Struggling To Build Habits? Try Rituals Instead.
Contrary to popular belief, going to the gym is not a habit.
Personally, I’ve been going to the gym for years, and it’s still not automatic. I’ve never once walked into the gym and said, “How strange! I don’t even remember driving here. I must have done it without thinking about it.”
The thing is, many times when people talk about acquiring habits, they’re confusing them with rituals. To help clear the air:
Rituals are distinct from habits in that a habit is a behavior that you repeat until it becomes involuntary (or nearly), while a ritual is a behavior or pattern of behaviors that you perform deliberately.
Putting on your seatbelt when you get in the car is a habit. Brushing your teeth is a habit. Washing your hands after you use the bathroom is (hopefully) a habit.
Sitting down and doing creative work is a ritual. Cooking a healthy meal is a ritual. Performing a workout is a ritual.
Rituals, when repeated often enough, certainly become easier to perform, but they never have the automaticity of a habit—which is one of the reasons why I love them. What I find really beautiful about rituals is that they require a certain level of mindfulness to execute.
The more mindfulness you have, the more you will get out of your action, whether your goal is to efficiently improve at a skill, ingrain a new practice into your routine, or simply to savor an experience.
Here are 3 places where your consistency and results can benefit from thinking about rituals over habits:
Studying or Learning a New Skill
In order to learn a skill or study efficiently, you must employ deliberate practice.
Deliberate practice involves constant monitoring of your progress, taking the time to pinpoint where you’re the weakest, and intentionally strengthening those areas before moving forward.
If you’re a violinist like me, this means correcting your wrong notes rather than playing a piece straight through. Or if you’re a grad student, this means practicing problems and retrieving information to test your memory rather than rereading and highlighting your text.
Deliberate practice, as you may have gleaned, requires mindfulness.
Developing a New Routine
Common advice on developing a new habit includes suggestions like creating a schedule, designing your environment, and starting small. But no matter what behavior you’re starting—on any day, in any place, at any time—you’ll need to be mindful of your internal and external environments in order to embed the cues into your daily routine.
Similarly, if you’re not performing the action consistently, you’ll need to use mindfulness to troubleshoot your behavior. And depending on what behavior you’re practicing, it may never become fully automatic—although your initial cue may become effortless.
For example, my writing ritual includes: making a cup of tea > opening my time tracker, playlist, and word processor > putting on my headphones > writing.
Putting on my headphones has become such a powerful cue for me that sometimes I forget to start my music and I’ll find myself finishing an article an hour later, having written in complete silence.
While writing requires mindfulness, putting on my headphones doesn’t.
Savoring or Entering a Flow State
Let’s say you don’t care about improving a skill or starting a new behavior—you simply want to get more out of what you already do.
Savoring is the act of increasing your awareness and appreciation of experiences such that you can deliberately intensify and prolong positive feelings.
Research has shown that the benefits of savoring include stronger relationships, improved mental and physical health, and increased creativity in solving problems, and, in a study done on older adults, higher life satisfaction.
A state of mind where you become fully present, intensely concentrated, and deeply rewarded by an activity is known as a flow state. Becoming fully immersed requires you to be fully present.
In addition to experiencing greater positive emotions during the moments you spend savoring or in a flow state, the more you associate feeling good with a specific experience, the more likely you are to continue engaging in it, leading to increased consistency.
Ritual Coaching Collective is named thus because we don’t coach individuals on automaticity. We teach others how to utilize their mindsets and mindfulness in order to introduce productive, meaningful rituals in their lives, deal with the inevitable barriers that arise, and build intrinsic motivation to perform them with ease.
Whether you want to perform a simple action like evaluating your hunger level before a meal, or consistently execute a series of actions like getting dressed > going to the gym > working out > stretching > and returning home…
…I can promise that you’re going to be more successful if you focus on increasing your level of mindfulness and turning your desired actions into rituals instead of trying to build habits by going on autopilot.
More efficiency, consistency, and better results are waiting for you…inside your rituals.
This article was originally published on January 12, 2019 and was revised on January 9, 2022.