Habit Hacking
The Transformative Power of Ritual Design
A simple guide to forming healthy, lasting habits through well-designed rituals
Rituals are an essential part of human life. They’ve existed longer than recorded history itself: the earliest signs of a ritual date back 70,000 years. Nowadays, we still perform rituals every day. Some rituals are so ingrained in our day-to-day life, that we don’t even notice the ritualistic nature of our actions. From drinking a small cup of coffee every morning to mourning our loved ones in a funeral when they pass away, rituals come in all shapes and sizes. They can be individual or collective, secular or religious.
Most of our rituals are passively learned from others, rather than actively designed by ourselves. Our societies, our institutions, our families and our friends collectively shape the rituals we perform everyday. Rituals don’t need to be learned from others. Instead, we can harness the power of rituals to hack our habits and improve our life hygiene.
What is a ritual, anyway?
Although the definition of rituals varies widely depending on the domain, a 2016 paper authored by a Harvard psychologist defines a ritual as “a predefined sequence of symbolic actions often characterized by formality and repetition that lacks direct instrumental purpose.”
In essence, a ritual is a repeatable sequence of behaviors that gives meaning to a recurring experience, such as a birthday or a World Cup final. A ritual can be performed before, during or after such an event. In the same paper, the authors outline three key characteristics that constitute a ritual:
Fixed sequence of actions
A ritual is composed of a predetermined sequence of manual actions. For example, when making coffee in the morning, each coffee lover has their own sacred routine for the perfect brew. It’s very rare that we would stray from it.
Symbolic meaning
We must attribute some meaning to a ritual for it to become a noteworthy part of our daily life. Without any meaning, a ritual is just a mundane, inconsequential of life, like commuting to work in the morning. With some meaning, rituals can be a fundamental landmarks within our schedule, setting the pace for all the other activities that fall around them.
Non-functional behavior
In most cases, rituals contain specific behaviors that have no direct utility. Consider as an example all the rituals surrounding a simple “cheers” at the dinner table: direct eye-contact, no crossing glasses, no toasting with water... Forget any of these and it’s 7 years of bad sex for you. Yeah, that sounds about right. This medieval tradition has long replaced its original functional purpose of ensuring drinks weren’t poisoned with a purely cosmetic celebration between family and friends.
Benefits of Ritual Design
Rituals have been associated with many benefits including anxiety reduction, mindfulness and increased enjoyment.
Rituals increase enjoyment in mundane activities
We see in every culture — and throughout history — that people who perform rituals report feeling better.
Michael I. Norton, member of Harvard’s Behavioral Insights Group
Rituals can provide meaning and engagement in otherwise mundane activities. For example, in a recent study, subjects were told to perform a ritual composed of a series of silly gestures before eating a carrot. People who performed the ritual multiple times reported more enjoyment than those who just ate the carrot.
Rituals can also make difficult, tiresome activities more fun. In the context of physical activity, a study by the self-care coaching app Fabulous has shown that users enjoyed their physical exercise more when they engaged in a ritual beforehand.
Rituals give back control and decrease performance anxiety
A familiar sequence of actions induces the feelings of control, constancy and predictability in the performer. Most high-level athletes use rituals to maintain and improve on their performance before a match, a game, a shot, etc.
Skeptics might call these rituals superstitions and discard them as irrational aspirations. Funnily enough, even such skeptics can reap the benefits of rituals without believing in them.
Legendary tennis player Rafa Nadal responds to the claims of superstition in his autobiography “Rafa: My Story”. He writes,
Some call it superstition, but it’s not. If it were superstition, why would I keep doing the same thing over and over whether I win or lose?
It’s a way of placing myself in a match, ordering my surroundings to match the order I seek in my head.
Although the causal relationship between a ritual and the outcome of the performance is hard to measure, the confidence and self-belief generated by a ritual naturally reduces the risk of performance anxiety and improve the athlete’s chances of success.
Rituals promote mindfulness
A defining characteristic of a ritual is the symbolic meaning attributed to it. For meaning to arise, we must be intentional in our actions while performing a ritual. These intentional actions and focused attention promote mindfulness.
A ritual that engages multiple senses, such as touch, taste or smell, can increase our involvement in an experience. Intentionally engaging our physical senses, beyond the hyper-stimulated audio and visual ones, is another way that rituals can make us more mindful.
The 3 D’s of Ritual Design
It’s surprisingly easy to incorporate a new ritual into our lives. The process can be decomposed into three phases: discovery, design and dedication.
Discover the context around your ritual
Which habits would we like to form or enhance? And why?
From my experience, ritual design works best to form new habits or enhance familiar ones. It’s especially effective with habits we tend to procrastinate on — like doing sports.
- Define your target habit that the ritual will trigger
- Identify 5 key benefits motivating your target habit (this form could help for exercising more)
- Identify 5 key barriers preventing your target habit
Make sure to use brainstorming rules when identifying your benefits and barriers: quantity over quality & don’t self-edit. Once you’ve listed out both, prioritize them accordingly.
Design the right ritual
An effective ritual is contextual, meaningful and too easy.
With our context in mind, we can use some helpful behavioral change tools to design our ritual,
- Make it contextual with simple “if/when X, then Y” implementation intentions considering your identified barriers.
- Make it meaningful with your identified benefits and personal motivators.
- Make it too easy to overcome procrastination. It should be fewer than 3 steps and take less than 10 seconds.
Here’s what a good ritual looks like: “When I get home after work, I’ll put on my favorite sports shoes and do 1 squat.”
Dedicate your future self
Align your current ambitions with your future self.
Consistency is much more important than intensity when it comes to habits. Here are some tips on how you can ensure you stay consistent in this project:
- Schedule it now: don’t wait until “tomorrow” to plan your ritual. Schedule the rest of your life around it, not the other way around.
- Make it temporary: commit to doing it 4 times. The next times after that don’t matter right now.
- Make it shared: talk about your ritual with someone whose opinion is important to you.
- Make yourself accountable: ask“did I do my best to do my ritual?” if you ever miss your ritual.
Changing your habits is an incremental process, so it takes patience to see results. It’s important to focus on the progress itself, rather than the result.
In conclusion, rituals are an essential part of our life that we can leverage to form lasting habits.
They help us to achieve goals, motivate us, and make us feel more in control. Rituals also provide consistency in our lives which is important for mental health. They increase enjoyment in mundane activities, help decrease anxiety and promote mindfulness.
The 3D framework for ritual design is a good starting point for anyone to build the right mindset and find the spark of motivation to see their target habits flourish. If you try it out, let me know what you think and if it works for you!
