476. Why you need more rituals!

In a culture increasingly organised around productivity and individual choice, many of our repeated behaviours have become about efficiency rather than meaning. In this episode, we explore why even very small rituals - a meal, a walk, a song, a candle - can give shape and significance to ordinary life, particularly in our 20s. Watch on Netflix: HERE https://netflix.com/thepsychologyofyour20s We explore: Why rituals aren’t just religious or spiritual Why performing rituals is an integral part of human behaviour How rituals create belonging and maintain relationships How predictable rituals can provide an anchor during uncertainty, overwhelm and periods of change Why our 20s may particularly benefit from rituals The importance of ritualising endings Follow Jemma on Instagram: @jemmasbeg https://www.instagram.com/jemmasbeg/?hl=en# Follow the podcast on Instagram: @thatpsychologypodcast https://www.instagram.com/thatpsychologypodcast/?hl=en# Subscribe on Substack: @thepsychologyofyour20s https://substack.com/@thepsychologyofyour20s For business: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] Our favourite sources: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1088868317734944 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S109051381500077X https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00084298241238680 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1545-5300.1992.00151.x The Psychology of your 20s is not a substitute for professional mental health help. If you are struggling, distressed or require personalised advice, please reach out to your doctor or a licensed psychologist. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Jemma Sbeg?

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• 2:31Jemma Sbeg?

  Hello, everybody. I'm Jemma Sbeg and welcome back to the Psychology of Your 20s, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology.

• 2:51Jemma Sbeg?

  Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we, of course, break down the psychology of your 20s and beyond, your 30s, 40s, whatever, whatever age you are. Today, we're going to talk about rituals. I think everybody knows how important hobbies are. We need something that is outside of work, that is perhaps creative, something that you do just because you enjoy it. We know that's vital. But rituals are this whole other category of human behavior that don't get the same credit for their importance for us emotionally. Rituals are these things that we've been doing

• 3:34Jemma Sbeg?

  for hundreds of thousands of years and they ground us. They give us meaning, they connect us to others. And today I want to talk about specifically why we need more of them. For a lot of human history, society was actually structured around rituals. There were rituals for birth and for death and for marriage and for changing seasons and for leaving home and coming home. There were all these little things that we did day to day, that we did every day, same time, that connected us to other people that were really organic, like we gathered wood, we prepared food in a certain way, we sang, we danced, we prayed. Rituals are so important for us because of their role in giving life a deeper meaning.

• 4:17Jemma Sbeg?

  And the sad truth is we have fewer and fewer of those moments. Our days are now incredibly functional and they're incredibly productive. Like we wake up, we check our phones, we work, exercise, eat, watch something, sleep, repeat. And a lot of what researchers are saying is that all of that has been stripped of these little moments where we actually have to connect with what we are doing. And that is making us really, really sad and really, really isolated. So today, we are going to break down the psychology of rituals, what makes them so important, ways that you can reintroduce them into your life to feel that grounding, peaceful effect, and just some examples, some examples of things that you can do

• 5:02Jemma Sbeg?

  to actually ground yourself and connect yourself to the deeper processes happening in your life and to something that makes your life feel a little bit more important and extraordinary than your everyday life maybe is making you feel right now. I'm very excited for this episode. Without further ado, let's get into the psychology of rituals.

• 5:26Jemma Sbeg?

  So I kind of said this in the introduction, but rituals are so human. They are as human as love, they are as human as dance, as song, as sharing food. Every single human society we know of has ritualized something, has made something meaningful through these shared, repeated practices that have been passed on through generations. Yes, I said they help with human meaning. Yes, they also help with grounding. But a ritual is really what it is. It's just something that we can grab onto that is like an anchor in a storm. No matter what else is happening around us, we know that this thing will always exist for us. Because of that, the most common type of ritual is obviously religious. Prayer is a ritual.

• 6:11Jemma Sbeg?

  Leaving food or offerings on a shrine is a ritual. Fasting is a ritual. That's not accidental. A big reason we perform rituals is to connect to bigger beliefs, to connect to a higher power. So religion is often involved. But rituals have also always followed nature as well. Like the solstices and solstice celebrations are such an amazing example of how humans like to mark different points in the season and the change between light and dark. You know, winter solstice often is celebrated with fire and candles and feasting and gathering during the darkest part of the year. And summer solstice involves outdoors and flowers

• 6:55Jemma Sbeg?

  and bonfires and staying awake. And these rituals, which are deeply connected to nature and the changing of the seasons, give us a way to really engage in the natural world deeper, more profoundly. It allows us to understand our place in the world and our place in nature a lot better. So we do it for religion, we do it for nature. We also do it for very human things, things like graduations. Graduations are a ritual, game day activities are rituals. Marriage contains many rituals, walking down the aisle, the exchange of rings, wearing white, all examples. And then there's this smaller thing, which is the things that we do for us on the day to day, which I really want to talk about more in this episode.

