The Science of Rituals: 5 Ways to Routine Into a Belonging Hack
Sometimes (and tell me if you can relate), life feels like I’m on a roller coaster I didn’t buy a ticket for. Kind of like a hamster wheel, except the hamster left hours ago and the wheel is still spinning. Days blur into weeks blur into "wait, what month is it?" Everything is moving forward, but nothing really marks the moving. It's one long run-on sentence with no capital letters and no periods, just one event merging into the next.
The fix isn’t necessarily to slow down (or get off the rollercoaster all together). It’s to create punctuation in the run-on sentence.
That's what a ritual is.
The winter I overdid it
Last winter, when I was busy rehearsing Kill the Buddha, my one woman show, I overdid it. It had been years since I'd written, produced and performed a solo show, so I had forgotten the sweet spot between rest and work. Every waking hour became rehearsal. By the time I finally stepped on stage for opening night, despite the show going even better than I’d hoped, I was too exhausted to enjoy a second of it.
I'm performing Kill the Buddha again in two months. This time will be different. Not because I'm rehearsing less but because I’m ritualizing more.
Ritual vs. routine
A routine and a ritual can look identical from the outside. Same morning coffee in the same mug with the same walk with the same dog. The difference is implicit.
A routine is something you do for the sake of doing it, like an item on a checklist. A ritual is something you do to be changed - to create internal transformation by way of journeying through a live experience (much like a story) to come out the other side with a new perspective. The former gets you through the day while the latter helps you orient where you are within it. (Ahem, creating a felt sense of belonging.)
Ritualizing is simpler than it sounds. You give an experience a beginning, a middle and an end. You mark the threshold, you stay present within the middle and you close it with intention.
What the science says
Researchers have been putting rituals under a microscope for years, and the findings are hard to dispute. Below, I split them the way I think about belonging: first for you, then for the people you lead and gather.
First, for you. A team at Harvard Business School led by Alison Wood Brooks ran a simple experiment. Before a stressful task, like singing in front of others or doing high-pressure math, some people performed a short ritual and some did not. The ritual group performed better, and the reason was measurable. Their anxiety dropped. Not just their self-reported nerves, but their heart rate and stress markers. A predefined little sequence of actions, done on purpose, calmed the nervous system enough to change the outcome.
Throwback to my Kill the Buddha rehearsal burnout issue. The panic of a solo show does not resolve simply through more hours of run throughs. It responds to better structure. (I.e. working smarter not harder.)
Two other findings worth mentioning: Michael Norton and Francesca Gino studied people moving through grief and loss, and found that performing a ritual gave them something the raw experience could not: a restored sense of control when everything felt out of control. And separate research on savoring shows that ritualizing an experience, rather than rushing through it, makes people more present and makes the experience more enjoyable. (Again, I don't just want to survive my next Kill the Buddha run, I want to enjoy the process.)
Enter the case for rituals as burnout prevention: Burnout is not only about doing too much. It thrives in the blur we experience when everything in our life is happening all at once (like working our 9-5’s on our living room couches while scrolling on our phones while eating lunch). No boundaries, and certainly no rituals. My winter of rehearsal, for example, was one long undifferentiated push. Rituals redefine the “edges” in our life that create a sense of safety through boundaries. They orient us in time and in space, and knowing where we are is the ground that belonging stands on.
Then, for the people you gather. This is where it gets powerful for anyone who leads a team, hosts a room or builds a community. Anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas has spent years measuring what happens to bodies during collective rituals, and he keeps finding the same thing: shared ritual pulls people's emotions, attention and even heart rhythms into alignment. That alignment is what we feel as closeness. Being in a crowd doing one thing together literally syncs us up.
And here is the finding I cannot stop thinking about. Studying football fans, his team found that the pre-game ritual generated more emotional synchrony among the crowd than the actual game did. The bonding was not in the event. It was in the ritual around the event.
In workplaces the effect shows up in meaning. Norton's research found that teams with simple shared rituals reported a 16% jump in how meaningful they found their work, and were more likely to go out of their way for each other. One caution he adds is worth its weight in gold for anyone who facilitates: rituals cannot be forced from the top down. Announce a mandatory chant by slide deck and you get eye rolls. Let people build their own and you get belonging.
5 ways a routine becomes a ritual
The good news is you do not need a weeklong ceremony to turn our routine into a belonging-hacking ritual. You need intention, and a beginning, middle and end. Here are five examples of ordinary routines you can evolve into a ritual with small shifts:
Morning coffee. Routine: gulped at your desk while you delete junk mail in your inbox. Ritual: made slowly, phone off, one intention for the day said out loud before the first sip. Same coffee. Now it's the threshold that seizes your day before your day belongs to someone else.
The team meeting. Routine: everyone logs on and dives straight into the agenda. Ritual: open each gathering with the same one-word check-in, close by naming one win, or the best thing that happened to each member that day. This is the Norton finding in real life. Bookends to live experiences build belonging.
The end of the workday. Routine: the laptop stays open and work bleeds into dinner. Ritual: a hard close. Shut the laptop, say "done for today" out loud, walk around the block, or do a little dance to your favorite millennial throwback mix. The ending is what acknowledges your transformation; the edge that keeps burnout at bay.
The shared table. Routine: people grab food and scatter to their screens. Ritual: a pause before anyone eats, a quick go-around, a toast to something. That is how feeding a group becomes a group belonging to each other.
Pre-show, or pre-anything that scares you. Routine: cram until the last second and walk on frayed. Ritual: a fixed sequence you repeat every time. Same playlist, same warm-up, same words before you step out. This is the exact thing the research says settles your nervous system, and it is what I'm doing differently this fall.
So here's the belonging hack, summarized: The fastest way to turn a routine or a “to-do” into belonging is to make it a ritual. Open with a threshold. Name an intention. Acknowledge who's in the room (even if it’s just you and your cat) and what the moment is for. Learn or explore something inside it. Name the learning. Then close it with presence. A beginning, a middle and an end. (Again, a journey, not a checklist.)
Why? Because rituals create psychological safety, and safety is the only state in which we can feel like we belong. In other words, you can't belong somewhere you don't first feel safe. A ritual is how you make a moment safe enough to belong in. Engagement, connect and productivity follow.
So the next time a day blurs or a meeting you're leading feels super awkward, turn it into a ritual. You'll leave transformed, not tired.
Need a belonging buddy in the process?
Hire us to create belonging rituals through our curated social wellness activities for team-building events and off-sites in NYC, conferences wellness sessions and corporate retreats in the Hudson Valley and beyond.
Explore our Belonging Bootcamp™, now offered for both workplace leadership trainings and for community builders.
Explore our ever-growing Uplift Academy for self-study belonging practices.
Follow @uplift.center on Instagram for regular belonging hacks.
Sources, if you want to go deeper
Brooks, A. W., et al. (2016). "Don't Stop Believing: Rituals Improve Performance by Decreasing Anxiety." Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
Norton, M. I., & Gino, F. (2014). "Rituals Alleviate Grieving for Loved Ones, Lovers, and Lotteries." Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
Vohs, K. D., Wang, Y., Gino, F., & Norton, M. I. (2013). "Rituals Enhance Consumption." Psychological Science.
Xygalatas, D., and colleagues. Research on collective ritual, emotional synchrony and physiological bonding (including the football fan study on pre-game ritual vs. the game).
Norton, M. I., and colleagues. "Work Group Rituals Enhance the Meaning of Work." Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
