426. The psychology of superstition

0:05 Hello everybody, I'm Jemma Spake and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments, and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology. 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 break down the psychology of our twenties. So a few weeks ago, I saw this book in the window at a secondhand bookstore in Amsterdam, called The Psychology of Superstition. It was like you know when you see a book and it's like calling to you. It was calling to me. I'm a deeply superstitious person, have been since I was a kid. I immediately bought it and

0:58 I kind of put the question out to you guys, the listeners, asking if you wanted to hear an episode on it, and all of you said, yes, absolutely, we do. So this is that episode. Superstitious behaviors, as I learned from this book, show up in basically every single culture across every single time period that humans have been alive for.

1:23 They are an unspoken part of the fabric of humanity and it turns out they are more psychological than you would think. They're also a lot less about actually controlling outcomes and creating good luck, and more about emotional regulation and anxiety management. When we perform superstitious rituals, something deeply calming actually occurs in our minds that we can see and we can observe. Not only that, they also connect us deeply to others. They create self fulfilling prophecies because they unconsciously influence our behavior, and they may even have a little bit of an evolutionary purpose. There are also some downsides to our superstitious beliefs that we're going to talk about as well. Their relationship to conspiracy theories is

2:18 one of them. How they intersect with OCD and anxiety, to name a few others. But ultimately, I think having rituals, small superstitions, small practices that you do to mentally protect yourself or help yourself is for most people an incredibly valuable thing to have, whether you're in your twenties and beyond, and the science says it may actually help you live a more successful life to believe in something bigger than you.

2:48 So we're going to talk about exactly why that is. According to some fascinating research, plus some really interesting superstitious rituals from across the world that you may want to try without further ado. Let's get into it. So what is superstition really, Because I think you'd be surprised how many everyday things we do actually have superstitious origins. So superstition is usually defined as like any belief that a particular action, object, symbol, or coincidence can, can, and will influence outcomes in a way that goes beyond ordinary cause and effect. In other words, superstition links things that are objectively not connected so that they feel connected, often through some mystical, otherworldly maybe even religious comic force. So great example.

3:45 Classic example is like touching wood after saying something you're hoping for that you don't want to happen, so not to jinx things unconsciously avoiding saying like oh I feel excited or I feel good about this thing if it hasn't happened yet, because that feels like you're tempting fate. Maybe you wear the same earrings to every job interview or every first day, even though they don't actually rationally influence the outcome. You're superstitious about it, or you keep a lucky charm in your bag, you blow on dice, you don't want to step on the cracks, not walking under ladders because you think it's gonna kind of curse you.

4:21 Things that are objectively not related to the superstitious outcome, but that we still do. And these tiny rituals that might initially seem really insignificant, so much so that they don't even count for anything, but you still do them. You still involuntarily find yourself knocking on wood, not walking under ladders, saying a prayer when you see a black cat.

4:45 So there's this concept called half belief that was first spoken about in a paper published in twenty twenty four, and it talks about how many people, probably like you, practice superstitious things or practice superstitions even though they don't believe in them, because of how woven they are into human history and consciousness. In this paper, across two samples of participants, nearly half of these participants practiced some kind of superstitious belief or behavior, even though the majority of them was not convinced that it was actually real. So when they were asked, do you think this actually does anything?

5:21 Most of them would say no, but they still did it anyway, even if rationally we don't believe or don't have evidence that these things work. Superstitious behaviors, again, are a deeply reoccurring human event that are part of our collective consciousness. When you look at some of the oldest, most significant superstitions, that is when we can kind of see why they are so psychologically significant and therefore have survived for so long. Take, for example, displaying the evil eye.

