Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - How Turning Habits Into Rituals Can Help You At Home, At Work, And When You’re Anxious | Michael Norton

Episode Date: August 5, 2024

A Harvard professor on how to elevate everyday activities in order to lift your mood, improve your relationships and rise to new challenges.Michael Norton is the Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He has studied human behavior as it relates to love and inequality, time and money, and happiness and grief. He is the author of The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions. In this episode we talk about: The difference between habits and ritualsHow rituals impact various spheres of life, including creativity, grief and politics - and how not all rituals are beneficial how to transform your everyday activities into rituals and how they can inject meaning into your life and give a boost to your relationshipsHow to introduce rituals into your workplace without falling back on cliché (like trust falls)Related Episodes:What Science Says About Money and Happiness | Elizabeth Dunn — Ten Percent Happier How to Benefit From Religion, Even as a Nonbeliever | David DeSteno — Ten Percent HappierHow to Change Your Habits | Katy Milkman — Ten Percent Happier   Sign up for Dan’s weekly newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/michael-norton/Additional Resources:Download the Ten Percent Happier app today: https://10percenthappier.app.link/installSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and ad free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey gang, today we're going to talk about something that research shows can help you perform better at work, get along better with your romantic partner, more easily form healthy habits and calm you down when you're anxious. What is this that I'm talking about? It's rituals. To the extent that I ever really thought about it,

I've personally never been a huge fan of rituals. Many of the rituals I observed in religious settings left me cold personally. And I should say that my guest today, the Harvard researcher Michael Norton, actually had similar reservations. But Michael's work shows that all of us should actually be taking

rituals seriously. Michael is a professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School and his new book is called The Ritual Effect. We talk about the difference between habits and rituals, how rituals, as I mentioned earlier, can actually help us in forming healthy habits, the impact of group rituals, the perils of having a weak handshake, how to introduce rituals into your workplace without falling back on annoying cliches like trust falls, how to transform your everyday activities into rituals, how rituals can inject meaning and a little bit of magic into your life, how to infuse rituals

into your relationships, and how rituals can be used maliciously. We'll get started with Michael Norton right after this. But first some BSP. As you've heard me say before, the hardest part of personal growth, self-improvement, spiritual development, whatever you want to call it, the hardest part is forgetting. You listen to a great podcast, you read a great book, you go to a great talk, whatever it is, and the message is electrifying. But then you get sucked back into your daily routines, your habitual patterns, and you

forget. So this is the problem for which I have designed my new newsletter, which we just started a few months ago, and we're just really hitting our stride. So I'd love it if you sign up. Every week I list one quote that I'm pondering right now, and then I give you two of the top takeaways from the podcast this week. It's really for both me and for you to get these messages into our molecules.

I'm just kind of mainlining the practical aspects of the episodes from the week and listing it out for you. And then I also list three cultural recommendations, books, movies, TV shows that I'm into right now. You can sign up. It's free. It's at danharris.com.

That's my new website, danharris.com. Sign up for the newsletter. Also, I want to tell you about a course that we're highlighting over on the 10% Happier app. It's called Healthy Habits. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonigal and the meditation teacher Alexis Santos. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist, Kelly McGonigal, and the meditation teacher, Alexis Santos. It's great stuff. To access it, just download the 10% Happier app wherever you get your apps, or by visiting 10% dot com. That's one word all spelled out.

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["Sapiens"] Hello, this is Alice Levine, host of the chart-topping Wondry podcast, The Price of Paradise, the true story of an island dream that turned into a living nightmare. And we have a brand new episode for you, which is out now, because since we released the series, we've had so many people asking questions, wanting us to pull back the curtain on the show, wanting to know the lowdown on Teodoro's affair, the kidnapping, and how on earth there were two Phil Gaskins. In this episode, we answer all of those and more with two people who experience the story unfolding first hand. Listen to The Price of Paradise Exposed, and if you haven't yet listened to the full series, you can find all seven episodes on Wondry Plus or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Michael Norton, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Dan. It's a pleasure. Let me start with some definitions. What is a ritual? Can I ask you a question? No, I'll ask all the questions here. So silly, silly question, but in the morning, if you're getting ready or at night, if you're getting ready for bed, do you brush your teeth first and then

shower or do you shower and then brush your teeth? Brush my teeth first. And how would you feel if I asked you tomorrow morning to flip the order? So you got to wait to brush your teeth and take a shower before that. I would just feel a little janky, a little off. A little off. Yeah. So I think about half of people, first off, half of people brush first and half of people shower first, and then it's just kind of weird and funny.

But also half of people, if I say flip the order, they say, sure, couldn't care less. And half of people are like you, where they say, oh, I'm going to take people shower first, and then it's just kind of weird and funny. But also half of people, if I say flip the order, they say, sure, couldn't care less. And half of people are like you, where they say, janky, off, weird, wouldn't feel ready to start the day. And for me, that's a bit the difference between a habit and a ritual. Habits are kind of tasks that we need to get done. Like brushing our teeth is good for us, so we should always brush our teeth. But as soon as you start to care about how you're doing things, you know, I like to do this and then

this and then my coffee and then I read this and then I talk to my kids and then I go to work. The how starts to become a little bit more of a ritual because it's the same actions, but there's more meaning, there's more emotion. When we do it the way we like, we feel good. And if we can't do it the way we like, we feel off or bad. They enrich these really boring actions with something a little bit more. Let me read a quote from you back to you and then maybe you can expand on it on the other side. Good habits automate us, helping us get things done. Rituals animate us, enhancing and enchanting our lives with

something more. The intrinsically emotional nature of rituals gives them their animating power. So I do research actually on helping people to have better habits. I think we all should have good habits. I wish I had better habits myself. But if you think of a life of perfect habits, so imagine starting today, all of your habits were completely perfect for the next 30 or 40 years. At the end of that time, I think you'd feel, you'd be very, very healthy, there's no doubt,

but you might feel like your life was missing a little something if you did the exact same thing every single day. You know, we have this phrase going through the motions, which is a very negative phrase because it implies you're doing the same thing kind of in a rote way and there's nothing more in it. For me, rituals are one of the ways that kind of kick us out of the mundane automated life that we get stuck in. And they remind us to have a wider range of emotions, positive emotions, joy,

happiness, also negative emotions, sometimes like sadness, but they enrich our lives. So you, if I understand it correctly, after all these years of studying habits, were reasonably skeptical about rituals. Why? And what changed? scientific thing where you can, you know, you want to have more steps every day and so you go from 9,000 steps to 10,000 steps and we can measure that change very very carefully. Rituals when I started studying them felt a little bit more warm and fuzzy, a little bit more nebulous, a little bit more how would we possibly study these things when they are so emotional and filled with such meaning. And I think over time I came came to see that they are, first off, easy to study because we can really measure what role they play in our lives, but also that they're another side of life that I think is really important.

I think if we're always helping people to optimize on metrics, that's really, really good. But life isn't only about optimizing on metrics. It's also about all of the other things, the emotions and the connections we have with other people as well. You use this term emo diversity. Can you explain what that means? This was a project that we did a few years ago.

The idea was, this is how nerdy we are. We thought about biodiversity because if you have an island, you measure the number of species and their relative abundance. So like too many predators is bad, not enough prey is bad. That's how you figure out if the ecosystem is doing well. And we thought of applying the exact same idea but to the mind and using emotions actually. So if you think about the relative abundance of the emotions you have, you can have joy, fear, sadness, anger, the whole range of emotions. The idea was that maybe there's something about that

mix, that variation, that separately predicts whether we feel like we're having a good life. For sure it's good to be happy. We all want to have happy moments in every day, but happiness isn't the only thing that makes us feel my life is rich, my life is interesting, my life has meaning. We thought of this emo diversity as a way of capturing all of the variation in our lives that really kind of makes us human in the end. And what's the connection between ritual and emo diversity?

