The power of rituals on our wellbeing
Written by Anna Gibbons
With the festive season fast approaching, you’ll no doubt be attending end of year functions and decorating your Christmas tree. But do you notice the rituals you have consciously (or unconsciously) created for yourself? By increasing our awareness of the little things that we incorporate in our daily life to help us relieve stress, we can really amplify their benefits, which we all know we can do with right now after a challenging year on all fronts.
Whether you know it or not, you will have rituals that exist for you and the science suggests it provides certainty and a sense of control for your brain. Rituals are not just religious or cultural acts, albeit these have historical legacies and ample research around the strength of these cultural and religious rituals. They are simply a behaviour or an act you do regularly at a certain time of day or year.
Before every show, Beyoncé listens to the same playlist, performs stretches, and meditates for precisely one hour. This is part of her pre-performance ritual. Sport athletes know that their pre-game rituals help to enhance their performance by providing the brain a sense of calm to combat the pre-competition nerves.
“At Best of Today, we want you all to be clever this festive season and slow down enough to be consciously aware of your rituals, savour the experience and sense of control they provide for you and notice the pleasant feelings of familiarity and the calmness they offer. ”
Rituals can be like anchors for boats in a perfect storm. They can also simply help to structure our lives. People perform group rituals that demarcate significant social events and milestones such as singing at birthday parties, celebrating at weddings, and mourning together at funerals. Individuals also have personalised rituals that help to organise their day, such as getting that morning cup of coffee, performing a bedtime routine, or stretching before a shower.
We’re challenging you to be creative and think of ‘new rituals’ too. For example, we just celebrated Thanksgiving in our house for the sixth year in a row. Despite not having any American connection, I consciously decided to adopt this annual ritual simply because I loved the positivity, presence, and gratefulness that this tradition provided not only for myself, but for my nearest and dearest.
What ritual can you adopt?
During Lockdown, people sadly experienced negative effects on their wellbeing when rituals were taken away. No more takeaway coffees from your favourite café, postponed 21st parties and graduations, and even more heart breaking, no weddings or funerals. Not being able to mourn the loss of a loved one in a ritualistic way that we all expect to be able to do has created a huge wave of grief, depression, fatigue, motivation loss and even PTSD and anxiety. The true effects of this are yet to be recorded and fully recognised.
Let’s dial up the rituals now more than ever before! They are the antidote to this anxiety-riddled pandemic which we are all currently experiencing or witnessing on some level.
Examples to get you started:
Lighting a candle to say a prayer to start your day (it takes 60 seconds and recently I have started to do this before getting four kids out the door).
Take a mindful walk around the block each morning before breakfast.
Change your work clothes when you get home as a ritual to transition from work to home (Mr Brown putting his slippers on as soon as he walked in the door was a clever man).
Playing the same song during the school drop off or pick up to help provide certainty for your kids.
Family rituals – pancakes on a Sunday, Funday Friday with takeaways, Teas on Knees on a particular night, the way you say goodnight, Peaks and Pits around the dinner table...
If you are working from home, it’s even more essential to create a ‘close off’ for the day. E.g., move your computer out of view or put a blanket over your workstation to keep it out of sight. Take control and create a boundary between work and home time. No ritual is silly if it’s providing compartmentalisation for your brain.
Pulling the curtains at night with conscious thoughts of “goodbye world, hunker down time”. Yes, this is seriously a ritual for me.
Remember your purpose (what gets you up in the morning and keeps you going through tough times) when you order your coffee each morning, in your reusable coffee cup of course!
Try a Christmas ritual borrowed from another country. Particularly if you are sharing Christmas with a ‘new-Kiwi’, try incorporating some traditions that they are familiar with from their home country.
The Takeaway
You don’t have to be a world-famous singer or athlete to have your own ritual. You will have one that you do that you just don’t realise. But we want to challenge you to become more aware of them and bank them for all that they offer to boost your wellbeing.
Our rituals hold us, shape us, sustain and connect us. Write down your rituals in your Best of Today Journal or notebook so you can reflect and increase your awareness of them.
Rituals do not have to be religious or cultural. Be creative and think outside of the box and create new rituals for yourself.
Best of Today Programme
As part of the Best of Today Programme, we encourage workplaces to create their own rituals including a 20-minute meeting that focuses solely on wellbeing and positive culture activities. We firmly believe that it’s the small habits that create the biggest transformations in people’s happiness and wellbeing.
Wellbeing is Productivity Journal
Journaling is a great way to work with your brain to get the best out of it each and every day. Give a gift that will help your friends and whānau live their very best lives.