476. Why you need more rituals!

0:05 Hello everybody, I'm Gemma Speck 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, of course, break down the psychology of your 20s and beyond, your 30s, 40s, 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...

0:57 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 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.

1:24 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. 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. And the sad truth is we have fewer and fewer of those moments. Our days are now incredibly functional and they're incredibly productive. We wake up, we check our phones, we work, exercise, eat, watch something, sleep, repeat.

2:09 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 to actually ground yourself and connect yourself to your 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

2:52 for this episode. Without further ado, let's get into the psychology of rituals. 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.

3:32 It's just something that we can grab onto and 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. Leaving food or offerings on a shrine is a ritual.

3:48 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. 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. Winter solstice often is celebrated with fire and candles and feasting and gathering during the darkest part of the year. Summer solstice involves outdoors and flowers 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

4:39 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 is the exchange of rings, wearing white, all examples. And then there's the 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.

5:12 We journal, we do our skincare routine, we light a candle before bed. We also may have birthday rituals. 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.

5:50 It doesn't make the tea any better to watch the leaves seep. I think that's like an old phrase, 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 died. But it's also a

6:37 way of connecting with your creativity, 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. 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. They're meant to be quite evergreen. They're meant to be quite emotionally fulfilling. Sometimes

7:25 we want them to be hard. We don't want them to get easier. 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 or is the physical raw nature of it the point because it shows intention? I would say part of the point.

7:50 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 researchers essentially concluded that 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.

8:25 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 the way we don't want to 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 want to have, the ritual cues your desired state of calm, of focus, of creativity, of gratitude. And this is so relevant when

9:08 we feel out of control. One of the things that humans find probably not particularly difficult, like the most difficult thing is not knowing what's going to 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 a specific kind of ritual, we insert something that we can control. We insert something that we know will be certain,

9:51 that we know will always be something that we can do from a place of calm, rationality, and intentionality. 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 of famous tennis player. He had 19 rituals, exactly 19 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. They create order that feels intentional.

10:42 There's this really fascinating study that was published in 2015. 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.

11:18 You're going to deliver this speech to a panel of experts. 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 student's 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.

11:56 The physical data they got basically showed that repetitive motor patterns aligned with spikes in heart rate. So essentially, the more anxious you become, the more you are going to try and ground yourself in something that you feel that 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.

12:31 I think that gives us a really, like probably one of the best ways of understanding why engaging in rituals can feel so grounding and why we need them now more than ever. The level of uncertainty in this world is overwhelming. There's so little in our lives or just in the world around us that we can directly control.

12:52 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 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.

13:12 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.

13:30 Ritualistic behavior has this really crucial role to play in social bonding. Group rituals in particular, we don't have any anymore really, but they indicate that members... We're like-minded, we share certain values. We're all doing this thing, we all care about this thing. Festivals are like an amazing example.

13:50 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. The reason your football team has a chant is psychological. 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 going to do this and we care about this together. The more we lose those things, the more we lose a crucial ability, not just to self-regulate, but to co-regulate. I want to talk about this, what they call de-traditionalization or de-ritualization a little bit more. We're going to take a short break and then when we return, we'll get into it. So the world is losing its rituals.

14:42 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 Byung-Chul Han. And he basically said, what I've already said, we've lost rituals. That's making us sad.

15:00 But he was like, why? Why has this happened? And that's where I think his work was very interesting because 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 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, detraditionalization. In the past 40, 50 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

15:48 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 whole left by these things that we did as collectives. 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.

16:18 It feels good to do things over and over again for you symbolically. And companies have realized that they can benefit from that good feeling financially if they can bottle that feeling up. So they've commodified, they've commercialized, 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 as a ritual to like wake yourself up has turned into a red light mask.

16:48 Carefully like brewing and laboring 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 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 by making it feel like this is

17:32 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 well-being is going to be because we are losing something that was otherwise completely free, which is small symbolic acts, small things, small touchstones that you do every day, you know, touching the pole of your front porch before you leave for

18:19 work or for school or really like having silence in the morning, all these little things that it's like, well, now if I can make money off of that feeling, there are a lot of people who are going to 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 favorite explanation. 66% of the world's population lives in urban areas. Historically, many of our rituals were organized around the natural world. the changing of the seasons is one of them, solstices, as I mentioned, is another, but harvests, 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,

19:05 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 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 food isn't being produced. Now we're expected to really maintain the same pace continuously, regardless of how sad you feel, regardless of how dark it is outside, regardless of like, if you want to work or not, even though your like internal evolutionary clock is like, well, this is the time for rest.

19:52 Even though there's the 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 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.

20:13 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 entirely. I think they've just been replaced by, as well, productivity habits that mimic and fulfill our same need for repetitive behavior, but aren't as meaningful.

