One morning in 1762, a three-year-old named Maria Theresia von Paradis woke up blind.
The daughter of an adviser to the Holy Roman Empress, Maria Theresia grew up in Vienna and, in spite of her loss of sight, lived a relatively charmed life. Born a musical prodigy, she excelled at the clavichord, a small rectangular keyboard, and organ. Her talent combined with her disability earned her the attention and generosity of the empress, who ensured that she received a pension and the best education available. By the time she was a teenager, she was a celebrated musician, playing at the most exclusive salons in Vienna and beyond. Mozart would even write a concerto for her. Yet Maria Theresia’s parents didn’t give up on the idea of their daughter regaining her vision.
As she grew up, doctors experimented with a variety of treatments, administering everything from leeches to electric shocks to Maria Theresia’s eyes, all to no avail. Her vision didn’t return. Even worse, the treatments left her with a host of maladies. By the time she was eighteen, she suffered from bouts of vomiting, diarrhea, headaches, and fainting spells.
Enter Franz Anton Mesmer, a mysterious Vienna-trained physician who had become well-connected among the city’s elite. He claimed to have pioneered a medical intervention that could cure a broad range of physical and emotional ills by altering the flow of an imperceptible force that coursed through the universe using magnetic principles alone. Mesmer cured people’s conditions by channeling this invisible energy with magnets and his hands. He called this technique animal magnetism. It would later be eponymized as “mesmerism.”
In 1777, when she was eighteen, Maria Theresia began undergoing treatment with Mesmer. Over the course of several months, he touched her eyes and body with his magnets, telling her about animal magnetism and how it would heal her. She was a believer, as were her parents, and sure enough her sight miraculously returned. Not all at once, but in fits and starts.
At first, she just saw blurry images. But then she started distinguishing between black and white objects. Eventually, her sense of color came back. While her perception of depth and proportions still lagged, she gradually began to make out human faces. Yet instead of filling her with joy after all these years, they frightened her, especially noses. The visual world had become alien to her. But the change was still incredible. She could finally see again.
Briefly.
Maria Theresia’s parents had a dramatic falling-out with Mesmer, which eventually caused their treatment sessions to end. Hearsay had it that her parents were worried their daughter would lose her pension if she fully recovered her sight. Another version suggested Mesmer and Maria Theresia had been caught carrying on an illicit affair. In any case, their time together was over, and amid swirling rumors Mesmer left Vienna. And when the medical master of animal magnetism disappeared from her life, so did Maria Theresia’s vision, yet again.
Mesmer’s story, however, didn’t end there.
After leaving Vienna and relocating to Paris, he opened a clinic and once again ingratiated himself with the upper classes. He even treated King Louis XVI’s wife, Marie Antoinette, along with one of his brothers. During the following years, the demand for Mesmer’s services was so great that to increase his profits, he devised a method to increase the number of patients he could simultaneously treat: He directed many people to stand or sit shoulder to shoulder around a wooden tub filled with water and tiny shreds of iron that he had magnetized. Metal rods jutted out from the tub, and with music playing quietly in the background, patients applied the rods to the part of their body that was bothering them while Mesmer walked around adjusting the flow of magnetic energy between rod and patient.
The effectiveness of Mesmer’s treatment differed depending on the patients he saw, in some cases significantly. Some people experienced small tinges of pain in the affected parts of their body; some convulsed as if they were having seizures. Others simply felt cured. But not everyone saw improvements. Some experienced something else: nothing at all.
Eventually, in 1784, King Louis had heard enough about mesmerism. He ordered a royal commission of scientists to investigate Mesmer’s techniques, led by none other than Benjamin Franklin, who was living in Paris as a diplomat at the time. From the outset, the commission was skeptical of Mesmer’s claims. They didn’t doubt that some people benefited from being mesmerized. They just didn’t believe that the cause was an invisible magnetic force.
The commission’s investigation did little to alter their opinion. In one experiment, for example, a woman who was a passionate believer in mesmerism sat next to a closed door. On the other side of the door a Mesmer-trained physician actively applied magnetic energy. When the woman didn’t know he was on the other side, she showed no signs of being mesmerized. The moment the same physician made his presence known, the woman began to jerk and flail wildly, indicating the treatment’s success. Many similar demonstrations followed.
After concluding the investigation, Franklin and his commission published a damning critique of Mesmer’s methods. They wrote that the only healing power that they had observed was the one residing within the human mind: that people simply expecting to feel a certain way could produce a positive outcome—not “animal magnetism.” While Mesmer was indeed peddling a force that didn’t exist, more than two hundred years later we now know that he provided the world with a valuable peek into a unique tool for combating chatter, which scientific research has only recently caught up to: the magical-seeming power of what we believe, and the profound implications it has for our minds and bodies.
