The Power of Ritual
What placebo effects, heroin overdoses, and little plastic monkeys have to do with achieving your new year's resolutions
“’Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’
‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cat.
‘I don’t much care where –‘ said Alice.
‘Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,’ said the Cat.
‘– so long as I get SOMEWHERE,’ Alice added as an explanation.
‘Oh, you’re sure to do that,’ said the Cat, ‘if you only walk long enough.’” – Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
In January, a lot of us are re-examining and reconsidering what we want for our lives. It’s a good time for planning, for goal setting, for making exciting and ambitious lists of how we want things to be different this year. (And, oh my God, how much do we all want things to be different this year?!?)
I’ve long admired Jordan Ferney’s annual list of New Year’s resolutions, which are always ambitious but also exciting and which she’s good about pursuing and often achieving. We’ll talk in future newsletters about how you choose these goals, about what it means to create and pursue a good and meaningful life. But that’s not the aim for today. It’s January 16th — you’ve already got your goals for this year, right?
Most goals (have a dinner party every week, make 10 new friends, become an artist, eradicate racism, solve climate change) involve a set of habits, a repeating series of behaviors, a practice.
We’re all really tired. We answer email all day and then follow that up with an exciting evening of scrolling through three apps on our phones.
How do we cultivate a daily practice in service to the life we want?
The answer lies in the power of ritual.
Ritual – the repeated behaviors, environmental context, irrelevant little cues, intentional devoted practices, and all the associated details of anything you engage in more than once, whether helpful or unhelpful, joyful or depressing – is one of the most powerful human experiences. Ritual is our witchcraft, our magic, our prayer, our medicine.
It is how we get things done, and it’s so powerful it can cure diseases, eliminate pain, give us enhanced abilities, and even kill a person.
Ritual can kill a person? How?
Many people are familiar with the idea of death by sorcery, and scientists and anthropologists who have investigated such cases suggest that the medical causes of death in such cases are numerous, and might include stress arrhythmias, dehydration, poisoning, or other physiological outcomes of a prolonged stress response. In some cases, the cause of death by sorcery is simply unexplained.
But even in cultures where there’s no great faith in sorcery, ritual (or the lack of it) can amplify the effects of drugs, with fatal effects. Consider the case of heroin “overdose.” Dying following consumption of heroin is common: About 1-3% of heroin users die after taking the drug every year. But researchers know that addicts who die after taking heroin often don’t have blood morphine levels any higher than those who survive to use another day. In fact, blood morphine levels among heroin addicts who die after taking the drug are often suspiciously low (morphine is the metabolite of heroin in the bloodstream). And addicts who die after taking heroin are often taking their usual dose, not an unusually high dose. Often they are taking a dose from the same batch of heroin they survived just fine taking yesterday. Heroin addicts are dying, but maybe not of overdoses. So how?
In some cases, heroin addicts who die after consuming heroin are dying because they changed some aspect of their heroin-consuming ritual. A heroin addict who usually shot up with his wife together at home died after they mutually agreed to quit, and so he took his usual dose for the first time in secret, in a public toilet. A cancer patient who was given morphine daily for pain died when he received the usual dose in his brightly lit living room, instead of his dimly lit bedroom.
How does this work? The ritual of drug-taking – the room, the company, the time of day, any number of small, seemingly irrelevant cues, becomes paired with the experience of the drug, such that when the cues are present, the body is prepared for a threat to its survival, and it compensates to diminish the effect of the drug (in this case on breathing). Without the cues, the body isn’t prepared, and the risk of death by “overdose” increases.
This works the other way, too. As many as 20% of U.S. servicemembers in Vietnam became addicted to heroin while they were there. But researcher Lee Robins found that only a small number of them continued to use heroin after they came home, even though heroin is extremely addictive. Being removed from the rituals and the environment where their addictions began removed their addiction, too.
And it’s not just heroin: In fact, without the ritual of medical treatment, many powerful medicines and even surgeries, such as deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease, have little or no effect. When drug or treatment administration is hidden from the patient, so the patient does not know they have received a treatment, or when they have received it, in many cases the effect of the treatment is diminished, sometimes to the point of being ineffective.
Placebo and nocebo effects, when the ritual of receiving a medicine or being exposed to a toxin causes healing or harm even though no medicine or toxin has been administered, only the ritual, are shockingly powerful. A placebo injection of morphine in athletes improved pain endurance and athletic performance so much that researchers wondered if it should be considered doping. Telling just one person about the risk of headache from hypoxia at high altitudes caused severe headaches in a group of more than 100 students visiting a high-altitude research lab, whereas administering sham oxygen reduced the pain.