• 7:37Jemma Sbeg?

  We journal, we do our skincare routine, we light a candle before bed. We also may have birthday rituals. We like, this is what I really want to get into. These little things, these traditions that we create for ourselves that feel personally relevant. This is what really distinguishes a ritual from a habit, a hobby or a custom. The major distinction is that a ritual is personally meaningful and it's symbolic. It contains meaning beyond what the action implies. And a lot of time, unlike hobbies, unlike customs, unlike traditions, it doesn't make practical sense. You know, it doesn't like, it doesn't make the tea any better to watch the leaves seep. I think that's like an old phrase.

• 8:22Jemma Sbeg?

  But we still do it to connect to our intention to slow down. Lighting a candle on a loved one's birthday, who's maybe passed, is symbolic because it's not going to bring them back, but it does allow us to feel their presence. Even graduation rituals, moving your tassel from right to left when you graduate, does not magically change you as a person, but it's representative of this one chapter closing and this next chapter opening. All of these things, you are trying to connect with something that is not immediately available or apparent. Maybe that is something spiritual. Maybe that is somebody who has, who has died. But it's also a way of connecting with your creativity,

• 9:05Jemma Sbeg?

  connecting with your future self, connecting with your inner child, connecting with the universe, something that doesn't immediately feel real. A ritual is a way of making it feel tangible. This is the other distinction that I think is important between having rituals and having habits or hobbies.

• 9:23Jemma Sbeg?

  Rituals aren't meant to get easier or more automatic over time. We perform habits repeatedly in a productive way so that they become automatic patterns and that that hopefully creates momentum and that momentum changes our behavior and that behavior changes our life. But rituals don't have that same requirement or, or goal. Like they're meant to be quite evergreen. They're meant to be quite emotionally fulfilling. Sometimes we want them to be hard. We don't want them to get easier. You know, the ritual of doing a hike every year on your birthday, the ritual of speaking to your parent or your family member that you've lost before bed. Is it necessarily meant to get easier doing those things?

• 10:06Jemma Sbeg?

  Or is the, the physical raw nature of it the point? Because it shows intention. I would say it's part of the point. So that's kind of what distinguishes rituals from habits. And if I haven't already convinced you, I want to talk a little bit more about why it is so important that you have something like this in your life, why it is important for you socially, psychologically and emotionally. The first point I want to make revolves around this paper from 2017 and it was published in the Journal of Personality Psychology. And the research has essentially concluded, we need rituals because they are one of the easiest ways of controlling our emotions and allowing us to choose our mental state. Especially when it otherwise feels like we don't have a choice.

• 10:51Jemma Sbeg?

  This is so important, so important when we are anxious, when we are sad, when we are unmotivated. There is one avenue to getting out of that feeling, which is that we can try and force ourselves to not feel that way. We can try and punish ourselves for feeling a way we don't wanna feel. Or we can perform an action that symbolically kind of shifts the mood for us, like slowing down, making tea, humming a certain song, lighting the same candle. Every single morning, meditating. You do those things enough times. Instead of trying to force your way out of an emotion you don't wanna have, the ritual cues your desired state of calm, of focus, of creativity, of gratitude. And this is so relevant when we feel out of control.

• 11:36Jemma Sbeg?

  One of the things that humans find probably not particularly difficult, like the most difficult thing is not knowing what's gonna happen next. Basically, the experience of uncertainty. Uncertainty, our brain interprets that as a thousand threats because it's the threat of everything that could possibly happen. And everything we don't know, all rolled into this one catastrophic potential outcome. Uncertainty represents every single bad thing that could possibly occur. So it's just naturally intensely overwhelming. When we perform rituals, even superstitions, which is some, a specific kind of ritual. We insert something that we can control, we insert something that we know will be certain, that we know will

• 12:19Jemma Sbeg?

  always be something that we can do from a place of calm rationality and intention. For example, there has been extensive research in sports psychology that shows matter of factly, that athletes who perform certain rituals before every game, before every match, before every practice perform better because they are able to control their emotional state. Rafael Nadal is a great example, famous tennis player. He had nineteen rituals, exactly nineteen rituals that he performed before every single match. And he said this was his way of ordering his surroundings to match the order that he saw in his head. So that he could perform the best that he could. And I think that's the most brilliant way of putting it.

• 13:04Jemma Sbeg?