This does sound like they opened up for like Blink 182 in the early aughts. I will say the regret that we feel over the name of this term is very, very high. Very, very high, and now we're stuck with it because yeah, the emo band thing is, although emo bands in a way, they did kind of prompt

a wide range of emotions, I guess, so maybe there's some sort of a link. Mostly self-pity from what I can hear from the emo music I have consumed. Desperate sadness, maybe, I think. Yeah. We get emotions in many, many different ways in life. I mean, we like to have emotions.

We go to scary movies. We go to sad movies to be frightened. We go on roller coasters. We think about how we enrich our emotional lives. But rituals are one of the things that humans consistently turn to across so many domains of life. We use rituals for weddings and we use them at funerals. We use them sometimes to amp ourselves up and we use them to calm ourselves down. So they're really this very general tool is what we realized over the years where when

we're looking for a specific emotion, we can go see a horror movie or sometimes what we do is we turn to a ritual to try to provoke these different emotions. I Realize I kind of lost the plot for a second because you were describing why you were skeptical, but I didn't let you explain What changed your mind? I was so excited to talk about emo diversity and make fun of you I forgot to let you describe what changed your mind about rituals My friends often would rather make fun of me than ask questions too. So I feel, I feel a bond. We're off to a great start.

So I was studying rituals for a few years, but really from, um, I'd say an outsider perspective, you know, like, uh, I'm a Harvard scientist and I am studying these things that people do, but at a bit of a remove until my wife and I had our daughter. So if you've ever had a child, what happens is they give you a baby and then they say, take it home and take care of it for like 50 years. It's pretty stressful.

Very little guidance on what to do. Very stressful. You know, a big moment in your life. And we did all kinds of things and made all kinds of mistakes. But one of the things that we did was new parents, the only thing they talk about is sleep. Is the baby sleeping? Are you sleeping?

How's the sleep? How's the naps? And what I realized we had started to do without thinking of it, was creating a pretty elaborate sleep ritual for our daughter. And when you ask parents to think about how they help their kids get to sleep, almost all parents will give you a very long sequence of events that had to happen in a very specific order each and every night. Like these two books, and then we had to sing this song,

and then we did a swaddle, and then we sang these other two songs, and it was really important that these three stuffed animals were there as well. And if we did it wrong, we sometimes would just start over to make sure that the baby could sleep. My wife and I did the exact same thing with books and stuffed animals and songs. And I really, I mean, it almost hit me. Oh my gosh, something very stressful happened in my life. And I just instinctively turned to ritual to try to help myself out. We didn't say, Hey, let's sit down and write out a sleep ritual for the baby.

That's not usually how it happens. It's kind of when we're faced with something in life, we start to bring them on board. I realized in the end, by the way, that it's not clear that it helped the baby to sleep at all, but it definitely made us, I think, feel some kind of semblance of control over this completely chaotic thing in our lives. Yes. Yeah.

So ritual can be like a buffer, even if it may seem ridiculous, it can be a buffer against the entropy of the world. Completely. You know, we see with rain dances, for example, which emerge in different cultures over time, again and again. And you could think rain dances, we're pretty sure that movement on the ground doesn't cause it to rain. So a skeptic would say, well, that that's a waste of time. That's not actually going to help the problem. However, when you look at rain dances, what happens is in times of drought, the social fabric starts to fray. I start looking out for my family and nobody else. So the community starts to erode.

And what rain dances do is they bring groups together to celebrate their shared history, to celebrate the fact that they've gone through this before and survived. And so it's true. The rain dance isn't doing the thing maybe that is intended to do, but it's serving an incredibly important other role in helping people and helping societies thrive, just like our daughter wasn't sleeping any better, but it actually was serving the purpose of helping us. That's really interesting.

We're going to get to there. There's a lot to say about ritual as it pertains to many, many things, including both uniting and dividing people. But let's stay on a higher level for a second. Preparing for this interview, I realized that in my 20s and 30s, I had had thoughts about ritual

because I was starting to attend weddings. I didn't get married until I was in my late 30s, but I was starting to attend other people's weddings and I was also, I had been forced into covering faith and spirituality by my mentor at ABC News as Big Anchorman and Peter Jennings and so I was finding myself in houses of worship and watching these elaborate rituals, they left me completely cold. So I had this non-academic, just totally freelance cynicism about ritual. But as I've gotten older, and I don't know if it's a function of age or it's a function of education, being educated by life, I can see the power of ritual to some extent.

Does any of this land for you? Completely. I mean, I think my mother would say exactly the same thing about me that you that you just said about yourself, which is, sometimes when we're younger, we think we've got all the answers, or they're simple answers to things. And the older you get, the more you realize, we really don't have control over very much in the end in our lives, including things like what is my purpose for being on earth?

We don't have great answers for that. And so sometimes people turn to things like rituals to help them have a sense of control amidst everything that's happening and try to get at some deeper connections and deeper meaning. We have other ways of doing it as well, but again and again, we see rituals as being one of the components that we all turn to. And again and again, we see rituals as being one of the components that we all turn to. Right. In cultures that are separated by geography and chronology, this is a thing that humans do. It is. So if you think about how we determine if a group had a culture, one of the ways we determine it is did they bury their dead in a ceremonial fashion or not? So dinosaurs, it's just bones all over the place.

They didn't have any funerals because they were just dinosaurs. Humans at some point start to have graves with sacred objects around the person with their finest clothes on. That means we know that they had a funeral for that person and they had a culture. They valued each other as individuals and took care of each other. Even after they were gone, it is actually one of our earliest signals to even evaluate if a group of humans had culture is were they practicing rituals or not so the book is called the ritual effect but that expression has

some meaning what is that meaning for me if I think about the ways in which we try to solve the problems in our lives, which could be finding meaning at work, could be feeling closer to our spouse, it could be making family dinners not so awkward, or getting through the holidays with our families, all of these different tasks we have in life, we see that people use ritual. It's one of the things that we turn to to try to say, can it help me here?

Can it help me here? Can it help me here? And they do seem to have, when we do the research, an effect on us. We turn to them for good reason. And very often, the reason we turn to them for turns out to help us very much. We see, for example, that rituals at work actually help us see our work as more meaningful. They have a causal effect sometimes on how we think and feel.

And that means that they're kind of a domain general tool that we can use to say, in this domain, I'd like to feel calmer and people will try out rituals. In this domain, I'd like to feel more excited and they'll try out rituals as well. So the breadth of it really is what we thought of as the ritual effect.

rituals as well. So the breadth of it really is what we thought of as the ritual effect. So let's talk a little bit about how we can use rituals as tools in various aspects of our lives. You talk about ritual as something you can deploy in romantic relationships. How would that work? We see if you ever get married, it's another big event in life, like bringing a kid home. When you get married, most cultures have something. Most faiths have something, a wedding of some kind. It could be a day, it could be five days, you know, very variable from culture to culture. But most have something where they say, these two people have decided to join. Let's have a ceremony of some kind.

