous thing called life.

Speaker 2 And isn't that insanely beautiful and weird? Clink.

Speaker 3 And it's just the two of us.

Speaker 3 So, you know, we have weddings and anniversaries and Valentines. You know, again, culture gives us some reminders.
But those like, it's just a couple of days a year.

Speaker 3 And it turns out when you're married or with someone, you're with them kind of every day

Speaker 3 you kind of need some things other than just the couple of days a year and that's where i think people turn to these little small actions you don't need a huge elaborate ceremony or a crazy you know date night once a week these little actions like clinking the silverware together they really can become very meaningful because in a relationship it's how do you know you're in it for good with the person you can like get a ring you can get married you can sign papers but you don't really know if you're in it for the long run Often you don't, Michael.

Speaker 3 This is true. I think these little actions like twinking the silverware.
So this couple, every time before dinner, they just clink their silverware together.

Speaker 3 It's something, if you think about it, imagine you've been doing that every night for 10 years.

Speaker 3 The feeling of it is, I bet we're going to do this for the next 10 years also. You know, this is our thing.
It's not from a book. It's not from some ancient text.

Speaker 3 It's we came up with this and it's our thing.

Speaker 3 And one of the reasons we know those are so important is because if you ask people like when you break up if you say how would you feel if your ex dated someone else married someone else had kids with someone else you don't love it but it's like okay they're allowed to do that but if you say how would you feel if they reused your ritual

Speaker 3 the rage i mean the moral outrage that people if you saw you know your ex clinking forks with another person

Speaker 3 That is inexcusable and unacceptable. And again, that shows it's just a fork and yet it means so much about who we are.

Speaker 2 Oh, that's so beautiful. Better not be clinking any forks with anybody.
We already stole it from somebody else. That's fine, but for you know, in 20 years, we will be still doing it.

Speaker 2 And how exciting is that? Well, it's so beautiful, too, because when I think about rituals that I do with people, when I'm mad at them, I don't want to do it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So it is a mark that is beyond our daily bullshit, too, right? It's like communities,

Speaker 2 ritual of going to church, or ritual of the neighborhood Christmas lighting or ritual of

Speaker 2 so much shit could have gone on that year. Neighbors could be mad at each other.
Congregants could be fighting and yet we come back together and we do this thing.

Speaker 2 So it is almost like it's a celebration of human nature and a protection. from human nature.
Yeah, because it isn't marking how you feel.

Speaker 2 Sometimes rituals are most important precisely because they are in opposition to how you feel. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And we use them in weapons, actually. So we threaten not to come home for the holidays as a way to show our family how mad we are at them.
Whereas if we said, I'm not coming home next Tuesday,

Speaker 3 nobody cares. But if you say, I'm not coming home for New Year's or whatever it is your family cares about, we're actually using that to say, I'm really mad at you.
You've done something really wrong.

Speaker 3 I can't even be in the same room with you.

Speaker 2 That's interesting.

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Speaker 2 I was thinking when you said that about the community and the congregants, can you tell us about the rain dance ritual and what they thought they were doing, what happens in a drought, and what they were actually doing?

Speaker 2 Because I think that's fascinating.

Speaker 3 And it's interesting because sometimes the reason we're doing a ritual isn't necessarily, we're not getting the benefit we think we are.

Speaker 3 Sometimes it's doing something else for us that we're not quite aware of.

Speaker 3 And this example that I love is with, so many cultures in human history have independently come up with the idea of some sort of ceremonial rain dance.

Speaker 3 As you'd imagine, it's mainly in regions where there's drought. Obviously, if it's raining all the time, we don't need a rain dance.

Speaker 2 Barry, no rain dance.

Speaker 3 Exactly. But if there's drought, then maybe we need something.
And of course, I think we could say it's unlikely that dancing will cause rain to come down, I think.

Speaker 3 So it's the question is, why would all of these different cultures have come up with the idea of dancing in order to make it rain?

Speaker 3 And if you're skeptical and don't understand humans at all, you'd say they're wrong. You know, they're wasting their time.
Why are they doing this? They should be doing something else.

Speaker 3 But in fact, what happens when there's drought is communities start to fray.