  They create order that feels intentional. There's this really fascinating study that was published in two thousand and fifteen. It's a bit of a long one, but it's a really good one. So just bear with me. It was a study titled The Effects of Anxiety on Spontaneous Ritualized Behavior. And the researchers wanted to see whether anxiety changes the way people actually move and behave in their bodies. And the way they did this was that they split participants into two groups. One group was a low anxiety group, one group was a high anxiety group. In the high anxiety group, they said, we want you to prepare a speech. You're gonna deliver this speech to a panel of experts.

• 13:47Jemma Sbeg?

  And the speech is about a random decorative object. And you have like an hour or something. In the low anxiety group, they were like, we just want you to prepare a description. You don't have to present it to anyone. It's just a little task. Whilst they were preparing for either task, the researchers tracked the participants' movements. What they found was that when the students, the students who were in the high anxiety condition, when they were stressed. They were picking up this object and like they were handling it a lot more and they were often moving it in a really repetitive pattern compared to the relaxed group. The physical data they got basically showed that repetitive motor patterns aligned with spikes in heart rate. So essentially, the more anxious you become,

• 14:32Jemma Sbeg?

  the more you are going to try and ground yourself in something that you feel like you can control, such as, you know, turning over a little thing in your hand over and over again, like kind of bouncing your knee. As our brain experiences this spike in anxiety, what we want most of all is something that's familiar. And we want an ordered pattern of behavior that makes whatever environment that we are in more predictable. I think that gives us a really, like probably one of the best ways of understanding why engaging in rituals can feel so grounding. Why, and why we need them now more than ever. The level of uncertainty in this world is overwhelming. There is so little in our lives, or just in the world around us, that we can directly control.

• 15:17Jemma Sbeg?

  And it's very easy for that to make us very hopeless and depressed. And I think rituals might not save the world, but they will save your sanity. And like, that's enough. And the sad thing is that despite knowing the deep psychological importance of these things that we do for ourselves, of these rituals, we have fewer and fewer of them. There are all these psychologists that basically say, the reason we're lonely, the reason that we lack meaning, the reason that we're depressed is a loss of ritualized activities in society. Because as much as they connect us to ourselves and they give us certainty, they also connect us to other people. Ritualistic behavior has this really crucial role to play in, in social bonding.

• 16:00Jemma Sbeg?

  Group rituals in particular, like they indicate, we don't have any anymore really, but they indicate that members were like minded, we share certain values, we're all doing this thing, we all care about this thing. Festivals are like an amazing example, holidays are an amazing example. Ritualistic chants have been shown, for example, to make football fans feel more connected. Which is why every team has one, like that is, the reason your football team has a chant is psychological. Um, there's just so many reasons why a ritual helps people unite around this core common thing that they all get to reach out and touch and say, we're gonna do this and we care about this together.

• 16:42Jemma Sbeg?

  The more we lose those things, the more we lose a crucial ability, not just to, like, not just to self-regulate, but to co-regulate. I wanna talk about this, what they call de-traditionalization or de-ritualization, a little bit more. We're gonna take a short break and then when we return, we'll get into it.

• 17:05Jemma Sbeg?

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• 17:49Jemma Sbeg?

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• 18:32Jemma Sbeg?

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• 19:59Jemma Sbeg?

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• 20:07Jemma Sbeg?

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• 21:23Jemma Sbeg?

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• 21:44Jemma Sbeg?

  So the world is losing its rituals. This we know. We know this from our experience. We also know because it's been extensively detailed. And there's a really amazing book on this that was published in 2022 by the Korean German author, um, Byung Chul Han. And he basically said, well, what I've already said, we've lost rituals, that's making us sad. But he was like, why? Why has this happened? And that's where I think his work was very interesting. The first thing he says is religion is a less deeply ingrained part of our daily life. Our life is less structured around prayer, church, those sort of things. Since the 1980s, I found the statistic that basically said

• 22:26Jemma Sbeg?

  the amount of people who would say, I am religious, I follow a religion has halved. This has been the biggest driver towards that thing I mentioned before, de-traditionalisation. In the past forty, fifty years, the level of inherited social traditions or cultural traditions we have been doing has rapidly decreased because a lot of people are moving away from major institutions like the church. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? If we're looking through the lens of rituals alone, it's not great. And it's not great because those rituals haven't been replaced. Maybe some of those things needed to go, but there's been nothing that's kind of filled the hole left by these things that we did as collectives.

• 23:10Jemma Sbeg?