5:56 This is actually a five thousand year old superstition originating in like Mesopotonia in the Mediterranean, and it basically says that when people are jealous or envious of you, this can actually poison our own good fortune. So by wearing an evil eye amulet, which I'm sure you see everywhere these days, by displaying that blue eye charm, this almost reverses like the curse back on the person who is thinking negatively about you and kind of strikes them down with their own envious thoughts. Nowadays, everywhere, every jewelry shop, every like every girl has one of these necklaces. But anthropological works suggest that people have been displaying some version of the evil eye of this evil eye for thousands

6:40 of years beginning with these amulets that they were finding in Egypt and in Greece. This belief has been passed down through so many generations because it maps onto a lot of aspects of social psychology in that things like envy and things like social threat have always mattered for our survival. So we employ the use of symbols as protection to manage the sense of vulnerability that we have psychologically around people who may wish us harm. The second example is Friday the thirteenth, and this is another explanation for why and how superstitions come to be. The origin of this is very, very tangled. It's like a myth of religious mythological historical events. The first I think notion that Friday the thirteenth might be a bit of a

7:33 curse date was because of the Last Supper. Judas was the thirteenth guest. The last supper it occurred on the I think on the Friday the thirteenth. I don't really know. That was like the first I guess inclination that like this date might be cursed. Other writers of linked thirteen to Norse mythology, particularly the story of Loki arriving as an unwelcome extra guest bringing chaos and death. That explanation is historically a little bit harder to pin down. Another reason why people think Friday the thirteenth maybe a curse state is because of there's been a lot of the occasions and historical events that have happened on this date. Yes, also obviously the Crucifixion, but also a number of just

8:21 like random things that don't seem interconnected or relevant to each other except for that they all shared this day. So there was a very famous bumming of bucking In Palace that fell on Friday the thirteenth. The death of many significant figures has happened on Friday the thirteenth. This shows the second way that you know, superstitions come to be through repetition, through layers and layers of stories and history that over time create superstition purely because of repeated association.

8:51 Another example that explains the final way that superstitious beliefs come to be is knocking on wood, which is one that I find myself unconscient doing all the time. One of the most common theories links it back to ancient pagan beliefs, particularly in parts of Europe, where trees were kind of thought to house spirits, God's protective supernatural forces.

9:16 In that view, when you touch a tree or later it just wood itself, it was like your way of asking for protection and showing reverence, or like quietly calling on those forces for help. It may have also come from a child's game called Tiki Tiki touchwood, where when you touch a piece of wood, you'd be safe from capture, you'd be safe from being it. We have a game like this in Australia called home Base, where I guess, like when you touch the stump of wood, the guard is protecting, like you win the game. Like there's a guard next to a stump of wood or a center piece of wood, and everybody's running around trying to get it.

9:54 Before this episode, I had absolutely no idea that that's where this tradition comes from. Every time I say something good or a wish or a desire, or even when I say something bad that could happen and I don't want it to happen, I touch would. And this just goes to show that over time, even as older religious or mythological beliefs die down and aren't necessarily something that we've been taught, the behavior still remains. It's been absorbed into our everyday group thinking. And those are three of the kind of ways that superstitions become global phenomena become communal phenomena. The big psychological question is why why do some things become superstitions that are seemingly random and others don't,

10:46 Like why do we knock wood and knock glass? Why do our brains randomly find certain things company even if there is no solid evidence to them, or just as much evidence for one thing over the other one. The I guess factors behind superstition is pattern recognition. Superstitions often begin just really randomly, with a kind of like a few examples of where you know, someone has displayed the evil eye and happen to experience prosperity, someone has knocked on wood and has been protected, maybe just out of coincidence.

11:20 People start noticing and putting together these coincidences, and that's what gives what are seemingly random things an association and a significance. Our brain only then sees the examples that confirm our beliefs or confirm our superstitions, ignoring the ones that don't. Because the pattern is so comforting it creates order.

