Today I want to discuss habits and rituals. Last week, we explored habits and described them as outsourced actions. Essentially, a habit is something we want to do frequently without having to think about it. For instance, consider tennis players—not the pros, but good players. When they play without overthinking, they perform well. However, if you ask them to focus on their technique while playing, their performance often declines. This happens because habits are automated; when we overthink, things can go awry.
We concluded that automating activities through habits is beneficial for increasing frequency and ease. But there's another intriguing path: rituals. Unlike habits, which minimize the need for attention, rituals actually increase it.
Take religious rituals as an example. Consider a hand-washing ritual in a religion—it’s done with full attention and specific actions, not mindlessly. Or think about the ritual of drinking wine: you pour it into a special glass, swirl it, smell it—all these steps make you pay more attention to the experience. Without such rituals, if you just poured wine into any container and drank it while multitasking, the experience wouldn't be the same.
Rituals direct our attention and slow us down, making activities more enjoyable and meaningful. For instance, wine consumed with ritual feels more valuable than without it. So the question arises: can we incorporate more rituals into our daily lives? By doing so, can we enhance our focus on these activities and derive more pleasure from them?
Unlike habits that automate actions to the point where we might forget if we've done them (like taking pills), rituals make us remember. Consider family dinners: introducing a ritual where each person shares something about their day or expresses gratitude can make the meal more engaging and memorable.
What about exercise? In an experiment, participants who recited a new-age mantra while tying their shoelaces—something like, "By going on this run, I care for my mind and body" increased their running frequency by nearly once per week. That’s a significant improvement.
In summary, while habits are useful for automation, rituals offer another powerful approach. They help us focus on and savor our actions. By making activities more pleasurable through rituals, we also make them more likely to be repeated.
So think about how you can add rituals to your life to better serve your behavioral goals.