  That is the first reason that we are losing our rituals, less people are religious. The second point this author makes is about money. Rituals inherently feel good. It feels good to do things over and over again for you symbolically. And companies have realised that they can benefit from that good feeling financially if they can bottle that feeling up. So they've commodified, they've commercialised, and they've turned rituals into consumer experiences. Instead of being something that you do with lots of people and you do symbolically, they've become something that you can buy. You know, getting sunlight, first thing in the morning is a ritual to like wake yourself up, has turned into a red light mask.

• 23:52Jemma Sbeg?

  Carefully like brewing and labouring over your coffee that you're making for your family has turned into like buying a trending drink from like Starbucks or somewhere. Christmas and holiday rituals that used to be small and inexpensive, like putting sweets or coal in a stocking, has now turned into dozens of elaborate gifts, themed decorations every single year. Small things that used to be purely symbolic and they were meant to be fun. It now feels like sometimes there's some pressure around them and that they've been perhaps hijacked and made into these like cheap and easy dopamine pathways because companies have taken the essence of what a ritual is and found a way to make a lot of money out of it

• 24:35Jemma Sbeg?

  by making it feel like this is something we absolutely need in that form. Remember the thing we said at the beginning? Rituals aren't necessarily meant to be easy. They're not meant to be as easy as buying something. They're not meant to always be pleasurable. Rituals occur because they create depth and connection. So the more we turn rituals into something that we need to buy a specific product for, or something that we need to have a specific item for, or something that we need to pay to perform, the worse our general emotional wellbeing is going to be because we are losing something that was otherwise completely free, which is small symbolic acts, small things, small touchstones

• 25:18Jemma Sbeg?

  that you do every day, you know, touching the pole of your front porch before you leave for work or for school. Really like having silence in the morning, all these little things that it's like, well now, I can like, if I can make money off of that feeling, there are a lot of people who are gonna, who are gonna do that. There's also another point he makes, which is that we have fewer and fewer rituals because we are less connected with nature. This is probably my favourite explanation. Sixty-six percent of the world's population lives in urban areas. Historically, many of our rituals were organised around the natural world. The changing of the seasons is one of them. Solstices, as I mentioned, is another, but harvests,

• 25:59Jemma Sbeg?

  the phases of the moon, planting and gathering food, winter, the transition from light into dark, dark into light. As our lives have moved more indoors, specifically what he says is that the seasons have mattered less because we are able to basically erase natural cycles in our everyday life. Like if you go from work to home, it might be the same temperature everywhere, but the place, like, but the journey in between. You're not as connected with what's happening in the natural world around you. Winter, for example, used to be this reason for us to slow down because it's cold outside, we can't work, the harvest isn't like this, food isn't being produced. Now we're expected to really maintain the same pace continuously,

• 26:44Jemma Sbeg?

  regardless of like how sad you feel, regardless of like how dark it is outside, regardless of like if you wanna work or not, even though your like internal evolutionary clock is like, well, this is the time for rest. Even though there's this seasonal rhythm that's like, this is the time to really to kind of let myself rot so I can bloom again in spring. Like, we don't have that. There's, there's fewer and fewer moments of transition and change when our lives are the same every single day and when we're expected to be productive every single day. And that has, in his mind, come directly from a disconnection from nature. The final thing I'll say about this is rituals haven't been erased like entirely.

• 27:30Jemma Sbeg?

  I think they've just been replaced by as well productivity habits that mimic and fulfil our same need for repetitive behaviour, but aren't as meaningful. So like gym, meal prep, habit stacking, maximising productivity, things that we do every single day, the structure and organisation and routine of life has kind of partially filled the gap that was left by a loss of rituals, but not fully. We live in this society that has replaced sacred acts that were meant to ground you and calm you with productive acts. We have traded like ancient communal ceremonies for optimising habits

• 28:11Jemma Sbeg?

  that is really basically just trying to make you more productive and more efficient because that is what the modern economic systems we live in require of you, and that's how they measure your worth. How much are you doing? How much are you putting out there? Rituals have nothing to do with that. It really doesn't matter. They're just for you. And there's nothing inherently wrong with wanting to do better and wanting to improve yourself. But what we are missing is the other side of that pendulum. We're just swinging in one direction and not going back to a restorative space. You know, if you only ever walk, walk outside because you need to get 10,000 steps, you miss the beauty and the luxury of really enjoying movement and enjoying yourself.

• 28:51Jemma Sbeg?

