by Ethan Kross
Many of our beliefs are transmitted by the culture we come from, such as the expectations we have about doctors and lucky charms and all sorts of other superstitious influences in our environments. In this sense, the families, communities, religions, and other forms of culture that shape us also provide us with tools for dealing with chatter. Yet beliefs aren’t the only “magical” tool that our cultures pass down to us. They offer another approach too: rituals.
The Magic of Fishing with Sharks
World War I turned out remarkably well for Bronislaw Malinowski.
A Polish-born, thirty-year-old anthropology student at the London School of Economics, he traveled to New Guinea in 1914 to conduct fieldwork on the customs of native tribes. Soon after he arrived, however, World War I broke out. This put Malinowski in a politically awkward situation, because he was technically behind enemy lines. He was a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now at war with Britain. Meanwhile, New Guinea was an Australian territory and thus an ally of Britain’s. As a result, Malinowski couldn’t travel back to England or home to Poland, but the local authorities decided to let him continue his work. So he sat out the war in the remote Southern Hemisphere, where he embarked on a quest to understand culture and the human mind.
Malinowski’s most important work grew out of the two years he spent in the Trobriand Islands, an archipelago near New Guinea, living with the tribes there to experience their culture firsthand. With his glasses, high boots, white clothing, and pale balding head, he stood out from the islanders, who were dark-skinned, shirtless, and chewed betel nuts, a stimulant like coffee, that turned their teeth red. Yet Malinowski succeeded at gaining their acceptance and a deep understanding of their traditions, including the “magic” involved in their fishing practices.
When the islanders went out on fishing expeditions in safe, shallow lagoons, they simply grabbed their fishing spears and nets, hopped into their canoes, and glided off along the island waterways until they found their preferred spots. But when they fished in the shark-infested unpredictable waters that surrounded the island, the Trobrianders behaved differently. Before setting off, they offered food to their ancestors, rubbed herbs on their canoes, and chanted magical spells. Then they offered more magical incantations when they were out on the open sea.
“I kick thee down, O shark,” they intoned in their language, Kilivila. “Duck down under water, shark. Die, shark, die away.”
Of course, the Trobrianders weren’t actually engaging in magic. The elaborate choreography of preparation that they engaged in before going on dangerous fishing trips transcends the particularities of their tribe. They were doing something entirely practical on an emotional level that speaks to the psychology of human beings.
They were engaging in ritual—another tool for mitigating chatter.
When people are filled with grief, religious institutions prescribe mourning rites to engage in, such as ritual bathing, burying the dead, and having funerals or memorial services. When cadets attending the U.S. Military Academy at West Point experience stress before an exam, they are told that dressing up in their uniform and walking across campus to spin the spurs on the back of a bronze statue of a Civil War general named John Sedgwick will improve their exam performance. We see rituals increasingly finding their ways into the business world as well. When Southwest Airlines rebranded in 2014 with a new heart-shaped logo on the sides of its planes, pilots began touching it as they stepped on board, and this spread throughout the company, presumably as a source of comfort when facing the daily, inescapable risks of flight.
These are all examples of culturally transmitted rituals, but you can probably think of several idiosyncratic rituals you have created on your own, or those of others. The Hall of Fame third baseman Wade Boggs fielded precisely 150 ground balls, ran wind sprints at exactly 7:17 P.M. (before a 7:35 start time), and ate chicken before every game. To cite another example, for thirty-three years Steve Jobs would look at himself in the mirror each morning and ask himself if that day was the last day of his life whether he’d be happy with what he was going to do. Idiosyncratic rituals of this sort are by no means restricted to famous people. In one study, the Harvard organizational psychologists Michael Norton and Francesca Gino found that the majority of rituals people performed after experiencing a significant loss, such as the death of a loved one or the end of a romantic relationship, were unique.
Regardless of whether the rituals we engage in are personalized or collective, research indicates that when many people experience chatter, they naturally turn to this seemingly magical form of behavior and it offers relief for the inner voice.
A study performed in Israel during the 2006 Lebanon conflict found that women living in war zones who ritualistically recited psalms saw their anxiety decrease, unlike those who didn’t. For Catholics, reciting the rosary is a similar dampener of anxiety. Rituals can also help with meeting goals. One experiment found that engaging in a ritual before meals helped women who struggled to eat healthier consume fewer calories than women who tried to be “mindful” about their eating.
Rituals also positively influence performance in high-pressure situations like math exams and (much more fun but even more chatter inducing) performing karaoke. One memorable experiment had participants sing the band Journey’s epic song “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” in front of another person. Those who did a ritual beforehand felt less anxiety, had a lower heart rate, and sang better than the participants who didn’t. Lesson learned: Start believing in rituals.
It’s important to point out that rituals aren’t simply habits or routines. Several features distinguish them from the more prosaic customs that fill our lives.
