The Restorative Power of Ritual

Like many families have recently, ours scheduled a virtual happy hour the other night. It was full of the same sarcastic jokes and crossing conversations we’d have at a family dinner, only it was all through screens. For an hour or so, there was laughter and relief. The next day, my brother-in-law texted to ask what time happy hour would start.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but what we’d done is enter into a ritual as a way to cope with the anxiety and grief produced by the current pandemic. Rituals, it turns out, are a powerful human mechanism for managing extreme emotions and stress, and we should be leaning on them now.

To understand how rituals work and how we can adopt and adapt them, I turned to Mike Norton. Mike is a professor at Harvard Business School who has studied rituals and their effects on our wellbeing. The following conversation is edited lightly for clarity.

HBR: What do we know about rituals’ effects on our wellbeing?
Norton: What I’ve learned in research with my colleague Francesca Gino and our other colleagues is that rituals play a number of critical roles: rituals in the face of loss can help us feel less grief, rituals with families can make us feel closer, and rituals with our partners can reinforce our commitment to each other. And by rituals we don’t mean “elaborate religious ceremonies” — in our research, we often find that the majority of people’s rituals are private and idiosyncratic to them. No other family does Thanksgiving (and meals in general) quite the way that your family does, and no other couple has the same secret nicknames and phrases.

Most important for the world right now, when we are all facing both actual and anticipated grief, these idiosyncratic rituals can restore our sense of control over our lives. We feel out of control when we experience loss – we didn’t want it to happen, but we couldn’t control it. That is, in and of itself, a very unpleasant feeling, that sense that you’re not in charge of your life. Rituals restore some of that control.

How do you study something like this?
First, we asked people to think about someone they’d lost, or to think about a relationship ending—both events that create grief and anxiety. We then asked, What did you do afterward? We expected the people to tell us about funerals and about moving their stuff out of their shared living space. But we were surprised to find that only 10% of the answers focused on these kinds of public activities and only 5% focused on communal activities — yes, people went to funerals, but most people told us about their own personal rituals. Some were heartbreaking. One person who lost a spouse said, “I washed his car every week as he used to do.” The relationship ones tended to be less heartbreaking but no less ritualistic. One person said, “I looked for all the pictures we took together during the time we dated. I then destroyed them into small pieces (even the ones I really liked!), and then burnt them in the park where we first kissed.”

And this worked? People felt better?
Yes. People reported feeling a little better in the moment, even when just remembering the ritual they performed. But we also wanted to see if the rituals themselves made people feel better when they did them. This is hard because you can’t impose that kind of loss on someone to test their rituals. But we did create a loss by inviting groups of 10 people to our lab, and rewarding one with $200 and telling them they could leave while everyone else had to stay and complete our boring surveys. This created a “loss” for the people who didn’t get the money. (We know that losing $200 is not the same as ending a relationship, so we thought of this “loss” as a very mild form of these much more serious losses.) We then assigned some of the people who “lost” to enact ritual—they drew a picture of how they were feeling, sprinkled salt on it, and tore the paper up. Those who performed the ritual felt a little less badly about the loss of the money than those who did not.

So you literally invented a ritual and that still helped?
Yes – it was based on rituals that people had shared in our survey work, but for the people in our studies, it was a novel ritual they had never tried before. But as you can imagine, when people devise their own rituals, they contain more personally relevant and symbolic aspects – like the woman who washed her husband’s car.

What makes a ritual a ritual? Is it repetition?
Not necessarily. When you repeat rituals, they do seem to gain in strength, but even rituals performed a single time can be effective- burning pictures in the place where you met your ex is likely a one-time event. What seems to matter is that you name it as a ritual, and that you actually do the ritual and don’t just think about doing it. Many things we do every day are a little ritualistic. We may get ready for work the same way every morning – you might brush your teeth first and then shower. If I ask people to flip the order and tell me how they feel, some people don’t care, but others report feeling a little uncomfortable, a little off. For these latter people, their morning routine has become more of a ritual – it matters to them the order in which it happens, and when they do it “right” they feel more ready to tackle their day. (Of course, enacting too many rituals such that rituals start to interfere with your day is less adaptive, as in the case with obsessive compulsive behavior.)

Is exercise considered a ritual?
It can be. For many people there are rituals within the exercise as well, the routine. They walk at same time every day; they take the same route. They’ll even tie their shoes the same way every time. Again, this all gives us that sense of control and it helps reduce anxiety and stress. I’m always struck every Spring—I live by a river—and there’s always a day when it turns warm and suddenly all these people emerge and run in circles around the river. I think, they could go anywhere but they do the same loop. That’s a ritual. They’re taking control after a long winter when they couldn’t.

Some rituals seem irrational. What does it accomplish to light pictures on fire in a park?
The utility of the ritual isn’t related to its practicality. Absurd rituals can have high utility. If it helps you create that sense of control, if it calms your anxiety, that’s what matters. Think of performers who do strange rituals before performing. They know that walking in a circle three times while repeating a mantra doesn’t help them win, but it helps them calm down so they can perform.

Thinking that rituals are irrational (“this is crazy, why would I do this?”) is actually a barrier that it can be helpful to overcome. Our research suggests that embracing them, no matter how silly, can improve our well-being. Your family’s Thanksgiving may be totally bizarre, but it’s your Thanksgiving; the way you and your partner say goodnight may be goofy, but it’s your tradition. Rather than avoid them, we should name them as rituals and be sure to enact them more regularly.

Right now, are people inventing new rituals to deal with the pandemic?
I’ve seen so many new rituals, and adaptations of rituals. People are using technology to recreate their rituals as best they can. But they’re also inventing new ones. One company has started all its virtual meetings by having participants click on images of Patrick from SpongeBob to indicate how they’re feeling. Hard to imagine something sillier than this, but think what it does for the group: it has become a ritualistic way to start the meeting, and it is giving people a sense of control and familiarity in a new and uncomfortable situation.

The loss of many of our public rituals, including things as simple as meeting a friend for coffee or a drink, has led people to naturally look for new ones. People can’t go to church, so they’re creating new rituals to help deal with that loss and anxiety.

So we can quite deliberately say “I’m going to create a new ritual” and that will work?
Yes. Think about it. If we could assign rituals in the lab and that worked, you can invent your own. In fact you’ve been inventing them on your own for your whole life. Your family invented your specific way of doing Thanksgiving, you and your partner invented your own love language, and who hasn’t at some point thought that wearing the same hat or socks, or sitting in the same place, will improve the odds of their favorite sports team winning.

They don’t have to happen organically; you can artificially insert them into your life. The woman who washed her husband’s car, she made that up. That’s not an established ritual drawn from history. But it worked. Sometimes the best rituals are the idiosyncratic ones like that that are personal to us.

I’m also seeing people try rituals and then say, “Let’s do this over video every Tuesday night at 9pm.” It feels good to us to know we have this event happening at a regular time. It regularizes our lives. It reinserts some of the sense of control in a time when many of us feel like we don’t have control.

So I would encourage people who are right now feeling anxious and grieving to consider inventing a ritual, or to notice the ones they’ve added to their lives – at work, with their families, and with their partners.