THE CALMING POWER OF RITUALS

Have you ever tried telling yourself to calm down—perhaps half-panicked, staring at yourself in the mirror of a restroom next to the conference room where you’re leading a meeting in two minutes…one minute…? Or have you ever suggested to your irate significant other, “You need to calm down”? How did that work out? It might seem as if a straightforward reminder should be effective. We are surrounded by motivational mantras (“Keep Calm and Carry On”) aimed at keeping us placid. But those efforts are trying to suppress a strong human mechanism known as arousal—a psychological and physical state of high tension that includes activation of the limbic and sympathetic nervous systems. Imagine telling yourself to “calm down” while a bear chases you, as you experience an arousal cocktail of stress and perhaps see your life flash before your eyes.Bear chases aside, how are we supposed to stay calm in high-stress situations? One answer is an activity that is uniquely human: rituals. It turns out they measurably tamp down rising patterns of stress and arousal as people try to perform difficult tasks and make mistakes.

Many athletes at the peak of their abilities rely on rituals. Tennis champion Serena Williams bounces the ball five times before her first serve and two times before her second. Portuguese soccer sensation Cristiano Ronaldo will take his first step out on the field only with his right foot. Baseball star Nomar Garciaparra had a highly visible and recognizable routine at home plate before each pitch: Step into the batter’s box, then out, then tighten his batting gloves, adjust the wristband on his left forearm, tighten the gloves some more—then touch both gloves, the wristband, right thigh, back, left shoulder, helmet, belt, helmet again, and finally step back into the box, tap toes against the ground and: ready to bat!

Garciaparra is far from alone in his behavior at the plate. Researchers at the University of Hawaii went even more granular in classifying and counting movements made by the school’s baseball players, using 33 different categories that included details like “scraping the ground in various ways with their feet” and “stretching or flexing different parts of their body.” During an entire at-bat of several pitches, the average player displayed 83 of these micro-movements, and no player used less than 51. Players generally knew they were doing this but underestimated their own movements by a factor of four and were surprised when watching their behaviors on video. But they didn’t stop doing them; the knowledge just confirmed how much they counted on these behaviors to get “in the zone.” Rituals help high achievers in a range of fields. Prima ballerina Suzanne Farrell pinned a small toy mouse inside her leotard, then crossed herself and pinched herself twice before going onstage. The writer Joan Didion put her working drafts in a bag in the freezer when she was feeling stuck. As captured in a 2019 profile by documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, world-famous pianist Sviatoslav Richter had to carry a pink plastic lobster in a satin-lined box backstage with him for every performance.Why? “Being able to do something means thinking, believing that you are able to do it,” Morris observed. “It’s not enough to have the skill to play the piano. Something more is needed.”We reach for performance rituals to reach for that elusive more—to try to overcome our anxiety and perform to our potential. We mere mortals rely on them to prepare ourselves in countless areas of daily life: when we need to lead a meeting, nail a job interview, make our case before the town council or otherwise step into the spotlight.

Pre-performances jitters aren’t necessarily bad for us. The Yerkes-Dodson law, formulated by two psychologists experimenting on mice in 1908, showed that a moderate dose of tension and stress improves performance, as long as it isn’t high enough to be debilitating. For humans, a certain level of arousal can prompt us to practice or prepare more, setting us up to perform at our best when a rush of energy boosts our motivation and stamina. But there is a tipping point: When the arousal becomes too intense it foils us, unless we have a way to deal with it.

Each year, I ask students in my class at Harvard if they have rituals they perform before tests, sporting events or other stressful occasions. They hesitate at first, but as soon as one person speaks up—“I always have to use the same toothpaste and have the same tea, and then I make sure to have three pencils”—the floodgates open. The answers helped me to recognize my own rituals. I always pace back and forth in my office 30 minutes before the start of class, running the flow of the course through my mind. Then I take my teaching plan, always written on yellow, lined paper, and place it in the black leather binder my father gave me 25 years ago, which I have carried to every single class. I’m not suggesting that you need to adopt any of these rituals. But a key way that research shows we can reduce performance anxiety—whether it’s a first date or a face-to-face with the boss—is to change how we see stress. Our tendency is to try to suppress it, either by simply trying to remain stoic or by that self-control impulse of telling ourselves to just calm down. These strategies fail in part by adding “stress about stress” to our already volatile emotional mix: We’re not only stressed about the task ahead, but we’re now also stressed about the fact that we can’t calm down. It can be better to optimize our stress by using the moderate amount that helps us rise to a task, and tamping down the excess that can make us crash. One way is a version of the bathroom-mirror talk, but instead of telling your reflection to calm down, you can remind yourself why you should feel confident, that you have it under control. You can develop a ritual like the outwardly swaggering Jack Donaghy character in the TV comedy “30 Rock,” who had his own baseball-themed self-pep talk: “Well, buddy, here we go. Bottom of the ninth. Bases loaded. It’s winning time, you magnificent son of a bitch!”

That doesn’t appeal? Many people, and sports teams, use specific “pump up” music to change their emotion from anxiety to excitement. A review of research published recently in Psychological Bulletin demonstrates the effectiveness of simply deciding to stop slumping in our chair in dread and instead adopting postures like sitting (or standing) up straight and tall, taking the time to tell our body that we’ve got this. Two psychology professors at Washington University in St. Louis suggest that rituals, whatever the type, have developed in humans to offer the possibility of addressing our stress in part by simply giving us something else to focus on, leaving less space for our intrusive, anxious thoughts.

A study by researchers at the University of Toronto showed exactly how this works. They taught subjects a physical ritual, then had them complete difficult button-pressing tests designed to induce errors, while monitoring their brain activity. The researchers were able to measure that an electrical response known as error-related negativity, or ERN, was reduced after subjects performed their rituals. In other words, participants were less focused on their mistakes, and that helped them stay closer to the moderate level of arousal ideal for performance under the Yerkes-Dodson law.

No ritual has the power to make rock stars or savants out of us. We still have to contend with the realities of aptitude and proficiency and the discipline of daily practice. But rituals can give us a way to manage our nerves, dial into the skills we’ve worked so hard to achieve and give us that elusive something more that allows us to step into the spotlight and shine.Michael Norton is the Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. This essay is adapted from his new book, “The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions,” published April 9 by Scribner.

2024-04-09T01:10:33Z dg43tfdfdgfd