11:49 Human brains are built to predict what will happen next in order to protect us, and they are constantly trying to connect events and for causes detect regular to live up to that mechanism or to fulfill that desire. Most of the time that is useful. It helps us to learn what effects have what outcomes, but it also means that we are vulnerable to finding patterns in often complete randomness, just because our need for safety, predictability, security demands it of us. A rather old paper from two thousand and eight from researchers at the University of Texas found that when people felt a lack of control, that is when they were more likely to perceive illusory patterns, which included leaning into conspiracies or leaning into superstitious thinking when things

12:48 feel confusing, uncertain, scary. This paper showed that the brain often prefers having any explanation even if it doesn't have evidence for it. Even if it can fully rationally explain why two things are linked, it just needs something to grab onto. That same logic appears in research on illusory control.

13:11 Griffiths and colleagues in their paper found that people with stronger superstitious beliefs also showed stronger perceptions of control in situations that were actually determined by chance. So what this means is that in ambiguous settings, some people are more likely to overemphasize the fact that certain behaviors they've done mattered.

13:37 They see themselves as more central because of their superstitions. A charm, a ritual phrase, a certain seat choice, a certain angel number. It starts to feel meaningful because the mind is attempting to reduce ambiguity to make us feel internally safe. This is also where gut feelings come in. Sometimes superstitions arrive more so as sensations or feelings, kind of like a bit of tension that we feel, or a sense that something is off, or a pull towards a certain choice. It feels superstition feels more like that listening to those things is what makes us superstitious, rather than specific rituals. Gut feelings happen because the brain is constantly scanning for patterns beneath conscious awareness, such as these ones.

14:28 We know this from so many episodes We've talked about it in. It takes in so much information we cannot deliberately think about it all at once. Past experiences, emotional memories, subtle environmental cues, microsocial signals, bodily feelings. We just can't think about it at the same time, and so it compresses all of that into a singular feeling that may be a gut instinct. Sometimes that feeling is genuinely useful.

14:53 It can reflect real learning, like when we see a I don't know, a slight momentary look on some its face, and because of past experiences, we remember that hah, the person who betrayed us in the past once had a similar look, and so even if their true intentions are overtly obvious, we get a gut feeling that something's amiss.

15:13 That's a helpful situation, or that's a helpful cue. But in situations of uncertainty, stress, fear, that same system can become oversensitive. The brain starts trying to protect us not just from real danger like that shady person, but just from the sense of ambiguity itself. This has increased one hundred, if not a millionfold, if you are anxious, because you already have a certain response to uncertainty that feels very physical, regardless of whether something is actually wrong, you already feel a million gut feelings every day just because of your anxiety that's shooting in many directions. When superstition is added in, we can make some incorrect calls, all in the name of trying to predict an outcome, trying to keep ourselves

16:00 really safe. And I think that helps explain why superstitions can feel so compelling even when rationally, again, rationally, we know that these two things are probably not linked. Having a rabbit's foot in your car and being able to drive safe like those things are rationally not linked. The conscious mind probably knows, but another part of our mind says, maybe they're not linked. Maybe there's no evidence, but why risk it. From an evolutionary perspective, it was and is still safer to overreact to possible danger than to ignore something that might matter or might protect us. Superstitions grow in that space. They grow in that space between intuition and uncertainty, where again the brain would rather do something

16:45 symbolic or that it thinks might help, then sit passively, not knowing and not being able to do anything. The only thing our brain can do in moments of uncertainty is just to kind of wait and see, or we can try this cool little ritual. A pretty notable paper from back in nineteen ninety four found that magical thinking increases under high stress conditions, especially among people with lower tolerance of uncertainty. Researchers asked, I think it was like one hundred and seventy four participants to basically complete questionnaires about magical thinking and tolerance to ambiguity. All of these people, by the way, were living in war zones during the Gulf War, and they were either exposed to regular missile