If you've ever been married, though, you know that once the wedding is over, you're still with the person for decades. So the question is, what do couples do? You don't have a wedding every day. You do celebrate your anniversary often once a year, but what about all the other days in between? What do we do to show our spouse that we care about them? And we do think, you know, we take out the trash and kinds of nice things. But when we ask couples, Hey, is there anything special that the two of you do

that's kind of unique to you that you make sure to do every so often, maybe every day, every week, every month, two thirds to three quarters of couples say, Yeah, actually, we do have something like that. One of my favorite ones, whatever reason is that a couple said every time before we eat, we clink our silverware together. whatever reason is that a couple said every time before we eat, we clink our silverware together. And then they eat their meal, the tiniest little, nothing's more boring than a fork, I don't think. But they turned this little action into a moment of connection before they actually start eating. And they did it every day for years before every meal. And they always knew they were going to do it. So these tiny rituals, not the

wedding huge thing with the flowers and everything, but these little rituals are often what we use and what couples use to try to signify we're in this together. Because how do I know that you're committed to me? You can say things and you can sign papers, but there's also this feeling of, oh, we're doing our little fork clinking thing that we've done for a decade. And you know what? We're going to keep doing this for the next decade as well. Tiny action, but really a strong signal of our commitment. You spend a lot of time on this issue in the book, like how to have rituals in your relationships, and you even talk about the four lessons of rituals in relationship. Let's take them one at one by one. The first is recommitment.

If we think about this idea of how do we know that we're in it for the long term? There is this sense of, you know, we get married, we move in together. We might have kids together. These are all signals that were in it for the long term, but we also need these daily practices with each other. Another couple said every night before bed, we always kiss three times. For 22 years, we've kissed exactly three times. What are they doing there? All couples kiss, so it's not about kissing. It's about the specific way that they've decided to do it. Shows every time they do it, you know what, I'm still

in this. And by the way, when couples stop doing their ritual, it can be a really bad sign. If one person says, I don't feel like kissing three times tonight, it's a signal again that something might be wrong in the relationship. The second lesson of rituals in relationship is exclusivity. This is huge. So even couples who say, you know, we have kind of a little thing, but it's not a huge deal. The question that I'll ask is, well, how would you feel if you broke up and your partner reuse that with their next significant other? And the level of outrage that people feel is incredibly, incredibly high. Your ex is allowed to date other people. They can even get married and have children. You might not like it, but they're allowed to do that. They are not allowed to reuse for clinking with the next person.

It is such like a stab in the back. That's what the words people use is a stab in the back. I could never forgive him for reusing that and it shows again, it's just forks. But when we imbue it with all of this meaning, it really, really comes to mean something much more. The third lesson is magic. We do think about, to our earlier conversation about habits kind of going through the motions every minute of every day. There are couples who will say everything is like that. You know, we're just, we've got kids, we both work. All we're doing is just trying to keep up

with the chaos and checking stuff off the list. And we don't have time to do a three-hour date night every Friday night or every night or whatever it might be. It's just not in the cards for us. And we see again that these little tiny actions can spark a little bit of magic every day without taking nine hours out of your day to reconnect. But it's the small things sometimes that really help us reconnect and have a little reminder of our past reminder of who we are and a little bit more of the magic that we might've felt the day of the wedding. We can get a little bit more of it back, even with our forks. Yeah.

I'm thinking of kind of think of like the rituals that I have with my wife. We like to surprise each other, like get each other's attention around the house We both work from home So we're around each other a lot like to get each other's attention like I might see her walking Outside and I'll bang on the window and give her the middle finger And see today I was stretching and she was outside and she banged on the window and was if she was tapping on the window with two middle fingers simultaneously. Another another couple that's like grounds for divorce. Right. And for you, it's the side of love for us. That's the magic.

All right. The fourth lesson is mutual agreement. This is one of the saddest findings actually in all of the research that we did. So you can think even of if we ask you and your wife separately, is there anything that the two of you do that's unique to you? You know, you make sure to do it every so often and it's very special. And imagine you just told me, absolutely, we do this really cute thing where to get each other's attention, we give each other the middle finger. We've been doing it for years. It's funny. It means a lot to us.

And then we asked your wife and she said, no, we don't have anything. That happens, unfortunately, in couples. If we interview the people separately, most couples agree. So most couples, both people say, yes, we have one. Some couples, they agree. They both say we don't have anything like that. But the sad, to me, the sad couples are the ones where one person says, Oh my God, we kiss three times every night and it's magical.

And the other person says, I don't know what you're talking about. And those couples, luckily they're not less happy, but they're no happier than couples where both people say we don't have anything like that. Meaning both of us have to agree that this is special for us in order to have the benefits on lock. Right. Let's talk about how we can use ritual and other aspects of life. The other the other place you talk about is work.

I want to give you credit because you acknowledge that as soon as you start talking about rituals at work, we go right to like some of the more cringey scenes from the office or being forced to do trust falls, et cetera, et cetera. So rituals can be powerful at work. I want to know how, and then how do we avoid Michael from the office forcing us to do uncomfortable things? It is funny if I go into a company and just mention these concepts at all. Employees worst nightmare is a manager who every weekend sees some Ted talk or listens to a podcast and comes in Monday morning and says, now we're going to do everything like just their worst nightmare, including now we have this new thing that we're going to do at the beginning of every meeting. Everybody has to do it. Let's get going. The strength of the collective eye roll. You can almost hear it. It's so powerful about what employees are thinking. And in fact, when we ask employees, actually the same question that we ask couples, but on teams, is there something that your team does that's special to you?

That's unique that you make sure to do every so often. Many, many teams say, yes, we do have something and many say no. But the teams that say, yes, they usually don't say, yeah, every morning our manager makes us do this thing. They say, well, actually we came up with something ourselves that was meaningful to us. So the top down ones sometimes have the eye rolling the bottom up ones that come from employees themselves.

Those are often the ones that they say. This is special. This is unique. This really is what makes us a team. And what kind of impact does it have when there are rituals on a team at work? I'll give you an example. It's very mundane, but I think telling so one team said, yeah, we do have something like that.

And they described it and they said, one day of the week, each of us is responsible for lunch. So on Monday, I buy lunch for everyone on the team. And then on Tuesday, someone else buys lunch for everyone on the team. And we do it every week. And we've done it that way for years. It's just lunch. I mean, everybody's going to eat food, right? So they're, they're not adding anything to the day. They're just changing the way in which they do it. And what they're doing is one day of the week, I take care of the team. And every other day of the week, the team takes care of me. It's just sandwiches, but it changes completely the meaning of what lunch is. And when we ask teams, do you have something like that or not?

Teams that say, yes, we do actually have something like that. Not only do they see the thing they do as meaningful, meaning lunch is more meaningful, but we also see that they report that they see their work as more meaningful, that there's some transfer from the meaning that we create in our group to the meaning that we then ascribe to the work that we're doing. Is there any evidence to show that teams

who have this actually perform better? I know psychological safety, which is the freedom that everybody on the team feels to speak up no matter where they are in the hierarchy has been demonstrated to lead to higher performing teams. Is there anything around ritual that would indicate that it has a similar effect? complicated. So we see very strong effects where we get these feelings of meaning and feelings of closeness. And then often it depends on the type of work that's being done, the extent to which that meaning then transfers on to what we're doing, and makes us more productive or more creative, or whatever other value the firm is looking for. So we know it boosts meaning, but it's hard to tie that directly to like a boost in productivity per se. Exactly. And you know, I mean, sometimes boosts in productivity are counterproductive because people double down on the wrong kinds of tasks and things like that.

So sometimes it really depends, I think, what the metric is that the company is interested in. Is it creativity? Is it smoother communication? What are they really looking for among their teams? And then we can try to target, maybe we can design rituals around this element rather than this element. Well, you said you can design rituals. Does that mean, but I thought you don't want them to come, you want them to be organic. We give, it's very fun actually, we give teams just time to come up with their own. So you can say, Hey, think about coming up with a little thing that you can do at lunch or at the start of a meeting or whatever, at the start of a zoom meeting

as well, and we say things like, what are the values on the team? What are the inside jokes on the team? What are the things that you do differently from other teams? And then ask them to build them into a ritual. And it's actually kind of fun because they, they know about the team, but they haven't observed it and really appreciated the ways in which the team is unique. So we give them the space to come up with their own. So it's top down in the sense that we're saying, can you do this this morning?