  If you're only doing things because it feels necessary to get ahead in your career or because it's grounding and you need to be calm so that you can be productive at work, everything is always a means to, to an end of being more productive. And what this author is essentially saying is that is kind of killing our soul because everything is for output and rituals don't fit that framework. More than any group, I think that those of us in our twenties should be most worried about this. Obviously, every human could benefit. But this period of our life is defined by a lack of definition. It also, well, our twenties also have the highest concentration of change of probably any other decade other than like the six, when we're in our sixties, our twenties can involve

• 29:37Jemma Sbeg?

  all these different layers of uncertainty. We have physical uncertainty, like where am I gonna live? Are my finances in order? Is the world safe? Am I gonna find stable work? Then we have identity uncertainty. Who am I? What kind of person do I wanna be? What do I wanna do with my time, with my life? And then we have that social or relationship uncertainty as well. Physical uncertainty, identity uncertainty, relationship uncertainty. Who are my real friends? Am I always gonna feel this lonely? Am I ever gonna find love? Never, at any other time in our life do we have so many unanswered questions. It's the perfect trifecta and it's why rituals are so important because there is that undercurrent of discontinuity. What I've noticed is that,

• 30:23Jemma Sbeg?

  and you've probably noticed this as well, a lot of the changes that happen in our twenties happen really, really instantly and really, really externally. And our internal feelings take a while to catch up. Like graduation, I know I've mentioned that example a few times, but like the second you've, like, the second you've graduated, it's like, okay, in the blink of an eye, I mean, all these different things are expected of me. Going through a breakup is another example. Quitting a job, like all these things. There's all this research on the rites of passage and rituals that mark rites of passage that say moving from one state to another is not the hard part, it's the part in the middle, the part in between, what they call the liminal space or liminality.

• 31:07Jemma Sbeg?

  That is where rituals need to be applied. There was a 2018 paper published by researchers at the University of Krakow that basically said when we go through these major life transitions, like the one that we're, ones that we're going through in our twenties, yes, there are these instant changes of status, but we cannot physically or mentally or emotionally adapt that quickly. And so our sense of confusion is likely going to outlast or is likely gonna last faster than we are expected to be ready for this next chapter. These changes, particularly the ending of things, therefore require a sense of closure that they are probably not giving us. They require

• 31:53Jemma Sbeg?

  something to signify that an experience is done to kind of bridge old to new, grieve old, thank the old, move forward to the new.

• 32:04Jemma Sbeg?

  Those are where rituals are most essential, the liminality, the in-between. Every single person in their twenties needs a closure ritual for this reason. We need something that we do when things end, whether it is a job or a friendship or a year of your life or a season or a relationship, even a version of who you are. You need something to make peace with the grief of growing up. And you need something that's going to allow you to say goodbye and also still be excited for the future. Otherwise, you just constantly feel trapped in the past. There was a twenty twenty one review conducted by researchers in the Netherlands. And it looked at this, it looked at rituals specifically for grief and for closure.

• 32:44Jemma Sbeg?

  And across twenty two studies, rituals like writing letters, imagining dialogue between you and somebody who's no longer in your life, or rituals like farewell tours or ceremonial haircuts or personal ceremonies or going to the same, I don't know, place or restaurant, anything like that. Like, they all helped people engage with loss on an individual level. And it meant that they got to a place of of healing or closure a lot faster. We are so used to having funerals for people who pass, but we so rarely throw the funerals that we need for the parts of our lives that are gone. We just kind of let these chapters like fly by and then we wonder why we feel so nostalgic and like so filled with grief for who we used to be because we never fully got to celebrate

• 33:29Jemma Sbeg?

  and say thank you to that version of yourself. We never like had rituals for the changing of the seasons within us. So I want to talk about some of the rituals that we can start doing to fill that hole. And why I personally think if you are feeling a deep dissatisfaction or nostalgia especially, or confusion within you around your twenties, maybe this is exactly what you need. You don't need to journal a thousand pages, you don't need to reminisce or go back. You need a ritual to say goodbye, you need a ritual to close things and you need a daily ritual to really ground yourself in where you are now, in what you want to be right now and in who you want to be going forward. So I'm gonna talk about that a little bit more after this break. Stay with us.

• 34:18Jemma Sbeg?

  You know that feeling when your skin just needs a tall drink of water? That's what Clinique Moisture Surge One Hundred Hour Moisturizer is for. Moisture Surge One Hundred Hour Moisturizer absorbs instantly and hydrates for one hundred hours for plump glowing skin. That is correct, one hundred hours. It is a lightweight, oil-free gel cream, safe for sensitive skin. It's allergy-tested, it's fragrance-free, it absorbs quickly, so skin feels hydrated without feeling heavy or weighed down. I use this daily and I'm very picky with what goes on my skin. I have a combination skin type, so I really don't want to feel too oily or too dry.

• 35:02Jemma Sbeg?