17:33 strike so that was a high stress condition, or not exposed low stress condition. What the research has found was that participants in the high stress condition who were actively living in a war zone basically were more likely to engage in magical thinking compared to those who weren't. Because under these situations where so little was in their control, they couldn't determine where a bomb or where a missile was going to drop and where it wasn't they weren't in control of the political forces that be. The only thing the mine could reach for was symbolic control, and was these superstitious beliefs that doing certain things might protect them, not doing certain things might leave them at risk. This

18:14 is such an important point. Superstition is often about fear management, as this example shows, psychological research proves that tiny actions regulate emotions precisely because they are tiny, because they are doable, and this ritualized behavior can counteract our anxieties about bigger things. These ritualized four leaf clover, knock on would evil eye behaviors are powerful in that manner. Researchers from Harvard actually demonstrated this further in a twenty sixteen paper where they got basically participants who engaged in rituals, so a sequence of symbolic actions that were very repetitive, very formal. When they did this before stressful tasks, it actually prove their performance.

19:02 This goes to show something very important. Superstition is a form of emotional regulation. Displaying the evil eye knocking you on wood may not actually change your luck, but it changes your emotional state to feel more in control. That is actually what influences the outcome, because somebody who is calmer can also think rationally, can problem solve better, will have a better outcome. That is the power of the superstitious belief. So do superstitions actually change outcomes? The answer is sometimes yes, but not in the way that you would expect. We're going to discuss all of that and more after this shortbreak. Superstitious people, I think often get a bad rap, Like we've explored why they come to

19:54 develop these rituals. Me being one of those people. I think we get about rap for being irrational and for being a little bit woo woo, or maybe not the sharpest tools in the shed, or being just anxious people who want and need anything to make us feel better. I think that is a way too simplistic perspective, and it overlooks some very deep, deep facts about human psychology and human behavior. Yes, in a sense, it is irrational to believe in something that's not evidence based, but that doesn't mean that rituals do nothing. As I said right before this break, they do and can and will continue to create a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy effect.

20:39 And here is how. There is a heavily cided paper from researchers at the University of Cologne published in twenty ten that found engaging in some kind of good luck superstition improve performance on tasks involving motor skills, memory, and persistence in part because doing or performing a superstitious ritual increased an individual self efficacy. I e their belief that they could execute the behaviors necessary to change the outcome themselves.

21:13 The lucky charm, the behavior the ritual made them calmer and gave them confidence to try something anything, compared to a previous situation where fear made them do nothing, and that ability or just that's like course change towards doing something that is what changed the outcome. I think it's kind of like when children bring their favorite stuff toy to school with them. Do remember that when you were a kid, in the first couple of weeks, you're to bring your toy to help us settle in. The toy doesn't change anything about the environment, apart from the fact that it makes it more comfortable and the positive associations the toy has induces a psychological effect in that it improves our mood and improves our emotions and makes us

21:57 feel like we can cope. Explain why athletes, performers, musicians so often develop superstitions and rituals in high pressure domains. Uncertainty is everywhere. You can train for years and still have an off day, still have a weird feeling, still blank, still have somebody throw something at you, yell at you.

22:17 People create routines around their performances, the same warm up, the same meal, the same playlist, the same socks, the same sequence of things. Because unconsciously or even consciously, it helps them manage the anxiety that things could go wrong. It helps them feel more in control of things that they're not in control of. The ritual is less about luck.

22:43 I think that's the first thing we think. We think that it's changing somebody's luck, or they think it's changing their luck. No, it's more about crossing this important mental threshold. It tells the body, it tells the mind that we're safe, we've done everything we can, and it enters them into a performance stay. It makes them feel prepared and in control for this big moment. There is also a social layer to superstition that I think people often underestimate. So many superstitions and rituals, when you break it down, are culturally inherited. They are ways of staying connected to family, heritage, ancestors in a way that makes us feel supported even in really hard situations. For example, in China, the number eight,