But it's very bottom up in terms of how they come up with the instantiation. Got it. Got it. saying, can you do this this morning? But it's very bottom up in terms of how they come up with the instantiation. Got it. Got it. So that might be a tip for managers. If anybody's running a team, it's good to know that rituals can have a healthy impact, but you don't want to impose it. What you can do is say to teams, Hey, you might want to come up with your own

rituals completely and less eye rolling for sure. I was just thinking about like my little team that works on this podcast and some related stuff. I don't know if this counts as a ritual but there's this if you've ever seen that movie up well you have a young daughter who almost certainly have seen it you're nodding your head you know there's the the bad guy has a has like a whole fleet of dogs that chase the good guys and occasionally the dogs will get distracted by a squirrel and they'll yell squirrel and so on our team we've because I tend to get distracted by squirrels a lot we've used that as a shorthand for like when I'm leading us down a rabbit hole does that count as a kind of like a verbal tick that falls into the ritual department for sure And if you think about what is happening when squirrel is shouted, it means that you're someone who is able to take feedback that you're headed down an unproductive path and hear it and change paths,

which means it's showing like an important value on the team, which is we can call each other out and try to improve things on the fly. And not all teams have that kind of dynamic for sure. When you ask teams about how they interact, even just, are we wasting time in this meeting or not? Many teams say, yeah, once we are, there's no way to get out of it. We're just stuck in the meeting until it ends. I can't tell the boss.

Exactly. If I said squirrel to this guy, right. It would never go well. I have a lab group here and our number one value is just creativity. We just want people to come up with ideas about humans. That's really the whole task. And the way that we do that is we'll have, for example, a day where we, it's called random ideas day. And you have to bring in a random idea about humans and you're not allowed to study it later.

You have to throw it away. And the idea is that we're just saying ideas for their own sake are good. And it's a ritual that we do to try to show, no, we really mean actually just come up with ideas as a habit of mind, whether they're good or not is completely irrelevant. We're going to love you for coming up with the ideas. So it sounds like the foundational move if you're going to come up with a ritual that doesn't arise organically is to figure out what your values are? For sure. I think we often see that something even on the team that did lunch for each other, they were trying to say we're a team that really cares about each other's well-being. Not just we care about our performance bonus or we care about something else,

we might care about those too, but this practice that we do reflects this deep value that we have. There was a team when the pandemic happened who had to switch to Zoom, they'd been in person and had to switch to Zoom, who started at the beginning of every Zoom meeting, everyone would take a second and click the emoji that reflected how they were feeling. And what you got on your screen was an instant kind of average how the group is doing. And also you could see, I should follow up with that person. You know, he seems to be struggling or she seems to be struggling. What was so interesting is they'd never done anything like that when they were meeting

face to face. So they, it wasn't that they took something that had been there and imported it into virtual. It was actually that the technology allowed them to develop a new ritual, but it was the same impulse, right? Which is we care a lot about each other's wellbeing. We're going to do these kinds of check-ins, not in a, everyone has to take 10 minutes and tell us how they're doing kind of way,

because that can feel invasive. But a very quick, we're going to start every single thing we do with just checking in on how everyone's doing. So simple, so quick, but you see the value that they're expressing when they do that. So if I'm the leader of a team, no matter how small, and I assume this can probably go for a family too, you know, we're all leaders in one sphere or another. If I want to institute some sort of check-in at the top of meetings, the move would be to say to the group, hey, I want to do this, but let's come up with the mechanism together rather than saying we're going to do red, yellow, green, which is a move that I've seen used in some groups, like where everybody's going to have to say whether they're red or yellow or green based on their mood. Let's come up

with something together. Exactly. And that's when we see number one, it's fun. Number two, it's more creative. And number three, of course, we worked on it ourselves. So we've got more ownership over the idea. Families are a bit different because parents are allowed to mandate the rituals for the kids, at least when the kids are very little. Then later it has to be more collaborative as we figure out once everybody's older, how we're going to handle dinner and things like that. But the central point, you just said how we're going to handle dinner.

And we were talking earlier about how you're going to handle lunch is basically you're taking the everyday and infusing it with meaning if not magic. I'm sure it would be great to meditate for four hours every day. I bet that would be a ritual that has a lot of health benefits. I mean I don't have the data but I could just imagine that's a good thing to do but we don't have four extra hours every day to meditate. That's just not how life works. And I do think one of the nice things about some of these rituals is they're not adding 19 more things to the day to have to get done.

They're taking, as you said, the things that are already there that have gotten a little mundane, a little automatic and imbuing them with a little bit more emotion, a little bit more meaning. And it's kind of free, you know, it's, it's sitting there waiting for us. We just have to decide how to unlock it. Coming up, Michael Norton talks about how to boost your performance with rituals. We talk about some more interesting rituals in various spheres of human endeavor, including creativity, grief, and politics. And we talk about the primal impact of rituals. I'm Mike Bubbins.

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James, podcasting from his study, And you have to say that's magnificent. Hello, I'm Rob Brydon. When I looked out at the podcast landscape, I thought to myself, you know, there just aren't enough podcasts. And so I launched Bryden And, where I talk to a series of interesting creative types. We're now on to our fourth series. And I've been speaking to, amongst others, Ruth Jones, Tidy, Chris McCausland, Aisling B, Richard Ayoade, and Ewan Rayon. And that's just a few. We tend to chat for about 45 minutes to an hour, never longer. It's a terrific conversation every time. Reminiscence where appropriate and in exchange of anecdotes.

I do like an anecdote. So do join me, Rob Brydon, and listen to Brydon and on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad free on Wondery Plus by subscribing in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Before we get back to the show, just a reminder about the Healthy Habits course over on the 10% Happier app taught by Kelly McGonigal and Alexis Santos. To access it, just download the 10% happier app

wherever you get your apps. You also write about how rituals can help us boost our performance and reduce anxiety, like when we have to go give a big speech or we've got anything that we need to do that is public or private, but feels stakesy. Can you talk a little bit more about that? So a great way to waste a morning or afternoon

or day of your life is to type in the name of any athlete or celebrity, followed by the word ritual and search. And you will get not all of them have rituals, or at least not reported so far, but the range of rituals that very elite performers, singers, musicians, athletes, whoever it might be, is really pretty astonishing. One of my favorites actually show this ritual when I give a talk. I show the person's ritual. It's about wiping your forehead and adjusting things and bouncing.

One of the steps is picking your wedgie. And I ask people, who is this? And about half the audience says, oh, that's Nadal. They recognize it. They can see, oh yeah, I've seen him do that really elaborate before every serve that he does, it takes quite some time for him to do. And we allow folks like that, Serena Williams as well. We allow them these unusual rituals because we allow folks like that, Serena Williams as well, we allow them these unusual

rituals because we understand the stress and pressure that they're under. It's as though we implicitly say, if you're going to do something really, really hard, it's completely fine to do something extremely unusual before you do it. For ourselves, we don't quite have the same leeway. So I can't stand up before I start teaching and do a very elaborate adjusting and wiping and picking my wedgie kind of thing before I start because I'm not playing at the French Open. But what we do instead is we often do them in private. People will say, you know what, before big presentation, I close the door to my office and I do this. Or if you don't have an office, people say, you know what I do is a few minutes before I go into the bathroom, I check

under the stalls to make sure nobody's there. And then I talk to myself in the mirror to get myself ready to go. So it's really common actually that people have developed something, not everyone, but many, many people something that they do before they need to do something stressful to try to get themselves in a better place. Another work ritual you write about is Victor Hugo. Can you tell us about that? Business is the put anybody's name followed by ritual and waste an entire day.

