How Rituals Rewire Your Brain

You can spend weeks trying to find a single, satisfying, comprehensive definition of the word ritual, but we simply don't have one.

- JESSICA BARON

We can claim that rituals are sacred, public, symbolic performances or private, mundane daily activities, but the truth is that it's a fuzzy concept.

That's an interesting quandary since researchers from business psychology to neuroscience have shown that rituals have social, psychological, and even physiological effects on us, making us less anxious and more resilient. And this effect is measurable. In fact, researchers from Harvard Business School found that performing a task we believe is a ritual can lower our heart rates, ease anxiety, and help us perform better.

Generations of anthropologists, sociologists, and theologians have argued about the origins of human civilization. The argument used to be that it was agriculture that got us to settle down into communities. Now, many researchers believe that sharing rituals was the key-ritual gathering places are older than farming sites.

Catherine Bell, the late scholar of religious studies who wrote the book on ritual (actually, she wrote two), concluded that strict definitions leave out many important aspects of ritual activity. Ronald Grimes, who founded the field of ritual studies, has pointed out that even trying to classify rituals into types is a recipe for failure because it is "not a precisely delineated analytical category."

So while rituals may define us, we have a hard time defining them.

One way to look at rituals is a series of activities prescribed as part of worship. And indeed, religious rituals have been found to create social bonds, which can lead to increased feelings of belonging and, subsequently, an increase in wellbeing. These rituals can reduce feelings of isolation and even symptoms of depression. Public religious ceremonies have even been found to affect the brainwaves of both participants and observers, stoking emotional reactions that bind people together and make them more likely to believe in the efficacy of the ritual being performed.