Speaker 3 Because now things are scarce. So am I going to be nice to my neighbor? I'm not sure.
I'm going to focus on my family and my needs right now. And you really see cultures start to fragment.

Speaker 3 So what these rain dances do is they bring everybody together again as a reminder that we're in this together.

Speaker 3 And by the way, we've been doing this for hundreds of years and those people got through this together as well.

Speaker 3 It's actual evidence that we can do this together because we know that others have done it before us.

Speaker 3 And so yes, it's not actually going to make it rain, but is it going to help us get through the drought?

Speaker 3 I think for sure it's going to help us get through the drought because it's going to bring us back together as a community and a culture.

Speaker 2 Gorgeous. So that reminds me of the drought that young parents have of sleep.
I have heard you talk about why it is that we create elaborate rain dances every night for our children to go to bed.

Speaker 2 I had to read the Good Night Moon. We had to look for four pictures.
It had to be at like 749. We had to sing certain songs.
We We had to have the certain blue passy.

Speaker 2 And I heard you say, it's so funny. I don't think we did any of that stuff for our kid.
I think it just helped us have some measure of control over this uncontrollable thing.

Speaker 2 You can control whether a child's going to sleep about as much as you can control whether it's going to rain.

Speaker 3 And yet, if you ask, I actually teach an undergraduate course and I ask these students who are, you know, 18 years old to ask their parents about their ritual that they had at bedtime.

Speaker 3 And their parents, number one, remember it exactly, you know, like burned in your memory what you did with your toddler or, you know, whatever age you remember. And they get very emotional about it.

Speaker 3 It's an amazing, wonderful memory of that time. And it brings back that time in a way that you can look at pictures.
You know, I mean, there's other ways to get.

Speaker 3 back and get memories, but sometimes these rituals are really strong triggers to really bring you back to the experience that you were having.

Speaker 3 What is so funny, I think, about these rituals, and by the way, my wife and I came up with them for our daughter too. So there's no judgment

Speaker 3 in the circle of parenting for sure.

Speaker 3 I think,

Speaker 3 I mean, maybe, as you said, it helps the kids sleep, but I think just for the parents,

Speaker 3 it's orderly. You know, it's this book and then that song.
And then probably it helps us to sleep. even more than it helps our baby to sleep.

Speaker 2 And it's frayed. It's afraid time.
Parents fray. When your sleep is scarce, it is hard not to turn on each other, just like any community.

Speaker 2 And I wonder, now that you're speaking, if that sort of ritual also brings you back to each other, we know we're going to do these things each night.

Speaker 2 Parents have gotten through this for centuries before.

Speaker 2 We will survive this. Can you talk a little bit about the relationship? between control and ritual because I am a person who struggled with all different kinds of control issues for so long.

Speaker 2 And it's curious to me that I am so reliant on ritual for someone who has tried to find 7 million different ways to control the cosmos. And talk to us about the, was it the pigeons?

Speaker 2 There's some control story here that's really helpful to me. Yeah, the pigeons.
Tell us about that.

Speaker 3 I think one of the things about like the older you get, the more you realize that we don't have control over anything.

Speaker 3 You know, we kind of knew it all along, but really, life just tells us even the things we thought we had a little control, we really don't have any, you know, I mean, so it's, it is, as you said, it's like existential.

Speaker 3 I have no control over anything. So, what are we supposed to do with that? I mean, technically, we could just say, oh, that's cool, but of course, that's not how we, right? We want to get control.

Speaker 3 We do all kinds of things to try to get control. And one of the things that we turn to, again, are rituals.
And this is amazing.

Speaker 3 And I can say it's, it's not my research, so I can just say it's amazing research by B.F. Skinner, who's a famous psychologist, who studied things like reinforcement learning.

Speaker 3 So how can I get a pigeon to peck something every so often by giving them rewards at the right rate? So it's very kind of measured and very specific. And how do we train pigeons to learn things?

Speaker 3 But one time he did this thing where, so the way it worked is it's called a Skinner box, and it's like a thing with levers and buttons and stuff like that.

Speaker 3 And he trains pigeons like you have to press the lever twice and then you get a treat. And then they can learn that because they're pretty smart.