So Victor Hugo, if anyone is a writer or has ever tried writing, of course, writer's block is a very common phrase. It can be very hard to get going and very hard to set a goal and very hard to stick to the goal because there's always other interesting things to do. So what he would do is every morning he would take off all of his clothes, all of his clothes, so he's naked, give them to his valet and tell his valet to hide them until he had met his writing goal for the day. And it's a fantastic commitment device because it's very hard to go out and do something

in town if you don't have any clothes. And so you see these eccentric geniuses in a sense, turning to very unusual rituals in order to somehow get themselves in the place where they can create amazing art, amazing performances, amazing, whatever it might be. Let's keep going with rituals and various spheres of life. You dedicate a significant amount of time to ritual and grief. Can you say a little bit more about that? In the same way that if we look at married couples and we say there was a wedding and then you have these small daily forklinking or kissing three times kind of rituals, it's

not so different with grief. So when you lose somebody that you love, again, all faiths and most cultures have something like a funeral. It could be one day, three days, five days a month. It varies widely from culture to culture. It could be everyone wears black. It could be everybody wears white. Very, very variable. But what's common is every culture says, you know what, when we lose somebody, we should gather together and get social support and try to start the grieving process, but just like a wedding, you know, grief doesn't end. I wish it did, but it doesn't end when the funeral ends. Grief takes, as everybody knows, a very, very long time.

And so the question is, well, what do we do the day after the funeral or the month after the funeral? What do people turn to? And of course, they turn to friends for social support. They turn to mental health professionals. Many, many things we should, of course, do when we're grieving. But when we ask people, hey, think of somebody you love that passed away. What did you do? They will say, yeah, there was a funeral and it was very helpful. And then they'll say, but what I did was, and then they have these very specific idiosyncratic stories about what they did to honor the person who was gone. And one

woman who stands out, she just wrote, I washed his car every weekend the way he used to do. It's like their whole story is in that tiny little ritual. Obviously he had a car that he loved. She lost him. She was grieving. She decided to honor him by washing the car once a week, exactly the way that he had. Now there's no ancient text that says wash a car every week. Cars are relatively new for one thing. So she came up with it entirely on her own. And people often tell us, you know, I do this thing.

I never told anyone because I was worried they would think that I was relatively new for one thing. So she came up with it entirely on her own. And people often tell us, you know, I do this thing. I never told anyone because I was worried they would think that I was grieving too much or that I hadn't gotten over it. But they'll say, you know, on my commute, I listen to my mom's favorite song every morning and cried as part of kind of helping them with the grieving process. And I do think, again, there we see people turning to these kinds of rituals, not the big funeral, the big wedding kind of rituals, but the smaller private ones to help us with the day-to-day

of trying to help us cope with our grief. Have you guys done any work or research into what kind of impact ritual can have in grieving people? One of the things that we see pretty clearly. So we have this view of kind of the phases of grief, the stages of grief that there are five. And we kind of pass through them, you know, anger is one acceptance bargaining. There's these different phases that are helpful to think about, but that's not how grief works. Really.

We don't go. I wish it were linear also where we could just say this phase for a week, this phase for a week, and then I'm almost over it, but it's not really what happens and the thing that really takes the longest to develop is acceptance of the loss. We can get over the pain of the loss. You know, there's aspects of loss that we can kind of start to recuperate from, but acceptance often it just increases forever.

There's no peak of acceptance. You're still kind of accepting the fact that you lost this person 20 years ago. You're never really going to completely accept it. And that's when we see rituals playing the most important role, because if acceptance takes years and years, what are we putting in place to support that years and years of grief? When we go back to work on Monday, people say, I'm sorry you lost your mom. And then on Tuesday, they say, get back to work.

The world doesn't help us grieve necessarily in the way that we might need help. And so these small rituals that we come up with, I think do play these important roles in the longer process of grief. You also talk about rituals, the role of ritual in politics. What have you learned there? It is extraordinary. The extent to which rituals can unite us and also simultaneously divide us. When we think of even teams at work, you know, we talked about how teams with

rituals come to care about the ritual, care about each other. It's a strong signal that we are close. The problem with rituals is sometimes it's not just that we say that my ritual is good or our ritual is good, but that our ritual is right. It's a fine line, but it's an important one because if I think my ritual is good, you can do whatever you want and doesn't bother me at all. But if I think my ritual is right, well, now you're doing it wrong and now maybe something

needs to be done to correct you. And even, I mean, as a more trivial example, I teach a college freshman class and when they go home for Thanksgiving, sometimes they've never gone to somebody else's Thanksgiving. They can't travel all the way home, so they go with a friend to their Thanksgiving. And when they come back, they say, they did it entirely wrong. And I say, what do you mean? Or people would go to their significant others for the first time.

They say, I couldn't believe how these people were doing whatever holiday it might've been, you know, they ate at the wrong time. They had the wrong pie. You see this kind of, you weren't thinking of it, but the way that we do Thanksgiving is the correct way. And the way anybody else does it is wrong. And that is the tension is that actually, our way is not just the way that we like, but our way is the right way, which means that your way is the wrong way. And then we have conflict and it happens at Thanksgiving but of course you can see it happening at a cultural level as well which is the way that we do things whether it's our politics whether it's

our faith other aspects of life if our way is right then we need to start thinking about the fact that your way is wrong how can rituals bond us but what's the mechanism we do very to, amusing experiments in our laboratory. So we'll bring in groups of strangers who've never met each other and we'll put them in groups of three or five or something like that. And we'll have them do rituals together that we've made up, stomping and clapping and shouting things, but they do them in unison. We'll even do things like the group will do it either all staring at each other in a circle so they're really feeling it together or do the same actions but they're facing away from each other.

What we see is when groups do these kinds of rituals afterward we say how do you feel about your group. The groups that do these really communal kinds of rituals again they didn't know each other before they've never done this ritual before. We can show that they actually start to see the group as more meaningful that the cause of the sometimes silly rituals actually have this effect where changes the way we start to feel about each other. group, this is many years ago. So when people come to the laboratory, it's as fun as it sounds. It's usually extremely boring to do these experiments that we like people to do. But this group at the end, they asked the experimenter, hey, is it okay if we get each other's email addresses because we'd like to keep in touch. Again, randomly assigned to strangers who just happen to do this type of ritual. So the bonds can be very real. Are they as strong as family bonds?

No, of course not. It's not to that level. But even with the smallest dose, sometimes we already start to see some of these benefits at the group level. Do we know what's happening at the level of the brain? We have seen, actually, so we've done research on the kind of dividing versus uniting us. And one of the things that we see is when you're used to performing a ritual your way,

and you see someone else performing it differently, not only do you trust, we can ask you how much do you trust that person, and you say, I don't trust them as much. Again, even though all they're doing differently is this ritual, but we can actually monitor your brain. And one of the things that happens when we see somebody engaged in a ritual That's different from ours regions of the brain that are associated with punishment are

More likely to come online meaning that I'm thinking now It's not that I'm gonna run over and punch anybody like that But at a very basic level as soon as I start to see you clapping instead of stomping a part of me is getting ready To say you're wrong and you need to do it differently. But when it's going well, is there some aspect, I don't even know, I've heard this word before, I don't even really know what it means, but is there any aspect of like co-regulation where our nervous systems are, you know, in sync in some way if we're stomping and clapping at the same time?

There is research actually on straight up synchrony, which is just you have people engage in the same action at the same time, and you do see in fact, these kinds of physiological effects. In addition to liking people more and trusting them more, you do see in fact that you get this visceral reaction to say, I'm feeling really good about this person again, only because we happen to be clapping and stomping at the exact same You get this visceral reaction to say, I'm feeling really good about this person. Again, only because we happen to be clapping and stomping at the exact same time. What is it about rhythm that's so powerful? I've had guests who've argued that it brings us back to the womb when the heartbeat of our mothers is providing a sort of a sense of rhythmic safety.