23:28 the color red, considered very lucky, considered a symbol that's going to bring wealth and happiness. This is a cultural wide superstition. It's also deeply tied to business, to daily life, to significant celebrations. And I actually think a big role of superstition and why people are superstitious is because it's about belonging. Rituals can strengthen social identity and cohesion and this sense that we are all held together and being guided or supported by something larger than ourselves. Studies on rituals, and particularly participation in superstitious rituals within a community, have linked ritual engagement with increased social bonding, increased social wellbeing, and increased individual satisfaction, especially in communities where shared practices

24:23 signal identity and mutual care. Think about it, who is going to perform better during an exam or a game or a job interview. Someone who feels like they belong and have people believing in them silently encouraging them. Who has a superstition that connects them to those people, or someone who feels the burden of going at it alone and who has nothing to relate to their community through.

24:48 I think it's a common sense answer for most of us. So again, this is why superstitions are so effective psychologically. They make us feeling control, They unconsciously manage our emotional state. For us, they're a form of anxiety management, and they connect us to something bigger than ourselves that is again very calming. Is there a downside? Yes, of course there is.

25:14 There always is. Firstly, the biggest downside of superstitions that we need to talk about, the same thing that pushes people towards superstitions during uncertain times is also what drives people towards conspiracies. Conspiracies are a similar form of what psychologists call compensatory control. When things feel unsafe, we want an explanation, and we want someone else or something else to blame the same way that we want to think that something else gives us luck. Think about time periods when superstitions and conspiracies have been the most ripe, during the Black Plate, during the Salem witch trials, after nine to eleven, during COVID. What is something that all those things have in common? They were very very uncertain times,

26:04 very scary things were happening that threatened our individual sense of safety, and so people flock once again to things that they think are an explanation or could provide a rational explanation, or could provide a rational cause and effect even when there isn't any evidence for it, just because they are seeking anything. They're looking for any answer, anything that could help them, anything that could ward off a bad spirit, anything that could explain a situation so that it is more manageable to them emotionally and mentally. Superstitions can also, alongside that become something that is very individually punishing rather than helpful, when they become negative rather than positive.

26:50 And I think here is a very good place to make the distinction between positive and negative superstitions, because they are very different. Positive superstitions are usually organized around luck, hope, the possibility that something really good is going to happen. These are the rituals and beliefs that people use to invite success, confidence, protection in uncertain situations, good fortune. Psychologically, these superstitions do often function as a form of emotional and psychological support. In that sense, as we've explored, positive superstitions are often less about fear the more about comfort.

27:30 They help people approach challenging situations with a stronger sense of agency, the stronger sense of control hope structure. Negative superstitions tend to work very differently. These are often built less around attracting luck more around avoiding danger, warding off bad outcomes, protecting yourself from the unknown. The emotional tone here is threat based rather than the superstition offering incouragement.

28:00 These superstitions can increase the vigilance, fear, avoidance, maybe even guilt if something bad happens and then you find out that there was a superstition all along that you shouldn't have done something. They're often bound up with the idea that something bad could happen if you get it wrong, which makes them feel psychologically heavier and more significant. It feels there's more of an urgency to perform them. That is why negative superstitions can become more time consuming or just mentally consuming compared to positive ones, because we are pulled into this preventative, anxious mindset that there is something we must do to avoid bad luck, we must do so that the bad thing doesn't happen to us. Research

28:44 has again found meaningful differences between people who are more likely to lean towards positive versus negative superstitions. Specifically, people who are more drawn towards negative superstitions are more likely to have severe anxiety, more likely to have a fear or what we call an intolerance for uncertainty and typically have a higher sensitivity to threat. Similar papers have also found that negative superstitions may be more likely to be repeated on an obsessive scale. Why simply because again they are threat based. Not doing them makes us feel like something bad is going to happen, and our brain pays more attention to the possibility of bad things happening over good things happening. Hence, they capture more of our attention.