Speaker 3 But one time he did this thing where the food just comes no matter what the pigeon does.

Speaker 3 So it doesn't matter what they peck or whatever they do. It's just going to come at random times.

Speaker 3 And on the one hand, you could say, well, they should just sit back. I mean, if nothing you do can help the food come, may as well just relax till it comes.

Speaker 3 And that is completely not what we do and also not what the pigeons do. They come up with their own superstitious ritual to try to get the food to come.

Speaker 3 So if they they happen to peck twice and then press the lever once, they keep doing that to try to get the food to come out, to feel the sense of control.

Speaker 3 But the pigeon in the box next to them is like seven pecks in one pull.

Speaker 3 So they're also, they're literally, each pigeon is coming up with their own idiosyncratic ritual to try to control something that we know they have no control over.

Speaker 3 And I don't want to extrapolate too much from pigeons to, for example, me.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 But I really think we're often doing the the exact same thing, which is we're trying through these practices to feel some sense of control because it's such an important feeling for us to feel like we're thriving, is to have some sense of control.

Speaker 3 I think maybe we do it a lot in our everyday lives.

Speaker 2 I have something to say to that because I think it's really interesting. I played professional sport and I basically, prior to a game, I would go through a sort of like a hundred-step ritual process.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it was a good game for instance i would think through very specifically if there was any altering of that and then i would add that to the ritual so when i retired at 35

Speaker 2 you could imagine the long list of stuff and then if i forgot to do something it would mess psychologically me up for the game one thing i'm thinking about and i'm curious what your thoughts are on this Because I can see kind of the difference between ritual habits and superstitions.

Speaker 2 They're kind of similar. They have a similar through line of a desire for control.
But with ritual, it feels like ritual is the place that we land after we try superstitions and habits over time.

Speaker 2 And ritual is almost the surrender in a way. that the contract we make with the universe is like, okay, I'm going to do these rituals.
It's going to bring me a little bit more peace.

Speaker 2 I know that I don't really have control, but this is just the little little game that I'm playing. It's like the surrendering to the control by trying to create this little ritual.

Speaker 2 Is there any truth into what I've just said? Yeah. And what is the difference between superstition and ritual?

Speaker 3 I had a student who told me, who was a gifted athlete herself, and she said, absolutely. I mean, if you want to waste an entire day of your life.
put in any athlete's name and the word ritual. Yes.

Speaker 3 And you're going to get any performer of any kind, actually. You could spend the rest of your life just there.
It's so, so fascinating.

Speaker 3 But this student that i had did this very clever and funny thing which was she would deliberately do one of the steps wrong

Speaker 3 so that if the game if she did poorly in the game she could blame it on the fact that she had done the ritual wrong instead of blame it on herself or on the teammates or on whatever else that was a genius the psychology of that is so complex and so fascinating and yet it kind of makes perfect sense to me to do that that's it's like reverse psychology and god or something, because it's like whatever God is, it's a entity looking down at us like we're a bunch of little pigeons.

Speaker 2 Oh, there she goes with her candle. There she goes with her tarot cards.
There she goes with her. And we're just like bop, bop, bop, five things.
And it's all random.

Speaker 3 And it's as though something is keeping track of us too. Because if I do my ritual correctly, the good thing will happen.
Who's monitoring

Speaker 3 if we're doing the ritual correctly? You know, there's nobody looking. It was superstition as well.

Speaker 3 Something is monitoring whether i walk under a ladder and then the next day making sure something bad happens to me again the psychology is very unusual

Speaker 2 and yet it completely resonates and i do the same thing myself yeah i've never thought of that the ladder thing assumes that there's someone monitoring some greater being monitoring that we go under a ladder but we would choose to believe in the kind of being that would would torment us for walking on a ladder.

Speaker 2 That's what religion is.

Speaker 2 I mean, I'm spiritual, I'm religious, whatever the hell that means and i always think is this just a bunch of superstitions we're doing like at what point does prayer and religion go over to okay here's how i in my life michael's like don't ask me that question yeah religion let's get away from okay anyway this is how

Speaker 2 i in my own self monitor when i'm keeling over towards weird compulsive superstition as opposed to ritual, which is for me, when I'm in ritual,

Speaker 2 it's because I am there to remember a reality that already exists.