Is that land for you? providing a sort of a sense of rhythmic safety, does that land for you? So something that's really valuable and important in relationships is, and research shows this, is having a sense of shared reality, which means that you and I see the world in the same way. Not necessarily that we agree on everything, but that we have the same kind of worldview or ethos.

And you know, couples that have a high shared reality. It's almost like this person can finish my sentences is the feeling of having a shared reality with someone that you're that tight, but it's hard to know sometimes if we have a shared reality with someone, how do you figure out if we're really in sync or not? And I do think that one of the ways we do it is are we physically in sync? It's almost like a shortcut to saying, do we see things the same way? Well, you know what? We're doing things the same way, so maybe we also are thinking about things the same way. So there's something in it I

think that's just very primal on do we agree or not about things? And if we're clapping at the same time and those other people are stomping, we seem to make the inference that I bet we agree more with each other than we agree with that stomping person over there. Coming up, Michael talks about how rituals are not inherently good and how rituals can help us with habit formation. I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Frankipan.

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you know, everybody into a sense of shared purpose. And we're all in the same story. We're seeing the world in a similar way, but that can be used for good and for ill. I'm just thinking of like Nazi rituals and things like that. So before I start rambling, can you pick up on that and expand on it? One of the important things about rituals, so our research doesn't show that rituals are good. It would be nice if I could say, hey the more rituals you add the happier you're gonna be in your life and that's really not what rituals do.

What rituals do is they provoke emotions. And those emotions can be great, happy, positive emotions, but they can also be negative emotions, not just sadness and fear, but also anger and rage. What they do is they unlock stronger emotions in us. And unfortunately, that means that we can use them to experience something like awe, like the majesty of the universe can open to us and it's an extraordinary feeling, yet they can also be used to provoke something like hate

of other people. And so their domain general for sure, and it's a little bit unfortunate that they are because they're a tool that you can use for ill or for good, depending on what your goals are. Right. So singing kumbaya together can be positive singing Jews will not replace us. Not so much.

And I will say this. I sometimes when I give talks on this, I'll put up a ritual and have everybody do it, clapping and stomping and unison and things like that. And the ritual ends with people putting their fists in the air and shouting, let's go in unison three times. They shouted louder and louder. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. I have the feeling that if I ran out of the room, everybody would follow me to go do whatever that I wanted to have them do. I mean, it's very, very powerful in the, I don't do that just to be clear, but this feeling that, wow, we're ready to go do something. And I think it could be, let's go clean up the river, or let's do something that's more anti-social.

Hmm. So rituals are not good in and of themselves. They're powerful and can be used and that power can be harnessed in any different direction. And you said you're not necessarily saying you do more ritual, you're going to be happier. But that kind of is what I thought you were saying at the top of the interview, which is we can transform habits in our lives into rituals, we will be happier. I think it's this back, the very sadly named Emo diversity again, which is that it is nice to have more positive emotions in our lives for sure. Of course, happiness is a nice thing, but the richness of life isn't just having happiness, that there are these other emotions that we learn from that cause us to grow, that make us feel we've had a rich life.

Those are the kinds of things that rituals often are involved with. Rituals at funerals, they don't necessarily make us feel better. Sometimes what they do is they unlock the sadness in a positive way, but it's not that we're smiling, it's that they're actually allowing us to grieve in a more intense way. It's both good and bad, the things that they can do for us. But in any case, the same actions can start to be imbued with much, much more meaning. It's just what that meaning is can really vary wildly.

Right. But okay, so maybe we're getting tangled on the word happier. I think what you're saying, I think what the overarching thesis of the book is, and you'll correct me, is that you can transform habitual actions into rituals that may not all produce happiness per se, in the sense that you're not jumping up and down with glee or joy or excitement, but it will produce, it will be overall positive. I'm not sure. I think what they do is they provoke lots of emotions in us. And our research shows that lots of emotions is important for our well-being.

In the domain of everyday life, I think typically you're exactly right. We take mundane things that have kind of lost any magic or any luster, and we can imbue them with a little bit more. Our morning routines, our family rituals, our rituals in couples. But there are other domains of life where it's less that doing them makes things better, it just always makes things kind of different. And that I think is really the effect of these kinds of rituals with grief. You know, the woman washing her husband's car every weekend, again, you wouldn't think necessarily that she's smiling while she's doing

it, but it's helping her have this grief that she needs to process, which is good in the end to try to get to acceptance. But it doesn't mean that the ritual is causing her to feel amazingly happy right at that moment. This is a bit of a digression, but for I think about the word happiness in a broad way. And so it doesn't mean and I think this is this is a common theme in Buddhism too, which is the tradition that I've been most influenced by. Don't confuse happiness. I've heard a great teacher say with excitement. Yeah, like excitement and joy and you know, you use the word happy.

People sometimes think, Oh, well that's what happens when you win the lottery. I mean it as like happiness is the Aegis under which all positive emotions would fall like contentment, meaning purpose and healing. And so the woman washing her car might not be excited or joyful, but it is she's engaged in something that is healthy and healing and meaningful. And so for me, that does ladder up to happiness, but that's a linguistic choice on my side. No, I think it makes perfect sense. And in fact, we think about well-being versus happiness and nerds like me use well-being for the global

kind of feeling that you're talking about. You know, how am I doing in my life overall? Yeah. On a moment-to-moment basis, when we say, are you happy, we actually mean, right now in this moment, are you feeling happy? Are you smiling or not? And that is very, very different, as you're saying saying from our global sense of how we're doing in life. And emo diversity, this diversity of emotions, what it predicts is that overall sense of well-being. So very consistent actually that it's not necessarily that you're smiling at every minute of every day, but that the experiences you're having, including grief, are adding up to you having higher well-being overall in your

life. So, back to my understanding or lack thereof of your core thesis, as it pertains to transforming everyday activities into rituals and infusing rituals into all aspects of your life, your argument is you should consider it not because it's going to make you happier in the small sense of that word, but because it will infuse your life with well-being, it'll boost your well-being. Yeah, it'll definitely turn your day from tasks to get done into something a bit more meaningful. It turns lunch into something more than lunch. It can turn family dinner into something more than family dinner. But I will say, I mean, even all the way back to the silly example of brushing your teeth first and showering, it is true that if you're someone who has an order that you would like to do them in, you do feel great when you can do them in that order. But if something happens to interrupt you, you know, kid comes in and now you can't do

the order you wanted to do them in, you said it at the very beginning, well, now I feel off. I feel janky. And so even with these, and I may use the example on purpose because it's kind of silly, even with something like brushing your teeth and showering, they have the potential to make us feel great. I'm ready for the day, I'm ready to go.

But at the very same time, because they're so emotional and meaningful, if we can't do them that way, it's actually a downside, right? We feel off, we feel different. So even on the mundane ones, it's true that when we put them into place, they can unlock all kinds of positive things, but they're not almost risk-free because in a sense,

we really wanna do them that way now. And if we can't do them, sometimes now we might even be worse off than if we didn't have one. So there's this really, there's this very complicated relationship to our emotional lives, which I think is why we use them in so many domains of life, because they relate to all of these different experiences. Okay, so which habits in our lives, which rote, repetitive actions, are eligible for transformation into ritual? For me, it's

almost anything. I mean, we have talked to elite athletes, for example, elite runners in particular, and all of them have a specific way that they tie their shoes. They're often very different from each other, but they have the specific socks, the specific shoe, this shoe first, then I tie it like this, then I double knot it. I mean, actually very, very elaborate things.