First, they tend to consist of a rigid sequence of behaviors often performed in the same order. That’s different from a habit or routine, in which case the sequence of steps composing those behaviors can be looser or frequently change. Take one of my daily routines as an example. When I wake up every morning, I do three things: I pop a thyroid pill (my gland is just a teeny bit underactive), brush my teeth, and drink a cup of tea. While my physician would prefer I take my medication first (it metabolizes better on an empty stomach), that doesn’t always happen. Some days the tea comes first. On others, I’ll brush as soon as I wake up. And that’s okay. I don’t feel compelled to repeat the sequence of behaviors if I don’t do them in a particular order, and I know that their order won’t have a significant effect on me for good or ill.
Now let’s contrast what I do every morning with what the Australian Olympic swimmer Stephanie Rice does before every race. She swings her arms eight times, presses her goggles four times, and touches her cap four times. She always does this. This progression of behaviors is Rice’s personal and peculiar invention, as are lots of other personalized rituals. In fact, the specific steps that compose rituals often have no apparent connection to the broader goal they’re aimed at bringing about. For example, it’s not clear how Rice tapping her goggles and cap four times will help her swim faster. But it has meaning for her, and this connects us to the second feature of rituals.
Rituals are infused with meaning. They are charged with significance because they have a crucial underlying purpose, whether it’s putting a small rock on a cemetery headstone to honor the dead, engaging in a rain dance to nourish crops, or taking Communion. Rituals take on a greater meaning in part because they help us transcend our own concerns, connecting us with forces larger than ourselves. They simultaneously serve to broaden our perspective and enhance our sense of connection with other people and forces.
The reason rituals are so effective at helping us manage our inner voices is that they’re a chatter-reducing cocktail that influences us through several avenues. For one, they direct our attention away from what’s bothering us; the demands they place on working memory to carry out the tasks of the ritual leave little room for anxiety and negative manifestations of th
e inner voice. This might explain why pregame rituals abound in sports, providing a distraction at the most anxiety-filled moment.
Many rituals also provide us with a sense of order, because we perform behaviors we can control. For example, we can’t control what will happen to our children throughout their lives, and we can protect them only to a limited degree, which is a source of chatter for many parents. But when they are born, we can baptize them or perform any other of a variety of birth rituals that provide us with an illusion of control.
Because rituals are infused with meaning, and often connect to purposes or powers that transcend our individual concerns, they also make us feel connected to important values and communities, which fulfill our emotional needs and serve as a hedge against isolation. This symbolic feature of rituals also often furnishes us with awe, which broadens our perspective in ways that minimize how preoccupied we are with our concerns. Of course, rituals also frequently activate the placebo mechanism: If we believe they will aid us, then they do.
One of the most intriguing aspects of rituals is that we often engage in them without even knowing it. An experiment performed in the Czech Republic found, for instance, that inducing college students to experience high levels of anxiety led them to subsequently engage in more ritualized cleaning behaviors. Similar findings are evident among children. In one experiment, six-year-olds who were socially rejected by their peers were more likely to engage in repetitive, ritual-like behaviors than other children in the study who weren’t rejected.
I have personal experience with similar ritualism myself. While I was writing this book, when I was stuck staring at my computer screen with writer’s block, my inner stream of thoughts filled with doubts about whether I’d ever finish, I found myself going to the kitchen to do the dishes, wipe down the counter, and then organize the papers strewn across my home-office desk (a new set of behaviors that my wife found strange, though not objectionable given my usual predilection for making messes rather than cleaning them up). Only when I began researching this chapter did I realize that this was my ritual for dealing with the despair of the writing process and my looming deadline.
This organic emergence of rituals is seemingly a product of the brain’s remarkable ability to monitor whether we are achieving our desired goals—for our purposes, the goal of avoiding an inner voice that turns painfully negative. According to many influential theories, your brain is set up like a thermostat to detect when discrepancies emerge between your current and your desired end states. When a discrepancy is registered, that signals us to act to bring the temperature down. And engaging in rituals is one way that people can do this.
I should stress that we don’t have to wait to be subconsciously prompted to engage in rituals when we experience chatter. We can engage in them deliberately as well, as I now do whenever I’m feeling stuck at work (my kitchen and home office have never been so clean). There are multiple ways to do so. One approach involves creating our own rituals to engage in before or after a stress-inducing event or to help us deal with chatter. Experiments show that cuing people to engage in completely arbitrary acts that are nevertheless rigid in structure has benefits. For instance, in the karaoke study in which participants had to sing Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’,” they were asked to draw a picture of their feelings, sprinkle salt on it, count to five aloud, then ball up the paper and toss it in the trash. This mere onetime reliance on a ritual improved their performance.