Speaker 2 When I move to superstition, it's when I start believing I am creating a reality with the action.

Speaker 2 So it happens to me if I have a weird morning and I can't do my candle and I can't do my meeting and I can't do whatever. And then I'm like, well, I'm fucked.

Speaker 2 Or if anything goes bad that day, I'm like, well, what did I expect? I didn't do my candle.

Speaker 3 And had I only done my candle,

Speaker 3 this would have been amazing.

Speaker 2 Could we have like a temporary thing?

Speaker 2 Like, let's just hypothetically say, because I'm an optimizer, unfortunately, but let's just hypothetically say that you don't have time to do your candle or your meeting or whatever in the morning.

Speaker 2 Is there a replacement ritual that you can do that can be like, bam, we're still going to be good today? Well, I would think

Speaker 2 that ultimate goal of ritual, it's like meditation.

Speaker 2 You meditate on your mat 20 minutes a day, not just so that those 20 minutes will, you'll remember that you're not your thoughts and you can find peace, but so that eventually off the mat during the day, you can tap back into that reality and remember.

Speaker 2 And for me, ritual is the same. So if ritual is working correctly, I can just remember the candle.
I can have micro doses

Speaker 2 of remembering what I was trying to formally remember in that moment, that it's always there.

Speaker 2 It's just something you can tap back into off the mat or off the ritual.

Speaker 3 I completely agree. And in fact, there's other amazing research, which again is not mine.
So I'll say it's amazing, that one of the things rituals do is they help us deal with failure.

Speaker 3 When things go wrong, they actually can serve as kind of a buffer against really feeling terrible about it. And I think that also is coming to, if your day is going badly,

Speaker 3 which happens, of course, a lot to all of us, how do you keep yourself from really spiraling down?

Speaker 3 I think sometimes ritual, as your experience suggests, they buffer us a little bit and thinking about them can keep us from going maybe quite so dark as we might otherwise go.

Speaker 2 That's good. And you also know that tomorrow you can do it and kind of like.
cut off the failure day. Yeah.
You'll find your way back. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Because the magical being, by the way, is monitoring 24-hour cycle. Of course.

Speaker 3 So as soon as it turns to midnight, the whole thing starts over and then you have a new 24 hours with the magical being who's keeping track of the whole thing.

Speaker 2 We are real. That's what I really believe, actually.
Ridiculous. I really do think I believe that shit that he just said.

Speaker 2 And I believe that the being will be like, all right, but you guys, whoever you guys is, I don't know, you guys is the being's council team. I don't know.
Friends. Yeah, friends.

Speaker 2 They'll be like, okay, but you guys, she did do it on Tuesday. So I know it's Thursday, but we can probably give her a break until at least Friday.

Speaker 3 But but if she does not show up for that candle on friday all hell is going to break loose she is on yellow yacht we're going to cut her off i will say though the magical being there is a version which is the bad version which is i walk under a ladder and it's going to make sure i get punished but one of the reasons we have that belief is there's a good version too you mentioned karma which is that if i do a good thing

Speaker 3 something good will happen as a result. And that's a really lovely feeling that we have, right? And not even to me necessarily, just that if I do good things, good things happen.

Speaker 3 That still requires the magical being to be tracking all the goodness. That's right.

Speaker 3 But that is actually, you can see why we would want to have a force like that in the universe because that can be really uplifting.

Speaker 3 But it comes with the other thing where they're monitoring to see if you messed up, also.

Speaker 2 That's right. Yeah.

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Speaker 2 Okay, here's another reason that I think ritual is important. First of all, to remember the reality that there's more going on here.
There's a magical,

Speaker 2 whatever, love connection that is going on beneath and around all of our mechanical adulting. What if that's tied to that?

Speaker 2 I just want to be protective of the people who might just be doing ritual for their own sake, not because they are believing or tapping into something deeper.

Speaker 2 But for their own sake is a bigger meaning. You're a human.
No, I understand. Who wants to have a human experience? I understand.
And maybe that's the same thing.

Speaker 2 It's just, I didn't want to ostracize a person who's like, I don't believe that there's, you know, I just think that I'm trying to do this thing because it makes me feel good.