And I'm talking about just with their shoes, not to mention anything else. So they've taken shoe tying, which is not interesting in life. Again, one of those boring things that we do is we've got to tie our shoes unless we have slip-on shoes. And they've imbued it with something more than that. Even shoe tying, even lunch, even clinking forks, these very small actions do have the potential to give us a little bit more than just, I gotta get this thing done because I gotta get to work and then I gotta leave work and I gotta get home. That's kind of the life that we start to get into.

And we can take a beat and take a moment and imbue some of these things with a little bit more. And so you talk about some of the bare minimum requirements. What would fall into that category? What are the minimum requirements here? For a ritual to... Yes. I'll tell you something that's very frustrating

about studying rituals is, so you can imagine that what we found is that if you stomp three times and clap nine times, that's the one, kind of like that works for everybody. So let's all do that. And what's frustrating, but fascinating for me is that two people can be doing the exact same sequence of actions. And for one of them, it can be deeply meaningful.

And for someone else, it can be like they're wasting their time. You mentioned attending religious services as a non-religious person. If I observe people at a religious service, they're all doing the exact same thing. They're standing, I'm Catholic, they're standing at the same time, they're kneeling at the same time, they're singing in unison. So each of them looks like they're practicing their faith. But one person there might be practicing their faith, connecting with history, connecting with their parents and grandparents, really deep expression of who they are. And the person next to them is there because their parents

made them go. And I actually can't tell by just observing them who's engaged in a meaningful ritual and who is literally going through the motions. And the only way that we can get to that is, in fact, to ask people, when you do this, do you feel something about it or not? And in a way, it's frustrating because it means we don't know if it's three claps and nine stomps or 10 stomps. But in another way, it means we have a lot of flexibility in what we start to imbue with meaning in our own lives.

It isn't just the ones that we've received from history. Those are the only ones that work. It's in fact incredible, the creativity that people show in creating all kinds of rituals that are very specific to them, or to their teams at work or to their families or their relationships, that then become imbued as you practice them over time with this kind of deeper meaning. Can making something into a ritual help with habit formation? We know habits and you've studied them. They're very hard to form. Many of us struggle with like starting

meditation, starting exercise, sticking to some sort of diet regime, whatever can ritual help us with this? We see, you know, if you think about extreme acts of self-control, when we're supposed to do one thing and we're trying to, you know, resist a temptation, very often in the world, extreme acts of self-control are associated with ritual. It's often in a religious context. If you think about something like fasting, most faiths in one way or another have a period of time where you give up food or drink and then come back to it later. It's extremely difficult for us to do things like that.

What you see is that when religion is laid over those kinds of practices, people are actually better able to execute because they're not just giving up food, they're engaged in something that has deeper meaning. And I do think very often you see that natural correlation in the world where when we're trying to do hard things, one of the things that is brought to bear to help us do those hard things is some form of ritual. So if we're, I imagine listeners, I certainly am, I'm kind of doing an audit of my day.

How can I think through the basic activities and turn them into rituals? So first thing is you can truly go through and do an inventory of your own day. If you think you don't have rituals, the best thing to do is ask your spouse or your kids or your coworkers-workers and they will often be very happy to tell you about all the rituals that you're engaged in that you're aware of,

but didn't quite note exactly. Even your middle finger against the glass, of course, you are aware you were doing that. But when you think of it in the context of a relationship ritual, now it feels a bit different. It's like, oh yeah, that is our thing that we do and we do it for this reason. So there is a sense of looking at what you're already doing and recognizing it a bit more, almost owning it a little bit more. Like now we're doing our fork clinking thing.

Now we're doing our lunch thing at work. That actually in and of itself can make it a little bit more meaningful because you're really recognizing the role that it plays. But then also encouraging people to experiment a bit. So if you're somebody recognizing the role that it plays, but then also encouraging people to experiment a bit. So if you're somebody who doesn't get nervous before meetings ever, there's no reason for you to start experimenting with shouting at yourself in the mirror in the bathroom because you don't need a ritual in that context. If you are somebody who gets nervous,

why not try out a ritual to see if it can start to help you? So we do think about in different domains of life, where are the spots where you might benefit and where are the spots where probably they wouldn't really help because you're already doing just fine. And those might be the places to start trying to experiment a little bit to see what impact they have on you.

Something I've talked about on the show probably too many times, but it's stuck in my head and I think a good way, is a comment that was made to me by my friend, Dr. Richard Davidson, who's a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin. He's a pioneering neuroscientist who was really one of the first people to comprehensively look or systematically look at the brains of both newbie and advanced meditators. And that has had a huge impact on public and social acceptance of meditation as a, you know, now it's a thing you can admit you do. But Richie was telling me once that before he does anything, including brushing his teeth, but anything he tries to remember to dedicate it to the benefit of all beings everywhere, which is a kind of a Buddhist phraseology. But I'm doing this for myself because I want to not have my teeth pulled.

But I'm also doing this because you know, if I'm not in dental pain, I'm gonna be much more useful and I've tried to do that. I forget all the time, but I've really tried to do that and it feels to me like this is a ritual. Completely there's a psychologist, Dan Wegener, who studied, he called it action identification. And the idea is anything that we're doing can either be seen as really boring actions, or something more than that. So if you think about the sign of the cross, for example, are you just tapping various

spots on your body? Or are you making the sign of the cross as an expression of your faith? And it turns out that we actually prefer as humans to go to the higher level classification. In other words, we'd rather not see our actions as just stupid actions where we're just going through the motions. We'd rather see them as having some kind of meaning. So in a sense, we're primed to be ready to say, you know what? This thing that I'm going to do now isn't

just this boring thing that I have to do, I can see it as having more meaning than that. And his practice is a wonderful example of just taking. I'm sure it takes him one second to remind himself before he does things of that goal that he has. He doesn't need five hours to do it, but just having that quick recognition before I engage in something, you can see how I'm sure for him it completely changes the experience of what otherwise might be mundane

or even painful kinds of experiences. Yeah, I've found that to be the case to the extent that I can remember to do it. Let's just go back to couples for a second. If I'm in a relationship and I'm listening to Mike Norton talk about the fact that rituals can be have a salutary effect, how do I infuse my relationship with rituals without it being corny or forced or annoying?

One thing that so I forgot to mention is we also ask people to think of their previous relationships and say, did you have any rituals in those? And people are less likely to say they had rituals in their previous relationships than they have in their current relationship. Now we don't know if that's because you didn't have any, cause you didn't like them or you just hate them so much now that you're not willing to admit that you had rituals with that terrible person. But we do see, you know, if you think about couples, couples almost always

develop their own little language. They have certain phrases that are very unique to them. Their nicknames that they call each other, you know, schmuper bear, whatever it might be. Again, you can't reuse those with your next significant other. They're specific to us. But these little things that are already in place, most couples are already doing some things that if they stop to look at how they do things, there's something in it already. The way that you say goodbye, the way that you say good night, you don't realize it, but you already have a little signature of how you do these things. And the couples who say they recognize it, they see it, then every night when they're doing it or every morning when they're saying goodbye,

again, there's that flash of self-recognition, the tapping your middle finger on the window that adds even a little bit more to the fact that it's showing how committed we are to each other. Okay, so we don't need to think systematically about creating new ones, we just need to see the ones that are already there and savor them. That's right and you know people will think I guess we should have a date night and there's nothing, of course. That's right. And you know, people will think, I guess we should have a date night. And there's nothing, of course, there's nothing wrong with date nights, we should all take more time to be with our loved ones. But date nights can be hard to schedule and things like that.