Placebo effects aren’t limitless – sham oxygen doesn’t change your blood oxygen saturation, and placebos are neither effective antibiotics nor effective contraceptives. But their effects are real, and demonstrable in a variety of neurobiological changes in the brain and throughout the body.
Our rituals of healing and of harm cause real change.
So how can you take advantage of this in meeting your 2022 goals?
Be intentional about your rituals. Attend carefully to what seemingly irrelevant details surround you when you are doing the things you want to do with your life, and recreate those elements in your environment on purpose. Add rituals of reward and indulgence to behaviors you want to do more of. Do your desired thing in a desirable, decadent way.
Similarly, when you find yourself doing things you don’t want to do, change some element of the environment or ritual under which you do them, in ways that are less appealing or comfortable. Have a designated chair for doom scrolling, and make it the least comfortable chair in the house. Have a rule that you can only buy cigarettes with pennies. Do your usual thing in an unusual or uncomfortable way.
This year, we’re cultivating a daily, intentional creative practice. And we’re using two daily rituals to support that work:
1. Mood lighting
Because paid work often happens at home these days, it can be hard to separate the work day from free time, and to retain energy at the end of that workday for creative practice. Lighting a candle (and changing the studio lighting in general) becomes a signal to begin the day’s creative practice. Because the candle is on the studio table with the art supplies – not the desk with the computer – physically walking over to the art space is another cue that it’s time for art to happen. And scented candles make the fragrance yet another cue that it’s time to work. Adding in twinkle lights, taking a minute to turn on the studio disco ball and dance lighting also communicate: Time for creative joys. You don’t have to have a studio disco ball to create this kind of ritual – just a designated space for the practice you are intending to cultivate, a candle, and some attention to what could you add or change to make the act of practicing pleasurable.
True Hue is a Twin Cities based company that makes some luxe and lushly scented candles (their Forest Fern candle smells like the forest floor after a rain). And if you’re not into spending more than 25 bucks on a candle, Target has these huge White Spruce candles for six bucks on clearance that smell like pine trees and vanilla cookies.
2. An energizing tonic
A tonic is a beverage used as a medicine, to give a feeling of vigor and well-being. It could be alcoholic or non-alcoholic, caffeinated or caffeine-free, but the essential elements of a tonic are that it is assembled with intention before creative work, and it is also totally delicious, so it feels nourishing and decadent to drink.
Here are our some of our favorite tonics lately:
Iced earl grey tea with orange slices and a dash of cherry bitters (best in summer)
Iced earl grey tea with fresh mint and lime
Hot milk with half a teaspoon of vanilla and a couple of spoonfuls of sugar (reduces anxiety, aids sleep or rest)
Cranberry juice and vanilla-orange seltzer with an orange slice (looking fab in the picture at the top!)
Coke with lime, with or without the rum
Grenadine on the bottom and orange juice on the top, with or without the tequila topper
Pink milk: Grenadine and milk – served hot or cold, this will delight both your inner six-year-old and also any actual six-year-olds you happen to need to delight.
Mulled wine: In a saucepan stir together a bottle of fruity red wine, a small glass of orange juice, a 1/4 of a small glass of lemon juice, a 1/3 c of cinnamon simple syrup, 3-4 star anise, 2-3 cinnamon sticks, 3-4 whole cloves, 6 allspice berries, a handful of brown sugar, a chopped apple, a sliced orange. Heat to a boil and stir to dissolve sugar. Simmer if you want for the ambrosial fragrance, or just enjoy (pictured hanging out with ice and drama above).
This delicious apple cider bourbon cocktail, courtesy your favorite Midwestern grocery store (pictured below).
The key to a tonic isn’t the drink – a tall glass of ice water can be a tonic, if the ice is beautiful and the glass is beautiful, and there’s three raspberries or a cucumber or orange slice or a pretty straw involved. The key to a tonic is decadence, and intention. It’s slowing down to slice an orange for the rim of the glass, or making some fancy ice, or adding a straw or a toy monkey to make you laugh. The key to a tonic is the ritual, the use of hydration to say, this is time for creative work now.
How are you creating rituals to support you in having the life you want? What are your favorite tonics? Let us know!