Speaker 2 I guess I just mean anybody who's remembering that they want to remember that they're not a robot, that they're not just some means to capitalistic ends. It has nothing human about them anymore.

Speaker 2 It's like when you're over-adulting and you just want a human. And then tied to that is the idea of wanting to feel it all.

Speaker 2 wanting to feel the entire human existence, which we don't get to do inside of our daily lives and don't get to do through habits because I am so annoyed by habits often because it just feels like Abby's a habit person

Speaker 2 and I just feel so bossed around and I feel like it's just wanting me to be habits want me to be happy all the time. They want me to be optimized and they optimize.
Yes.

Speaker 2 And I actually don't want to be optimized all day. And I actually don't believe that the purpose of being human is being happy.

Speaker 2 I go after my my little candle, Michael, and my morning pages, almost every morning I go to a 12-step meeting. And I think, why am I doing this? It's on my Zoom.

Speaker 2 And it's because with those people and their stories, before I start my freaking adulting day,

Speaker 2 I get to hear life.

Speaker 2 I get to hear people who are struggling. I get to hear people who are real and in pain and in loss and in triumph.
And it's like, I get to have the full human experience.

Speaker 2 And that is what's most important to me. And then I can get on with the day.
So can you talk to us about emodiversity, which is like, it's got to be my favorite new word. So good.

Speaker 3 So obviously we'd rather be happy than sad in general.

Speaker 3 But if you think about, imagine that some scale from one to 10, where 10 is amazingly, perfectly happy. If you think about doing that for a little while, it's kind of awesome.

Speaker 3 But if you were always a perfect 10 happy for your entire life, it starts to feel a little,

Speaker 3 I don't know what the word is, but kind of horrifying in a sense, you know, that I don't think I want to be the same thing all the time, even though I want to be happy.

Speaker 3 And I think that's really important. It's not as though we're hoping to be sad in a sense, and yet sadness and these other emotions.
sometimes are what make life really interesting.

Speaker 3 We came up with this idea of, we kind of regret the name now because people think it's like emo music or something like that.

Speaker 3 But anyway, emo diversity is this idea that it's the diversity, the range of our emotions, how often we experience each of them that independently makes us feel like we're having a pretty good life.

Speaker 3 If you've never had loss, you've really missed out on something. Do I want loss to happen to me? Of course not.
None of us do.

Speaker 3 And yet when we go through those experiences, they change us and make our lives a lot richer.

Speaker 3 And that, I think, is a different way to think about life, which is actually you're kind of hoping for a really wide range of emotions. You're not hoping to be 10 happy all the time.

Speaker 3 For one, we'll never get there. And two, if we did, we might not like it.
We want the range. We want the diversity.
Why do scary movies exist? Why do sad movies exist?

Speaker 3 We actually go out and we look for some fear sometimes just to shake it up. We find it all over the place.

Speaker 3 For me, it's been really helpful to think about not just happy, sad or something like that, but the whole range of these things.

Speaker 3 And we do things in life that really change our emodiversity for better better and for worse without thinking about it necessarily.

Speaker 3 But if you think more about it, you can really think not just, you know, is this going to make me happy, but how is this going to change my emotional experience in the world?

Speaker 3 Which emotions am I going to have more? Which will I have less? How will it change my mix? And how will that change how I feel about my life overall?

Speaker 2 That's beautiful.

Speaker 2 I have a question about that because I'm wondering We should eventually get into the awe aspect of this because that's like the openness to be able to receive the the different emotions.

Speaker 2 But is there something about ritual that opens us up to the range of emotion? Or is it, because I'm super interested in just the pause idea of the ritual. It isn't just

Speaker 2 making meaning. It is like marking something as meaningful.

Speaker 2 And in our lives right now, it's just like these 14 things to do today, the tremendous, what should be earth shadowing things in our lives that we don't even pay attention to.

Speaker 2 We don't even pause and say, I mean, even God was making the world and the sixth day marked it, took the time on a whole ass day to say it was very good.

Speaker 2 We don't do any of that, but I mean in anything, like I think about, you know, how girls getting their periods and we're like, here's a tampon moving right along.