And so we again, often see it's these little, tiny, seemingly insignificant behaviors that end up for couples signaling something more. You talk about how rituals can be used to diffuse conflict. I'd be interested in hearing more about that. And also, you know, that may be a ritual we want to invent in our relationships because fights are inevitable and you might be nice to have a makeup ritual. For sure. I think one of the things that we see across cultures, but our greeting rituals,

different cultures have different ways of greeting each other, but it's almost always formalized from culture to culture. Handshaking is one that that's fairly common and fairly ubiquitous. Handshaking is a very funny behavior. If you think about it, because we don't really need to touch somebody else's hand in order to say hello to them. You could just say hello.

But we've decided to have this kind of touch element to it. I'm pretty sure it's apocryphal, but the idea was that if you shook hands with someone, it would mean that if you had any daggers concealed in your sleeve, they would fall out. I'm sure that's not true, but it gives you the sense of what handshaking does, right? Is that we can be close enough to each other to touch hands without killing each other. That's already a huge step up and a lot of conflict, actually. So we're using the simple ritual of handshaking for much, much more than that. There are sometimes international

scandals where a leader of another country will approach another leader and shake their hand incorrectly, refuse to shake their hand incorrectly, refuse to shake their hand. There's entire summits for world leaders where the whole goal is just for the two leaders to shake hands and not do anything else. We really imbue these practices with an enormous amount of meaning. And we do see when people do shake hands, they do tend to then trust each other a little bit more. Do they completely trust each other a little bit more.

Do they completely trust each other forever? No, of course not. But these small actions do signal something to us about our counterparts in conflict. So again, that's not something new we have to invent per se. It's just like shake hands and make up is a thing that people are already doing. It's just about seeing it and tapping into the innate wisdom. Completely. And as a cautionary tale, I will say there is research on,

if you give a weak handshake, that can be worse than no handshake at all. That's not our research, but that has been shown. So you want to have some semblance of a decent handshake in order to hopefully get some benefits. Yeah, well, I mean, now that I have a some semblance of a decent handshake in order to hopefully get some benefits. Yeah, well, I mean, now that I have a child, I'm taking him to his sporting games and they, you know, they all line up and high five at the end or shake hands at the end. And I remember as a kid, I grew up in a more lawless era, but like kids would spit on their hands for that. Completely. What else are you going to do? Yeah, of course.

Last question is kind of random. It's just I'm looking at my list of questions. This is one thing I didn't ask and I don't quite understand this, but you say there are attributes of a ritual that modulate its effect and then you list five variables that rituals are impacted by effort, senses, repetition, action, and community. Can you just talk a little bit about this? We see, so years ago we did this research which, another unfortunate name, we called it the IKEA effect. But the idea of that was that when we make things ourselves, we come to really value them very highly, maybe more highly than we should. So we have like a terrible mug that we made in college

that we keep with us even though it's ugly or a watercolor that we painted. We have these things that we created that we think are important. And in a way, it's a mistake because they don't look as good to other people as they look to us. But in another way, when we make things ourselves, we do get more value out of them. They do become more meaningful and they are a source of pride. And we realized later, you know, we were talking about making things then with your hands, mugs and IKEA furniture, for example, but we realized later that rituals have a little bit of the same logic, which is it is true that there are the kind that we receive, the religious from our family, and those play an incredibly important role in our lives for sure.

But there's also the kind that we're constantly making ourselves in our own relationships and our own families and our own work teams. And when we make them ourselves, they get kind of imbued with a little bit more meaning. When we repeat them over time, well, then that starts to get a little bit more meaning as well. So all of these different attributes when they involve senses, so you think about fire is very common in rituals like for human history, birthday cakes, we love to light things on fire as part of our rituals. So involving the senses as well, you know, so you can

think about building out kind of a profile of ritual where different elements start to enhance the emotional impact of them. None of them are necessarily required in order to have emotional impact, but we just see across domains of life. These are some of the attributes that really people tell us, you know, when we do it like this, it really starts to have more resonance. So again, it's if I'm hearing you correctly, this is more like an anthropological observation about how rituals have evolved rather than a prescriptive thing that we should all be looking at and trying to infuse into whatever rituals we're inventing. Yes, definitely don't start lighting things on fire in every domain of your life. But we do see from a very wide angle lens that things like fire and scent and food and

drink are all things that do sort of change the emotional experience of these sorts of rituals. Although I could imagine, I think I know people who they want to make a daily habit out of meditation so they make an altar and they light incense and You know have pictures and I don't do any of that but but it does help people to actually follow through For many people, you know the the morning coffee that they drink It's not actually about the drinking of the coffee or the caffeine. It's the smell It's it's that is what tells them that it's time to wake up and that they're ready to go. We are very sense making creatures, you know, we do appreciate the role of sense in life. And people very often build them into rituals, I think, for exactly that reason.

Was there something you were hoping to talk about that we didn't get to? hoping to talk about that we didn't get to? Just that the I guess what I would say is the entry point is low. In other words, I think when we talk to people at rituals, they start to think about adding million things to their life, and it just feels overwhelming. And I think it's just so important. We touched on this, but it's so important to just remember that it doesn't necessarily require big changes to what you're doing. in terms of the physical part.

It's just more of a mindset approach sometimes that can be so transformative on these otherwise boring things like brushing our teeth every single morning. I'm glad you said that. In closing, can you just remind everybody of the name of your book and the name of your other book that you co-authored and anything else you want us to know about websites, social media, etc. etc. Yeah, the most fun place to go is michaelnorton.com. That's not fun, but there's a link there to a ritual quiz. And if you take the ritual quiz, it tells you across different domains of life, where you're using them, where you're not using them. You can think about kind of a ritual profile for yourself. And then I think you can also, it's kind of fun to have your spouse take it as well and compare your results. It could be a very interesting discussion. This book is called The Ritual Effect. It's really about how habits and rituals can go from being boring to being something a little bit richer in life. We wrote a few years ago,

a book called Happy Money, The Science of Happier Spending with my co author Liz Dunn. That was actually about using money specifically to enrich your days and enrich your life. So we went from using money to using rituals, but really thinking about small hacks that you can use to kind of change your happiness, change your well-being on a day to day basis. Mike Norton, thanks for coming on the show. Thanks so much, Dan. [♪MUSIC PLAYING [♪MUSIC PLAYING [♪MUSIC PLAYING

[♪MUSIC PLAYING [♪MUSIC PLAYING [♪MUSIC PLAYING [♪MUSIC PLAYING [♪MUSIC PLAYING [♪MUSIC PLAYING [♪MUSIC PLAYING [♪MUSIC PLAYING

[♪MUSIC PLAYING [♪MUSIC PLAYING [♪MUSIC PLAYING [♪MUSIC PLAYING [♪MUSIC PLAYING [♪MUSIC PLAYING [♪MUSIC PLAYING [♪MUSIC PLAYING [♪MUSIC PLAYING [♪MUSIC PLAYING [♪MUSIC PLAYING [♪MUSIC PLAYING Elizabeth Dunn. I'm gonna post an interview that I did with Elizabeth in the show notes if you want to check it out. And don't forget to sign up over at

danharris.com for my weekly newsletter in which I sum up what are for me the biggest takeaways from the week's episodes and also list a bunch of cultural stuff that I'm excited about right now including books, movies, etc. Before I go I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. We get additional pre-production support from my guy Wombo Wu, an old friend of mine. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer, DJ Kashmir is our managing producer

and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme. If you like 10% happier, I hope you do. You can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey. What's up guys, it's your girl Kiki

and my podcast is back with a new season and let me tell you it's so good. And I'm diving into the brains of entertainment's best and brightest, okay? Every episode I bring on a friend and have a real conversation. And I don't mean just friends, I mean the likes of Amy Poehler,

Kel Mitchell, Vivica Fox, the list goes on. So follow, watch, and listen to Baby. This is Kiki Palmer on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.