  And this product is perfect for that. I also find that Moisture Surge is a great lightweight base. If you like something under your makeup, it makes your skin look so plump and soft, especially first thing in the morning when it's maybe not looking that way. Basically, I think it feels exactly like how you want a moisturizer to feel. Fresh, lightweight and deeply hydrating. Try Clinique Moisture Surge One Hundred Hour today at clinique.com. Feels like Moisture Surge. I've been really trying to prioritize my health in a realistic way this year. And something that has kept me really motivated is my Whoop. I am such a data person, which is why I love Whoop, because I can genuinely see why my

• 35:45Jemma Sbeg?

  body feels differently depending on the day, why I'm running differently, why I'm maybe less focused. Whoop effortlessly tracks my sleep, it tracks my strain, my recovery, my stress and most importantly, my overall health. And it just gives me all that data and all those patterns so I can make better decisions, which includes knowing when to go easy and knowing when to go hard. New members can try Whoop with a thirty day free trial before committing to a membership. That's join dot whoop dot com slash psychology for your free month of Whoop. Who out here shops at CVS? Most of you, right? Well, if you're not signed up for extra care, you need to fix that because when you are, you get extra big deals.

• 36:27Jemma Sbeg?

  These are limited time offers you can find in store or in the app. And it's where being an extra care member pays off. So sign up now. If you're already shopping there, it's a no-brainer. If you're not, well, you need to do something about that as well. Signing up couldn't be easier. And once you've joined, the exclusive member discounts instantly appear. You don't have to do anything, no coupons, you'll just enjoy savings on the items you buy most. We're talking about savings on essentials like household items, snacks, health, personal care products, plus travel and seasonal stuff too, all right there in store. Couldn't be easier. Deals refresh every two weeks, so there's always something new, but they don't last long. Extra big deals with extra care. Instant savings made simple.

• 37:12Jemma Sbeg?

  Head to your local CVS or open the CVS app, look for extra big deals and start saving today.

• 37:20Jemma Sbeg?

  This episode is sponsored by Gymshark. Gymshark has spent over fourteen years obsessing over gym clothing and the people who wear it. And let me just say, I think we all know they are very, very good at what they do. No, seriously, their stuff is so good. Their everyday seamless collection is light, it's soft, it's stretchy. All of their stuff just looks good on and it's made for people who love to exercise, whatever exercise that is, lifting, cardio, Pilates, running around campus, maybe just doing errands. Discover Gymshark and find your new favorite gym clothing at gymshark.com.

• 37:57Jemma Sbeg?

  These days, there are more people than ever telling you how to manage your health. And we've all gone down an internet rabbit hole exploring the latest health trends. Your social media feed is packed with wellness advice, telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeart Media's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel and YouTube, talks to health influencers, real

• 38:38Jemma Sbeg?

  people, and most importantly, doctors, to separate fact from fiction. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 38:57Jemma Sbeg?

  Here's the kind of magic of a ritual. It can literally be anything, anything. It can be the specific ways that you like throw off your shoes. It can be the way that you make your toast. It can be the way that you brush your hair. It, anything, it can be anything. A ritual doesn't need to be ancient, it doesn't need to be religious, it doesn't need to involve other people, it doesn't need to be even spiritual. It, it, it really just is a way of demonstrating intention towards an area of your life that maybe feels neglected. I think a great place therefore to start looking, if you feel like, okay, where am I gonna put a ritual, is look at your week.

• 39:39Jemma Sbeg?

  And try and figure out where is a place where you're like, there is no meaning here. And because there is no meaning, this thing, this moment, this transition doesn't feel significant. Logging off from work, struggling to transition into like your life outside of work is a great example. If you find that you like finish your week and you feel like you did nothing, there's no meaning, another example, if you feel disconnected from yourself at the end of the night, another example where there is a lack of meaning, a ritual needs to be added. And the best pathway is thinking about, how can I be more present? And that often means, how can I do something that's gonna draw me out of my mind and into my senses so that I can like fully be in this moment that I want to, want to feel more important for me?

• 40:22Jemma Sbeg?

  Maybe it's sight, you know, noticing butterflies or rainbows. Maybe it's sound, playing a new album every Sunday night whilst you're cooking. And that really symbolizes like the emotions of the week for you. Touch is like quite an easy one, having a hot shower or a hot bath at the end of the workday, just to be like, I am symbolically washing this off. I am ready to pay attention and not be at work. All of these contain a sense and then they contain like a metaphorical why, like they represent something, you know? Why count butterflies and rainbows? Because they are symbolic of somebody who has passed. Why listen to a new album? Because it is symbolic of an, of an emotion that you felt that week.