Speaker 2 I had my breasts removed in surgery last year. And I'm like, I feel like I should be having something to mark this.

Speaker 2 Shouldn't we be having a little sitting in a circle and talking about taking these off of me? We don't take the time to pause and be like, this is something big and it means something.

Speaker 2 And it's meant something for a long time. And maybe the reason we feel strange about this is because we are living in denial of the meaning that has always existed when these monumental things happen.

Speaker 2 But we push through it. Tell us what's happening there.

Speaker 3 I think that, by the way, one of the things that we're working on now is exactly what you just said, which is there are experiences in life that are incredibly powerful for us, challenging, but we don't have rituals for those.

Speaker 3 Like humans didn't come up with them yet. So we have ritual for getting married, but getting divorced, we don't have a thing.
God, we don't. You know what I mean?

Speaker 3 There's no thing where you do the thing and then the thing. And a lot of things in life are like this.
We've been looking at ambiguous grief. which is a kind of grief.

Speaker 3 So if you have a parent, for example, with a degenerative disease, Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, they're not gone, but they're gone.

Speaker 3 We have funerals for when someone's gone, but we don't have something for all the people who are in the middle of it.

Speaker 3 And I do think that these places are places where we can actually be creative and come up with new things to do because humans have been doing it for ever, which is a really nice thing.

Speaker 3 Parks and Rec had Galentine's Day,

Speaker 3 which was a joke on the show. And yet, it's fantastic.
Like, of course, we need something like that.

Speaker 3 if you wish that you were in a relationship and you're not in a relationship on that day it's wonderful that we can come up with something else to do that's a new ritual that becomes meaningful and i think when we see the absence of them sometimes that's when we realize how meaningful they are and we saw it during covid you know people would try to get married on zoom and try to have funerals on zoom and thanksgiving on zoom and i think it's better than nothing but you could feel people saying it's not the same.

Speaker 3 And so if you got married on Zoom, a lot of people after then had a ceremony. So, there's something, I think, in the rituals that when they're gone, we didn't even notice how important they were.

Speaker 3 Thanksgiving is just a nightmare with family until you can't do it.

Speaker 3 And then people really started to miss it. And I think, again, that really shows how deep the meaning is in these things.

Speaker 3 Even if we complain about them, there's really a lot of meaning and emotion buried in them.

Speaker 2 Has there been a decline over when you look at ritual? did ancient people have more than we do? Is it that we think we have more control, so we have less ritual?

Speaker 2 Like, what is the actual volume of ritual in daily life over history?

Speaker 3 It's hard to say exactly. I mean, one thing that's interesting is if you look at archaeologists identifying a culture, for example, one of the things they use is burial practices.

Speaker 3 So this culture buried people in this way, you know, with jewels and this one did something else with a different.

Speaker 3 And in fact, that's one of the ways we know that humans had culture. So dinosaur bones aren't laid out in a particular way because dinosaurs weren't having funerals and things like that.

Speaker 3 So we know actually that humans very, very long ago were burying people ceremoniously, which suggests that there's something more happening in that culture than just people die and we don't care about it.

Speaker 3 So there is the sense of way, way back, humans had already started to do rituals, at least in that domain, but we can't see all the ones that we might have missed.

Speaker 3 There is some sense that as some countries have gotten less religious and people are less likely to attend religious services, you could say that means that ritual is declining because fewer people are doing Saturday or Sunday or every day, whatever day their faith asks them for.

Speaker 3 And yet then you've got like Burning Man.

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 3 Which is one of the, I mean, if you think about it, it's literally a pilgrimage to the desert

Speaker 3 where you take hallucinogenic items and then you burn a giant thing. I mean, it couldn't, if you said that was from 3,000 years ago, you'd say, yeah, that sounds right.

Speaker 3 I mean, that definitely sounds like something ancient. And so I think we often, we're reinventing them all the time.

Speaker 3 So up, up or down is hard to say, but I think the ingenuity of replacing them, I think, has always been there.

Speaker 2 And I think the more we obsess about optimization and efficiency, it feels to me like the more ritual goes.

Speaker 2 I want want to ask you, I have a friend who, and I wonder if on a macro, this is what happens. She was feeling kind of just no life in her life and stressed out and too booked.