Rituals that we see people engage in in lab settings, however, are stripped of their cultural meaning, which we know has additional benefits because it provides a sense of awe, social connection, and feelings of transcendence. With this in mind, another ready avenue for taking advantage of rituals when facing chatter is to lean on those transmitted by our cultures—our families, workplaces, and the broader social institutions we belong to. You might draw on your religion and go to a service, or even the quirky but meaningful rituals of your family. For instance, I make waffles for my kids every Sunday morning after I get back from working out at the gym. It doesn’t matter where rituals come from or how exactly they form; they just help.
The Magic of the Mind
The power of placebos and rituals doesn’t reside in supernatural forces (though some people believe it does, and that in no way diminishes the benefits of such practices). Their benefits lie instead in their capacity to activate chatter-fighting tools that we carry inside us.
Considering their potency, it’s interesting to note that while many people develop their own personalized rituals and placebos, the cultures we are a part of provide us with a vast assortment of these techniques. Culture is often compared to the invisible air we breathe, and much of what we inhale are the beliefs and practices that shape our minds and behavior. You can even think of culture as a system for delivering tools to help people combat chatter. Yet our scientific understanding of these tools is continually advancing, which raises a question: How do we spread this newfound knowledge and integrate it into our culture as a whole?
I never truly contemplated this question until I was forced to confront it when a student of mine raised her hand in class.
What she asked me changed everything.
Conclusion
“Why are we learning about this now?”
These words, asked in exasperation, came from a student named Arielle on the final day of a seminar I was teaching. For the past three months, I had spent my Tuesday afternoons with twenty-eight University of Michigan undergraduates in the basement of the Psychology Department discussing what science has taught us about people’s ability to control their emotions, including chatter caused by the inner voice. The students’ final assignment was to come to class with questions for me. It was their chance to raise any lingering doubts before the end of the course, and in most cases before graduating and moving on to the next phase of their lives. It was the session I looked forward to the most each semester I taught the class. The discussions always sparked interesting ideas, some of which even led to new studies. Little did I know when I entered the classroom on that sunny afternoon that this particular final session would add a new dimension to my work as a scientist.
As soon as class began, Arielle had shot her hand up, urging me to call on her first. I obliged, but I didn’t understand what she was asking. “Can you be more specific?” I said.
“We’ve spent this whole semester learning ways to feel better and be more successful,” she said, “but most of us are going to graduate this year. Why didn’t anyone teach us about these things earlier, when we could have really benefited from them?”
After you teach a class a few times, you usually know what questions to expect. But this one was new. I felt as if I had just run face-first into a wall I hadn’t known was there.
I deflected Arielle’s question onto the rest of the class (yep: classic professor technique). Students started raising their hands and offering ideas. But I was barely listening. I was stuck inside my head, fixated on what she had said.
The truth was, I didn’t have an answer.
Eventually, class time wound down, I said goodbye to the students, and off they went into their futures. But what Arielle had been getting at lodged itself in my mind like a splinter.
Throughout my career—and throughout that semester too—I have met people desperate to escape their inner voice because of how bad it makes them feel. This is understandable. As we know, chatter can pollute our thoughts and fill us with painful emotions that, over time, damage all that we hold dear—our health, our hopes, and our relationships. If you think of your inner voice as an inner tormentor, then it’s natural to fantasize about permanently muting it. But losing your inner voice is, in fact, the last thing you would ever want if your aim is to live a functional life, much less a good one.
While many cultures today celebrate living in the moment, our species didn’t evolve to function this wa
y all the time. Quite the contrary. We developed the ability to keep our inner worlds pulsing with thoughts and memories and imaginings fueled by the inner voice. Thanks to our busy internal conversations, we are able to hold information in our minds, reflect on our decisions, control our emotions, simulate alternative futures, reminisce about the past, keep track of our goals, and continually update the personal narratives that undergird our sense of who we are. This inability to ever fully escape our minds is a main driver of our ingenuity: the things we build, the stories we tell, and the futures we dream.
It is a mistake, however, to value our own inner voice only when it buoys our emotions. Even when the conversations we have with ourselves turn negative, that in and of itself isn’t a bad thing. As much as it can hurt, the ability to experience fear, anxiety, anger, and other forms of distress is quite useful in small doses. They mobilize us to respond effectively to changes in our environments. Which is to say, a lot of the time the inner voice is valuable not in spite of the pain it causes us but because of it.
We experience pain for a reason. It warns us of danger, signaling us to take action. This process provides us with a tremendous survival advantage. In fact, each year a small number of people are born with a genetic mutation that makes it impossible for them to feel pain. They usually end up dying young as a result. Because they don’t experience, for instance, the discomfort of an infection, the burn of scalding water, or the agony of a broken bone, they don’t know the help they are in need of or their extreme vulnerability.