• 41:07Jemma Sbeg?

  Why do any of these things? Psychologically, it's because like a ritual has to feel important to you. It has to feel like I'm doing this for something beyond just me. Like, otherwise you will never do it. This is what creates this thing we know as intrinsic motivation. A ritual that somebody else gives you that doesn't feel personally significant is gonna feel like a chore. That is why a lot of people kind of are walking away from like the traditional idea of religion because it's like, well, this ritual of prayer, of this ritual of whatever, like, doesn't feel important to me. You need to do something that offers a metaphor for your life in a way that maybe only you can understand.

• 41:50Jemma Sbeg?

  And that is gonna mean that you feel dedicated to this ritual and you're going to want to keep doing it. So I thought I'd finish this episode by just giving you some examples, giving you some examples for the situations that you are in. An easy one is if you don't have an end of work day ritual, you need one. Always changing your clothes after work, writing your to do list for the next morning, having a shower. Vital for being like, I'm distinguishing this area from my life from this area. Um, maybe you need a ritual for getting into a creative mindset. Before you paint, before you study, before you work, before you write, perhaps you clear your desk. That, that metaphor for a blank slate.

• 42:32Jemma Sbeg?

  Maybe you make a specific blend of tea, maybe you dance for three minutes, whatever it is. I've become really obsessed with, um, reading about the rituals of incredibly creative people. And I think it's a really great rabbit hole to go down, but the, some of the interesting ones was like Beethoven. He personally counted out sixty coffee beans every single morning. Uh, before he started to write, a lot of poets and authors notoriously often do a lot of walking. Doctor Seuss would wear a specific hat when he was feeling uninspired. A lot of creative people, their avenue to feeling productive and to feeling like they are ready to make is through something that has absolutely nothing to do with making.

• 43:16Jemma Sbeg?

  They, their avenue to getting in touch with this part of themselves is something that often feels completely pointless. Why wear a funny hat? Why count sixty beans? Because it's like, this, this is, this is a metaphor, this is symbolic for me, for the kind of mindset that I wanna be in. So a creative ritual is another one. You might also create rituals around relationships, maybe you and your housemate cook together every Friday. Me and my boyfriend, um, have a bunch of rituals. We do like a movie night once a month. Um, me and my long distance friends as well, every night that we see, like any city that we see each other in. After not seeing each other for a while, we always go and get Italian. I was actually saying this to some, like, somebody before.

• 44:00Jemma Sbeg?

  The ritual that me and my boyfriend are really enduring right now is that we've, this is so weird, but we found this potato. And, um, this is strange, like, again, it doesn't have to matter to anybody but you, but we found this potato. And our little ritual has been like hiding it around the house. And it's currently missing, so it's like rotting somewhere in our home. Somebody has hid it too well, but like, it would show up in the shampoo bottle and like show up in like a shoe or like in like your headphone case. And it is this thing of like, Tom's at work, I'm at home. And then I find the potato and I'm like, oh my God, I'm thinking about you. And then I go to the gym and he's, he's at home and it's like, oh, the potato. And it's like, why, what does a potato mean? Nothing. But there's a meaning applied to it, which is I hid this potato for you.

• 44:44Jemma Sbeg?

  I participated in the ritual of being like, I'm gonna make space in my day to pick up this rotting vegetable and hide it. Because that's meaningful. So maybe you and your partner, if you're feeling, uh, like you've lost a spark, need to go to the grocery store and get a potato. It's a, it's a specific like mini gem potato as well, if you really wanna do this by the book. And then of course you can do rituals around solitude, which are probably the most important. The first thing you do every holiday morning or like the first day of every holidays, you go for a walk by yourself. Every Sunday, you do five pages in your journal. Every Saturday morning, the first thing you do is go and watch the sunset. Maybe you do a solo trip every year on your birthday, something like that.

• 45:28Jemma Sbeg?

  I also think we need solo rituals around achievement as well. I think we are often terrible at not marking achievement, the way we don't mark years of our lives. When you've worked really hard on something for months, it's the habit of just being like, I've sent that off, it's done and I'm so relieved. That you don't celebrate it is, is very much ingrained in us. And I think instead of doing that, mark that achievement, mark moments in your life. Go and buy yourself some fresh flowers, take yourself out for lunch every time you meet a really important deadline. One of our researchers, Libby, is currently doing her PhD thesis.

• 46:07Jemma Sbeg?