Speaker 2 So we actually brainstormed together, like, what could she do to get some of the things off her plate? She stopped shopping, grocery shopping. She started doing a service to whatever.

Speaker 2 The depression got worse. And in a very long conversation, she started crying and she said, I love

Speaker 2 picking the food for my family. That time where I'm picking the apple that I'm going to put in my kids' thing or like picking a thing of flowers to put on my,

Speaker 2 it's like the more we farm out because we think that will help us, some of that is the very ritual that we need to add meaning to our life at all.

Speaker 2 Right?

Speaker 3 One of my collaborators, Jimena Garcia Rada, studies decision-making in couples and in caregiving situations.

Speaker 3 And one of the things that she shows in her research is that if things are too easy, we don't feel like we really cared for someone.

Speaker 3 So it's true that I could just send you whatever using whatever delivery service if you're feeling sick.

Speaker 3 You know, I can take care of you quickly and easily, but it doesn't feel to me that I really cared for you. What I want to do is try to make you soup that's going to be terrible.

Speaker 3 because I don't know, you know, I'm ruining the soup. Store-bought soup is better than my soup, but I'm trying to do something with my effort to show you how much I care about you.

Speaker 3 You may or may not want the store-bought soup, but you're talking about how I feel and your friend, how she feels when she's engaged in the effort of caregiving.

Speaker 3 When we optimize every single thing and outsource every single thing, sometimes we're taking that very important feeling away. Sometimes, of course, we should outsource things if we're able to do it.

Speaker 3 But sometimes I think that tension that you're pointing out is important to keep in mind, which is if everything is automated, you're not even a human anymore.

Speaker 3 Sometimes the effort that we put into things is what tells us that we care about things.

Speaker 2 That's why I love my dogs so much. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Obviously, my children too, but I really like spend a lot of time caring for the dogs.

Speaker 2 That's hilarious. Okay.
So.

Speaker 2 I think it's funny that you thought you were explaining that better, but then you just kind of doubled down on it. It sounded worse.
Yeah. Right.
Yeah. It sounded worse.

Speaker 2 So we're definitely keeping it. But

Speaker 2 I am annoyed because I feel like I could talk to you for 17 hours, but I do want to, before we go, I'm going to ask our people, the listeners, to

Speaker 2 send to us

Speaker 2 what individual rituals that they use to remember the magic of life, to send to us romantic rituals. familial rituals, community rituals.
One, because I'm just so curious.

Speaker 2 And two, because I feel like this is, which you may have considered since you're like the expert at this, but it's kind of like the antidote to despair.

Speaker 2 It's like a remembering of everything that matters. Yeah.
Yeah. That's good.
Would you just leave us with a few of your favorites?

Speaker 2 Give us a couple individual ones, familial ones, community ones that will just get people thinking and that if they're not going to do any more, they could implement maybe.

Speaker 2 And I know, but it's, but they have to make it their own. I know that.
But what are some examples?

Speaker 3 I think one thing that is helpful.

Speaker 3 So the example that you love, the clinking forks thing, I think sometimes if I say, try out a ritual, people think, oh my God, it's going to be like a 12-hour, you know, million step.

Speaker 3 I don't have time. Who has time? Who has time to meditate even for 20 minutes a day? Not to mention, you know, I take a week or whatever it might be.

Speaker 3 But sometimes the rituals that really matter to us, it's not that they take a long time. It's just that they have a lot of meaning embedded in them.
And I think that's the key to doing these things.

Speaker 3 I've been thinking about this one lately. I don't know why.
There's a family that they have a competition, which is who can make the grossest food.

Speaker 2 Oh my God, I could do it. That's what they do.

Speaker 3 Every holiday, that's the competition. And it happened because one time someone tried to make food that was good and it was so gross by accident that it became a family thing.

Speaker 3 And then you can see how they built in. And, but what are they showing in their family by doing that, right? They value each other, but they value fun.

Speaker 3 They're saying as a family, one of our core values is fun.

Speaker 3 Whatever your core values are, you can live them out with your family too. And by the way, if you have little kids, you can make them do it.

Speaker 3 Once they get older, it's harder to make them do it. That's real.

