In our modern, secular society, the word ‘ritual’ can at times come across as antiquated. Many of us are divorced from religion in our daily lives, and ritual certainly smacks of a certain religiosity. In fact, a google search on the definition of ritual returns this: “Ritual – noun – a religious or solemn ceremony consisting of a series of actions performed according to a prescribed order.” Of course, we’ve also heard of the term used in more casual ways – your morning ritual being perhaps the most common example. The Merriam-Webster dictionary arrives at this definition of ritual (after the religious definition): “done in accordance with social custom or normal protocol.”
It seems to me like rituals can occupy some place in between the religious rites of organized religion and the drab-sounding ‘normal protocol’ of Merriam-webster. A ‘series of actions performed according to a prescribed order’ sounds like a habit or checklist, but there is something more, something sacred, to the habits and checklists we consider rituals in our daily lives. ‘Solemn’ is the alternative to ‘Religious’ offered by our initial definition, ‘formal and dignified’, and perhaps that creeps a little closer to a secular view of ritual. Still, I’d hardly consider my morning ritual formal and dignified, yet I do consider it a ritual, and find it has some meditative, centring quality that sets me up for my day.
I’m a big fan of my coffee. In the hopes of kicking a bit of a caffeine dependency I’ve tried to push it back from the first thing I do in the morning, but my morning coffee is still a part of my day that I treasure, and an experience that I consider more than the sum of its parts. There is a workflow to making coffee – for some it’s simply tossing a keurig pod into the machine and letting it go, while others carefully weigh their whole beans, hand-grind them, pour their water from a long slender-spouted kettle at just the right temperature for their selected roast, and finally slowly pouring the coffee into their favorite mug. Certainly there are some snobs out there, but I would not be so quick to deride someone who cherishes a drawn out, cultivated, perhaps even impractical practice of coffee consumption.
As someone who initially considered their morning coffee a caffeine delivery device that just happened to taste good, I was drawn to appreciate it more after reading Hubert Dreyfus’ book All Things Shining. In his exploration of finding sacred things in our secular age, he invites us to consider – what is it we enjoy about our morning brew? If it was merely the caffeine – which to some it is – would a caffeine pill not suffice? Dreyfus goes on:
“Is there something in the coffee itself, not just in its stimulating effect but in its aroma, its warmth, the ritual of drinking it, or something else—that drives you to this activity rather than some other? And to the extent that there is, then what kind of coffee, what kind of coffee-making process, what kind of coffee-drinking companions or coffee-drinking places, what kind of coffee cup would bring these things out best? … If it is the warmth of the coffee on a winter’s day that you like, then drinking it in a cozy corner of the house, perhaps by a fire with a blanket, in a cup that transmits the warmth to your hands might well help to bring out the best in this ritual. If it is the striking black color of the coffee that attracts your eye and enhances the aroma, then perhaps a cup with a shiny white ceramic interior will bring this out. But there is no single answer to the question of what makes the ritual appealing, and it takes experimentation and observation, with its risks and rewards, to discover the meaningful distinctions yourself. This experimentation with and observation of the coffee ultimately develops in you the skill for seeing the relevant features of the ritual and ultimately develops the skills for bringing them out at their best. These skills are manifold: the skill for knowing how to pick exactly the right coffee, exactly the right cup, exactly the right place to drink it, and to cultivate exactly the right companions to drink it with. When one has learned these skills and cultivated one’s environment so that it is precisely suited to them, then one has a ritual rather than a routine, a meaningful celebration of oneself and one’s environment rather than a generic and meaningless performance of a function.”
As you might suspect, Hubert Dreyfus’ book was not just about coffee. Coffee is merely one domain of ritual that we caffeine-obsessed moderns can relate to, a potentially sacred events in our every day lives. It’s something that we might carelessly treat as banal and utilitarian if we do not take a moment to imbue it with something more, and we might even deride those who take the time to appreciate it as snobbish. Yet consider for a moment which habits and routines of yours would benefit from this mindfulness, this touch of sanctity, that produces something meaningful instead of merely something useful.