  And she gave me this amazing example, which is that each time she finishes a chapter of her thesis, she takes the afternoon off and she gets her nails done. Not only does she mark the occasion, but she was saying she gets a different pattern every single time. So every single chapter of, of her thesis has had its own set of nails that has written it. I feel like that, isn't that such a great idea? And like, I, I just think that's a beautiful way of being like, look at my progress. Look at how I'm marking time, look at how I am marking my own achievement, rather than just allowing a year of my life or an event in my life or an activity in my life or a relationship.

• 46:47Jemma Sbeg?

  Just be this like big clump of years or this big clump of moments where nothing distinguishes one moment from the next. And nothing feels intentional, I'm just trying to live through this moment. I feel like you have plenty of ideas to go off of here. And I would often, like, I would love if you shared any that you personally have. If you and your partner also hide potatoes from each other, I will personally send you a signed potato. That sounds like too big of a promise, but, um, no, I wanna know if you have something silly like that. And leave a comment on Spotify or DM me and I'll make a big master list of ritual ideas that if you're feeling like you're lacking, you can maybe go and steal, steal something from that list.

• 47:30Jemma Sbeg?

  I hope I've made a good argument for why you need more rituals. Why we've, what, what we've lost in society by removing these spiritual moments, these traditional moments, these rites of passage. I feel like we'd all be a lot happier if we just did winter and summer solstice. Or if we just had a few more traditions that weren't marked by spending money, but about connecting to the natural world and connecting to the things around us. So any way that you can find a way to do that for yourself, I think will benefit you deeply and psychologically. That is what every single piece of research I have read on this has said. It is so rare to find a research area in psychology or anywhere that's like, oh no, we all agree that this is important.

• 48:15Jemma Sbeg?

  This is one of those areas. Every single human needs something that they do, week after week, year after year, to feel like, to feel a sense of the passage of time and to feel like they are living within it. So thank you for listening. Thank you to Libby, who helped me out with this episode. Um, I wanna know what her nails are. I might text her after this and say, what nails did you use for your last chapter? Cause I feel like that is such a great idea. Make sure that you check out the podcast on Netflix, if you haven't done so already, that's correct. This episode and many others are now on Netflix. If you prefer a visual guide or a visual, um, companion to my voice. The visual companion being my face on the TV or on your phone.

• 48:59Jemma Sbeg?

  I will leave a link in the description. You can also follow us on Instagram, on Substack, it's all down there. Until next time, be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself. We will talk very, very soon.

• 49:14Jemma Sbeg?

  I've been really trying to prioritize my health in a realistic way this year. And something that has kept me really motivated is my Whoop. I am such a data person, which is why I love Whoop, because I can genuinely see why my body feels differently depending on the day, why I'm running differently, why I'm maybe less focused. Whoop effortlessly tracks my sleep, it tracks my strain, my recovery, my stress. And most importantly, my overall health. And it just gives me all that data and all those patterns. So I can make better decisions, which includes knowing when to go easy and knowing when to go hard. New members can try Whoop with a thirty day free trial before committing to a membership. That's join dot whoop dot com slash psychology for your free month of Whoop.

• 49:58Jemma Sbeg?

  This episode is sponsored by Gymshark. Gymshark has spent over fourteen years obsessing over gym clothing and the people who wear it. And let me just say, I think we all know, they are very, very good at what they do. No, seriously, their stuff is so good. Their everyday seamless collection is light, it's soft, it's stretchy. All of their stuff just looks good on and it's made for people who love to exercise, whatever exercise that is. Lifting, cardio, Pilates, running around campus, maybe just doing errands. Discover Gymshark and find your new favorite gym clothing at gymshark.com.

• 50:36Jemma Sbeg?

  Hey, question, are you an extra care member at CVS? Because there is literally no reason not to be. It's super easy to join and members instantly get extra big deals on things you buy most. I mean, this is stuff you're already buying, things like snacks, personal care products, all of it. And after you join, the savings just show up. Deals refresh every two weeks, but they don't last long. Head to your local CVS or open the CVS app, look for extra big deals and start saving today. You know that feeling when your skin just needs a tall drink of water? That's what Clinique Moisture Surge One Hundred Hour Moisturizer is for.

• 51:17Jemma Sbeg?

  Moisture Surge One Hundred Hour Moisturizer absorbs instantly and hydrates for a hundred hours for plump, glowing skin. That's right, a hundred hours. It is a lightweight, oil-free gel cream, safe for sensitive skin. It's allergy tested and fragrance free. I use this all the time. It makes my skin feel so fresh and plump and glowy. Even under makeup, I still see an amazing difference. It never leaves my skin oily or tacky. Try Clinique Moisture Surge One Hundred Hour today at clinique.com. Feels like moisture surge.

• 51:57Speaker 02

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.