Speaker 3 But when they're little, you can kind of get some stuff in there and see if you can get the ground rules. In our family, we do gratitude at dinner every night.

Speaker 3 Everyone has to say something that happened that they're grateful for.

Speaker 3 I'm not sure that's the best ritual in the world for everyone, but we're trying to say, I think being grateful is a really important thing to be in life, that we should all be more grateful.

Speaker 3 And we're trying to, through a ritual, signal that to our daughter. Is she taking it well? I'm not sure.
It's pretty annoying.

Speaker 3 A friend of mine asked her son to do it, Liz Dunn, actually, my co-author, and her son said, I'm grateful that we don't have a gratitude ritual.

Speaker 3 So, you know, it's a process. Yeah, it's a process.
But we're trying. I think trying them out.
and keeping them if they matter.

Speaker 3 And of course, not keeping them if they're not landing is one way to go about it.

Speaker 2 Not keeping them if they're not working is a beautiful ritual in itself.

Speaker 2 I just discovered last week that a beautiful ritual that I have with my family, which is putting up the Christmas tree, which to me symbolizes family togetherness and joy, turns out is a slice of hell for my children because all I do is yell at everyone for not separating the branches.

Speaker 2 They just admitted to me that they are all on a group chat. You're not yelling.
Talking about

Speaker 2 how for them it's the opposite,

Speaker 2 which was an interesting moment for me. I was like, oh,

Speaker 2 that's so sad and also so happy because now I get to do it my damn self and we'll think of something else that symbolizes family togetherness.

Speaker 2 So the evolution and letting go of something that has meaning to you and does not mean the same to the rest of the family is a whole nother thing.

Speaker 2 And then it allows them to step in and maybe be creative and have some sort of input themselves.

Speaker 2 And so we have teenagers who are just about to become real adults and they could care less about what we do. It's like, okay, well, think of something for yourself.

Speaker 2 And then maybe they will have some sort of

Speaker 2 individuality. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And if they choose to have kids later.

Speaker 3 They're going to try to make their kids do them. And then you can feel good about it.
You can say, now you know how I felt. That's exactly right.

Speaker 3 It's a wonderful circle of life that we all go through.

Speaker 2 I tell them all the time, like, I cannot wait until you have your first home. I'm going to walk in here and I'm going to mess it up on purpose.
Believe me, I will have a grandma I told you so ritual.

Speaker 2 Yes, for sure. Yes.

Speaker 2 Michael, I love your work. I think it's so important.
And Pod Squad, if you could call in 747-200-5307. Yeah, call that number.
Tell us your rituals. We're going to make more.

Speaker 2 We're going to add more meaning to our beautiful lives and we're going to just make sure that we're humaning while we're adulting.

Speaker 2 What if we get millions of people who listen to our podcast clinking their forks right before they start eating? What if we could just find like a collective ritual that starts?

Speaker 3 The silverware industry will be

Speaker 3 thrilled.

Speaker 2 That's a co-worker. The squad is now brought to you by

Speaker 2 Lord Hell Make Silverware. Yeah, Michael, thank you so much for this.
Thank you all. We're going to make sure everybody gets your book and it's beautiful work you're doing.
Yeah. Thank you, Pod Squad.

Speaker 2 Great to chat. Thank you.
See you next time.

Speaker 2 If this podcast means something to you, it would mean so much to us if you'd be willing to take 30 seconds to do these three things. First, can you please follow or subscribe to We Can Do Hard Things?

Speaker 2 Following the pod helps you because you'll never miss an episode and it helps us because you'll never miss an episode.

Speaker 2 To do this, just go to the We Can Do Hard Things show page on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and then just tap the plus sign in the upper right-hand corner or click on follow.

Speaker 2 This is the most important thing for the pod. While you're there, if you'd be willing to give us a five-star rating and review and share an episode you loved with a friend, we would be so grateful.

Speaker 2 We appreciate you very much.

Speaker 2 We Can Do Hard Things is created and hosted by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, and Amanda Doyle in partnership with Odyssey.

Speaker 2 Our executive producer is Jenna Wise-Berman, and the show is produced by Lauren Lograsso, Allison Schott, and Bill Schultz.