29:33 Purely from this ancient survival mechanism point of view, the greater the imagined danger, the heart of the ritual is to dismiss. And I think this is an important caveat because this is when superstitions start to more from a playful habit, a social habit, and closer to a more threat driven coping strategy where the person is no longer asking could this help me? But can I afford not to do this thing? So this is when we need to talk about a very one specific mental condition in particular that does not mix very favorably with superstitious rituals.

30:14 I'm going to give you a chance to guess what that may be. OCD obsessive compulsive disorder superstitions quickly become very complicated and sometimes genuinely risky for people with OCD because they overlap with the same I guess, the same core logic that often drives obsessive behaviors, the same thing that drives people to check locks multiple times, to obsessively clean their hands, to excessively ruminate over the same thought again and again again, also drives superstitious beliefs. And that is namely magical thinking. Magical thinking sounds very fun, doesn't it?

30:55 Very whimsical? Magical thinking very magical, it's not. With OCD. It is the sense that a thought, image, feeling, word, small action can influence an outcome in a way that it is not realistically connected to. So, for example, someone might fear that they like, if they don't tape a doorframe exactly five times in a specific place before leaving the house, everybody in their family is going to die.

31:28 They may believe that having a violent, intrusive thought somehow increases the chance that that's gonna come true. They're superstitious mentally, so many, so many. Somebody might believe that, you know, if they don't say a prayer a certain way or do a certain ritual a certain way bad things will happen to them. The central idea is very similar to superstition, if not the same. It's that you may be able to influence an outcome through an unrelated act if only you know about it, if only you were part of the group who understands the superstition. And just like superstition, compulsions are often again attempts to cope with the discomfort, the human discomfort of not knowing. They are ways of trying to prevent harm, create certainty, neutralize danger, and therefore

32:18 feel temporarily safe. The problem is because I don't think superstitions are the problem. The problem is that in OCD this never actually resolves the fear. It just teaches the brain that the ritual mattered, that the threat must have been real, and that uncertainty isn't tolerable. This is the interesting thing. Right you perform the ritual, you do the compulsion, the bad thing doesn't happen, But you have no way of knowing whether the bad thing wasn't going to happen all along, because now you can't stop performing the ritual one time. There's been this coincidence that you've done this thing and the bad thing hasn't happened in the mind of somebody with OCD, that is an amazing thing to cling onto. We're just constantly looking for anything that can

33:06 tell us or give us a sense that we can control what is uncontrollable. For somebody who's just superstitious, these things are kind of fine, fun like enjoyable. For somebody with OCD, a superstitious belief or ritual or activity or routine. To them, it is life and death. It cannot be ignored. I remember for me, I used to have to stare at the sun once a day when I was a kid to make sure it wasn't going to explode. And if I didn't look at the sun, well, everybody was cursed.

33:35 Completely irrational, so irrational. But I did some very serious damage to my eyes because of that, And it's just a part of superstition and its interaction with OCD we need to be aware of. Similar process can happen with anxiety. People with high anxiety are often especially sensitive again to uncertainty.

33:52 Superstitions are extra appealing because they offer a quick sense of structure, something to put into action that they can do right now out instead of sitting with the distress of not knowing. Instead of seeing how things may play out, the anxious mind gets to do something, so then in that moment, yeah, the superstition, the belief the ritual does reduce the intensity of the anxiety. That makes it more likely to be repeated. But you never get to see what's on the other side of if you didn't perform the superstition. Even if somebody doesn't, even if they don't rationally think that this ritual is doing anything, it becomes what we call a maladaptive coping mechanism. So whilst superstition in OCD or anxiety related behaviors are not the same thing,

34:41 they do rest on similar psychological foundations. One of the clearest clearest differences and ways for you to tell if it's something you're worried about, is how the behavior feels. If the behavior is flexible, occasional, more lighthearted than it is distressing, it's more likely to be an ordinary ritual or an ordinary superstition. But if it starts to feel rigid, urgent, exhausting, or impossible to resist, if you feel like you have to do it, that may be a sign that something more than everyday superstition is going on. The same is true.