20:41 So like gym, meal prep, habit stacking, maximizing productivity, things that we do every single day, the structure and organization 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 optimizing habits 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 you're doing, how much are you putting out there?

21:20 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 restorative space. If you only ever walk outside because you need to get 10,000 steps, you miss the beauty and the luxury of really enjoying movement and enjoying yourself. 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 an end of being more productive. And what this author is essentially

22:02 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 20s should be most worried about this. Obviously, every human could benefit, but this period of our life is defined by a lack of definition. Our 20s also have the highest concentration of change of probably any other decade other than when we're in our 60s. Our 20s can involve 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?

22:45 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.

23:09 And it's why rituals are so important because there is that undercurrent of discontinuity. What I've noticed is that, 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 the second you've graduated, it's like, okay, in the blink of an eye, all these different things are expected of me. Going through a breakup is another example. Quitting a job, all these things.

23:46 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. 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 ones that we're going through in our 20s, 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 going to last faster than we are expected to

24:37 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 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. Those are where rituals are most essential, the liminality, the in-between. Every single person in their 20s 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

25:25 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 2021 review conducted by researchers in the Netherlands, and it looked at this. It looked at rituals specifically for grief and foreclosure. And across 22 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 place or restaurant, anything like that.

25:58 They all helped people engage with loss on an individual level. And it meant that they got to a place 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 and say thank you to that version of yourself. We never 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 a nostalgia especially

26:42 or confusion within you around your 20s, 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 going to talk about that a little bit more after this break.

27:08 Stay with us. Here's the kind of magic of a ritual. It can literally be anything. anything. It can be the specific ways that you throw off your shoes. It can be the way that you make your toast. It can be the way that you brush your hair. Anything. It can be anything. A ritual doesn't need to be ancient.

27:33 It doesn't need to be religious. It doesn't need to involve other people. It doesn't need to be even spiritual. 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 going to put a ritual is look at your week 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,

28:15 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 going to draw me out of my mind and into my senses so that I can like fully be in this moment that I want to feel more important for me. 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 the emotions of the week for you. Touch is quite an easy one. Having a hot shower or a hot bath at the end of the workday just to

28:57 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 a metaphorical why. They represent something. Why count butterflies and rainbows? Because they represent are symbolic of somebody who has passed. Why listen to a new album? Because it is symbolic of an emotion that you felt that week. Why do any of these things? Psychologically, it's because 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 going

29:49 to feel like a chore. That is why a lot of people kind of are walking away from the traditional idea of religion because it's like, well, this ritual of prayer or this ritual of whatever 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.

30:08 And that is going to 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 workday 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. 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.

30:47 that metaphor for a blank slate. Maybe you make a specific blend of tea, maybe you dance for three minutes, whatever it is. I've become really obsessed with reading about the rituals of incredibly creative people. And I think it's a really great rabbit hole to go down. But some of the interesting ones was like Beethoven. He personally counted out 60 coffee beans every single morning before he started to write. A lot of poets and authors notoriously often do a lot of walking Dr. 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. Their avenue to

31:36 getting in touch with this part of themselves is something that often feels completely pointless. Why wear a funny hat? Why count 60 beans? Because it's like this is– As a metaphor, this is symbolic for me for the kind of mindset that I want to 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.

31:59 Me and my boyfriend have a bunch of rituals. We do like a movie night once a month. 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 food. I was actually saying this to somebody before, 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 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.

32:34 So it's like rotting somewhere in our home. Somebody has hit 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 at home and it's like, oh, the potato. And it's like, what does a potato mean? Nothing.

32:58 But there's a meaning applied to it, which is I hid this potato for you. I participated in the ritual of being like, I'm going to 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 like you've lost a spark, You need to go to the grocery store and get a potato. It's a specific like mini gem potato as well if you really want to 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 holiday is you go for a walk by yourself. Every Sunday you do five pages in your journal. Every Saturday morning

33:38 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. 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 very much ingrained in us.

34:06 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. 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 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 I just think that's a beautiful way of being like, look at my progress. Look at

34:51 how I'm marking time. Look at how I'm 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 just be this big clump of years or this big clump of moments when nothing distinguishes one moment from the next and nothing feels right.

35:14 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 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 want to 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 something from that list. I hope I've made a good argument for why you need more rituals, what we've lost in society by removing these spiritual moments, these traditional moments,

35:57 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.

36:33 This is one of those areas. Every single human needs something that they do week after week, year after year, 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. I want to know what her nails are. I might text her after this and say, what nails did you use for your last chapter? Because 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 experience. guide or a visual companion to my voice, the visual companion being my face on the TV or

37:16 on your phone. 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.