Allow me to share with you another coffee ritual, one I found amusing at first, but since trying it I’ve come to appreciate it all the same. Ludwig van Beethoven, the composer who surely needs no introduction, was also a lover of the bitter brown bean. He thought 60 beans made the perfect cup, and would count them out. One, two, three… I decided to give it a go while I was waiting for my water to boil, hearing each bean quietly ‘ding’ off of the blade of my grinder as I tossed it in. Much like the practice of counting your breaths in mindfulness meditation, this little addition to my coffee ritual gave me an opportunity to slow down, focus on what I was doing, and better appreciate the product that came out in the end. What makes a ritual satisfying or meaningful will change from person to person – this act of careful counting might be tedious and pointless to some, and for some the smell or dripping sound of their pot of coffee brewing while they do their morning stretches is the significant part of their ritual.
David Robson also visits the concept of the ritual in his book “The Expectation Effect”, a deep dive into the startling significance of the placebo effect and its evil twin, the nocebo effect. Our day-to-day beliefs in our practices, Robson argues, can have an outsized effect not just on our perceptions and outcomes but even our physiology. Keeping with our coffee theme here, one study cited in Robson’s book illustrated that student weightlifters given a shot of bitter-tasting liquid, which they were told contained high concentration of caffeine, performed 10% above their previous limit – this was despite the fact that their energy-juice was decaf. Inversely, the group that were given caffeine under the pretense that it was an inert substance saw a much smaller performance boost. When it comes to rituals, Robson had this to say:
“The adoption of secular rituals can also improve our resolve in some classic tests of willpower that often leave us feeling depleted, including our capacity to resist the temptation of a tasty treat. Participants in one experiment were asked to perform some ritual gestures (sitting upright, closing their eyes, bowing their head and counting to ten) before they ate, while a control group performed a set of random movements. They were then given a choice between a Snickers bar and a lower-calorie fruit and cereal bar.
On a subsequent questionnaire, the participants who had performed the ritual were more likely to report greater feelings of discipline, giving higher ratings to statements such as ‘I felt mentally strong when making this decision’ and ‘I felt sharp and focused when making this decision’. And this was reflected in the food they chose to eat. Around 64 per cent of those in the ritual condition chose the healthier option over the chocolate bar, compared with 48 per cent performing random movements without the sense of ritual.”
Robson’s book is chock full of examples and studies of this effect of our mindset on our ability to persevere and excel, or get sick and die. As tired as the ‘power of positive thinking’ can be to some people, the ability of placebo effects – even when we are aware of them – to improve our lives is growing increasingly clear. Rituals have the ability to imbue our routines with meaning and significance, and at the same time make them even more effective in terms of utility.
So I encourage you, the next time you’re making your morning coffee, to take a minute and count those sixty beans, pour the coffee into your favorite cup, and relish the experience rather than knocking it back for your fix. Be mindful of your habits, good and bad – they can be more than the sum of their parts.
Works Cited:
Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Sean Kelly. All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. 1st Free Press hardcover ed. New York: Free Press, 2011. – Amazon Link
Hurst, Philip, Lieke Schipof-Godart, Attila Szabo, John Raglin, Florentina Hettinga, Bart Roelands, Andrew Lane, Abby Foad, Damian Coleman, and Chris Beedie. “The Placebo and Nocebo Effect on Sports Performance: A Systematic Review.” European Journal of Sport Science 20, no. 3 (April 2020): 279–92. https://doi.org/10.1080/17461391.2019.1655098.
Robson, David. The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Change Your World. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2022. – Amazon Link
Tian, Allen Ding, Juliana Schroeder, Gerald Häubl, Jane L. Risen, Michael I. Norton, and Francesca Gino. “Enacting Rituals to Improve Self-Control.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 114, no. 6 (June 2018): 851–76. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000113.