35:19 If the ritual keeps expanding, if one rule turns into many, or if the relief never really lasts for that long, that is a sign that your superstition is becoming its own unmanageable beast. And if that's the case, that's when you do need professional help, because it is very much manageable. That's the thing. Superstitions or magical thinking is manageable. You just need somebody who can guide you through it. And again, not all superstitions are going to turn out that way.

35:47 Not all people who are superstitious have OCD or have intense anxiety. It is just one link in one relationship that it's just important to be aware of. Okay, we are going to take one more short break, but when we return, let's go back towards the positives of superstition and rituals and talk about why having superstitions and habits maybe is important in our twenties, Maybe is something that more of us should be looking to adopt. Stay with us.

36:24 I think we all need more rituals. Superstitious or not a hill I will die on. Humanity is sadder and less connected because we no longer have the same spiritual practice as we used to. Now let me say this because people always get mad when I talk about the importance of spirituality. But there are some very very scary, sad, destructive parts about religion. No denying religion has a very terrible history for many people. But one thing most major religions did get right was that humans feel better when they have a practice like prayer, When they have a practice like visiting an altar, like saying grace, specific traditions they can return to. It provides a much needed center for people. It provides once more, something they can control

37:11 when life is uncertain. So when we talk about why superstitions and rituals matter so much, especially in our twenties, I think the answer is because this is the decade where we are most often asked to create stability without actually being given very much of it externally. We are in probably peak uncertainty times right now. Your twenties are just full of just everything could go wrong, Everything may be going wrong, and you're just trying to figure it out.

37:44 You're trying to figure out what you actually care about. You're trying to make choices without complete information. You're trying to build a life whilst probably still grieving the life you had only a few years ago. You are changing at such a rapid rate you literally some days you think you know everything about yourself. The next day you know absolutely nothing. Some days you love your friends, the next days you feel lonely. Some days you feel great about your career, the next day you have no clue how you're going to do this for the rest of your life. This is an incredibly psychologically intense thing to live through for anybody. Rituals and superstitions become important during this time because, much like the spiritual rituals we spoke

38:23 about before, they become this grounding force to return to, they're always going to be there. They are stable, They are consistent. Wearing the same earrings to every job interview, wearing red on your first dates, Saying a marchal to yourself every morning before you walk out the door, watching the same movie every year on your birthday to ensure that you have good luck for the year ahead is a powerful form of uncertainty management in an uncertain time, even if it's a very very small thing to do.

38:55 Here are some other superstitions, superstitious and rituals. I should say that you guys, provide that I think maybe something you want to consider doing in your life. You guys, the listeners wrote in with these, thank you for your contributions. Let me read some of them out. Okay, you guys ready always sitting in the same seat at the movie cinema.

39:16 Love that one. This one comes from Maggie keeping every single birthday card you receive because throwing them out would mean SASH would signify that you want that relationship with that person to end. I will be doing that one. I again superstitious. I want my relationships to be good and healthy. That seems like a smart way to do it.

39:36 This person says, I cut my hair off after making a big decision to signify SASH, prove to the universe, God, the world, question mark that I'm serious about it, not telling anyone good news until it absolutely is confirmed. I do this one. My mum was such a big believer in this when we were growing up, so I will continue to do this. I reread old journals every single New year so that I don't have to repeat the same lessons twice, watching the sunrise every year on my birthday.

40:07 I love this one, you guys know I do this. Such a version of this always donating the first ten dollars of every paycheck to show abundance and that I am protected and supported enough by the universe that I can give money away. Having cold showers on the first day of every single month in brackets. I have never missed a month for five years. Crazy. Another one that I love. My friend Erica actually keeps wine bottles from important meals in her life as a way to just kind of show gratitude. And I don't know why she does it. I think it's like a superstition that like, if she doesn't keep these bottles, it shows that she's not grateful and she won't have more nights like that.

