06 Oct This Is The #1 Ritual You Need To Do Every Day
As you may or may not know, I’ve written a whole series of Audible audiobooks / podcasts based on the notion that habits can be helpful.
Beginning with “Habits for Happiness”, “Habits for Happiness at Work” and then moving through “Habits for Action” and “Habits for Happy Children”, even “Habits for Mastering Depression (and Anxiety”, they’ve been satisfyingly successful (if you’re interested, you can find them all HERE).
As such, it shouldn’t come as any surprise to see that I’m sharing, today, a great article on rituals (a very similar concept to habits) by one of my favourite writers, Eric Barker …
Before the match, you have to take a freezing-cold shower. Every time. When you walk on the tennis court, never step on the lines. Oh, and always cross the lines with your right foot first.
Your tournament ID has to be face up. Always. Consume an energy gel during your warm-up and make sure to squeeze it four times. Not three times. Not five times. Four.
Hop up and down as the ref does the coin toss. Then run to the baseline and drag your foot across the length of it. Then hit your shoe with your racket. Then make sure to…
Okay, I’m going to stop here. There are at least a dozen more rituals but I don’t want to type them all and, frankly, you don’t want to read them all. You and I would never do all these crazy things…
But then again, we’re not Rafael Nadal. Yes, he does all this — and more — before every single match. No, he doesn’t have OCD. But he is one of the greatest tennis players to ever lift a racket. And he swears by his rituals. Strange, right? Um, maybe not…
Humans, as a group, have some very weird rituals. Some tribal groups do fire walks. Others pierce themselves. And there are a lot of other rituals so extreme they look like a challenge you might see in the “Jackass” movies.
Then again, you and I aren’t all that different. Knocking on wood, presidential inaugurations, Bar Mitzvahs, Quinceaneras, weddings, funerals, baptisms, high school graduation, anniversaries…
Some readers might be frowning right now: “But those rituals are different…”
But are they? And this gets us to the heart of what makes rituals so interesting: they don’t accomplish anything. I’m not saying they’re unimportant – quite the opposite. But they don’t actually accomplish anything.
Rituals are rituals because they are what researchers call “causally opaque.” You brush your teeth because that process really does clean your teeth. But a wedding ceremony doesn’t actually create a physical change. (In fact, a whole separate legal procedure is necessary to make it official.) As sociologist George C. Homans said, “Ritual actions do not produce a practical result on the external world – that is one of the reasons why we call them ritual.”
And here’s where it gets even more interesting — despite not actually “doing anything” or being essential, rituals are a true human universal. Anthropologists have found that all human societies – without a single exception – have traditional rituals.
Very few things are so universal. So clearly they’re important. And yet when anthropologists ask people why they do their rituals they always get the same response: a perplexed look followed by, “What the heck are you talking about? We just do them. It’s our tradition. It’s who we are. That’s what we do.”
… keep reading the full & original article HERE