40:52 So it's like a gratitude practice of like collecting in a gratitude practice of keeping mementos. Those are just some examples that you guys sent in sometimes. Again, I love these. They're not always about superstition, they're always about luck. I think a lot of them are about faith, and they're about repetition, and they're about control. Again, not necessarily religious faith, but faith in the broader sense, faith that this moment we're in means something that you can do hard things, that you are protected in some small way that hope is still allowed, that there is a meaning in the mystery of life, and that you are in control, that you get to come back to the things that are important to you, and you have a way of I guess,

41:37 managing the unexpected. I think there's something very beautiful about this that we kind of need now more than ever. Yes, during our twenties, but also just in this weird time of humanity. We talk about superstition as if it's silly or embarrassing or something to grow out of. But I do think a lot of the time, again thinking of those examples, what we are really doing is creating our own magic, creating our own alchemy. We are taking an ordinary moment, an ordinary object, an ordinary routine and saying this matters to me, therefore it must matter full stop.

42:13 This helps me, This makes me feel brave, This gives me a small point of steadiness. It doesn't matter if it does or doesn't, based on the evidence, it's important to me. And studies have shown that people who do have rituals, who do have routine, who do have superstitions, a belief system, grounding habits, are happier, They are more well adjusted, and ultimately they feel more capable of handling difficult things because they have copy measures, because they have something that redefines their self efficacy. That is one of the most human things about us. We are actually not just creatures of logic. We are creatures of meaning. It doesn't matter that these things are irrational. It's why we make art, it's why we sing songs. It's why we

43:00 are superstitious. It's why superstitions show up in every single culture in the world, why they are part of humanity. We want to believe in something bigger, and we want to believe that there is something significant in the small things that we do that is psychologically important in a way that doesn't always make sense, but just happens to be true. So that is the psychology of superstition. I hope you enjoyed this episode as a little summary before I say goodbye to you. Superstition is in every single culture in the world because it says something really really important about our emotional and psychological state as humans, which is that we like order, We like structure, We like feeling that we are in control when we are faced

43:46 with uncertain things. Believing that a four leaf clover gives you good luck even though it's just a clover believing that knocking on woods somehow protects you, even though there's no science to that. It's anxiety management, it's fear management, it's emotional regulation, and I think one that has overlooked far too often. Superstitions definitely can go a little bit off the rails, especially when they get mixed up in conspiracy theories and in OCD and anxiety. But ultimately they are very, very valuable and if they are not hurting anybody, there is probably a chance that they are helping you because it brings back a sense of agency. It means that you feel, I don't know safe enough to actually

44:33 do something rather than nothing, and therefore does create self fulfilling prophecies. As we've seen from these examples, it does end up changing outcomes for people, not because what they did actually mattered, but because what it made them feel and what it then allowed them to do. So there we go, the psychology of superstition. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you have made it this far and you are listening on Spotify, leave a little comment down below.

45:00 What is a superstitious belief that you have? I was just saying to a friend of mine, my belief, and this is like totally not related to my life right now. People are gonna be like, oh my god, she's gonna have a baby, But no, I really believe that before, like, if you're pregnant slash expecting a child, you should not bring any baby stroller, baby crib into the house before the child is born. Don't know why, but I am so superstitious about it, and I think when I have kids, I will not be doing that. I think it's something like an old wives tell that my mum told me.

45:35 So share yours down below. Thank you, as always to our amazing researcher Libby Cobbet for her assistance and help with this episode. You can also watch this episode of many others on Netflix. Check it out, go have a look. It's really cool. You can follow us on substack. You can also follow us on Instagram if you want more visual summaries of episodes just like this one. There's all the stuff in the description, including some of our favorites sources from this episode, So go check it out. But with all that in mind, be safe, be kind, be a little bit superstitious, and be gentle to yourself. We will talk very very soon