Mesmer hadn’t discovered animal magnetism. He had simply administered a placebo.
Ask most people what a placebo is, and they’ll likely tell you that it is, basically, nothing.
Placebos are commonly understood to be a substance—a sugar pill, in many cases—that is used in pharmaceutical research to gauge the effectiveness of an actual drug. In reality, though, a placebo can be anything—not only a pill, but also a person, an environment, even a lucky charm. And what makes placebos so intriguing is that they can make us feel better even though they have no active medical ingredients.
We use placebos in research to verify that a new medicine or procedure has a clear medicinal effect over and above the simple power of suggestion alone. Doing so acknowledges that the mind possesses real healing potential, but placebos aren’t something generally thought of as substantial in their own right. They have long been understood as a tool serving a greater purpose, with no separate use of their own.
This completely misses the point.
Ben Franklin, of course, didn’t miss this point. He understood that the benefits Mesmer gave to his patients were real even if animal magnetism wasn’t. Yet his timeless insight about the mind’s role in healing was swallowed by the sensational story of Mesmer himself. This lasted until the mid-twentieth century, when scientists began to question the idea that placebos were merely a foil for research—in essence, nothing. We now know they are very much something: a remarkable testament to the psychologically intertwined nature of belief and healing, and a hidden back door for subduing chatter.
Placebos are part of an ancient human tradition of endowing objects or symbols with “magic.” The mythical seal of King Solomon consists of two interlaced triangles and was believed, among other things, to ward off harmful demons. Likewise, long before it became synonymous with Nazism, the swastika was considered a symbol of good fortune. And still today in Guatemala, when children are scared, they are given a set of tiny figurines dressed in traditional Mayan garb called worry dolls whose job is to take their concerns away.
Many people also develop their own idiosyncratic lucky charms. For instance, the model Heidi Klum carries a tiny bag filled with her baby teeth when she flies and clutches it during turbulence. (Weird, I know, but it helps her.) Michael Jordan wore his college shorts beneath his Chicago Bulls uniform during every game. Of late the healing practice of crystals has become big business—a billion-dollar business, in fact. In a broad sense, placebos are very common. We would be mistaken to write off people who cherish charmed objects as misguided. Scientifically speaking, it’s quite rational.
Study after study demonstrates that simply believing that a placebo—a charmed object, healing human presence (like a shaman or trusted physician), or special environment—is going to make us feel better actually does. For example, fewer stomach cramps for irritable bowel syndrome patients, less frequent headache attacks for migraine sufferers, and improved respiratory symptoms for asthmatics. Though the amount of relief that placebos provide varies notably across diseases and patients—like Mesmer’s patients, some people are more naturally sensitive to placebos than others—in some cases it can be substantial.
Placebos are even effective for Parkinson’s disease. In one experiment, scientists injected a promising new chemical treatment into the brains of patients with advanced Parkinson’s symptoms. The hope was that doing so would stimulate dopamine production, impoverished levels of which are a root cause of the disease. After the surgeries were performed, the scientists monitored the patients’ symptoms over the next two years. At first glance, the findings were encouraging. Participants who received the injection experienced a significant decline in their symptoms. But there was one problem. Participants in a “sham surgery” group who also had their brains drilled into but didn’t have the injection—a placebo, in this context—experienced the same decline in symptoms. They thought they had received the special treatment, so their brains and bodies responded as if they had. The message from this and many other studies is clear: Our minds are sometimes as powerful as modern medicine.
But what about chatter? After all, Mesmer also cured patients suffering from “hysteria,” a term that was once used to describe people who experienced difficulty controlling heightened emotions. The placebo of animal magnetism had helped them too. So, do placebos help the inner voice? This was the question that I began discussing one day over coffee with the neuroscientist Tor Wager in 2006, when I was still in graduate school and he was a newly minted assistant professor at Columbia.
“What if we asked people to inhale a nasal spray filled with saline?” he said. “We’ll tell them it’s a painkiller. I bet that would make them feel better. And we’ll also look at their brains.”
I won’t say I thought Tor was crazy, but I was skeptical at first. Nonetheless, we soon went ahead with the experiment.
The result was the study in which we brought the heartbroken of New York City into the lab to study their brains. You’ll recall that we discovered a fascinating overlap between the experience of emotional and physical pain by monitoring participants’ brain activity as they looked at a photo of the person who dumped them. But that was only the first part of the experiment.
After participants completed that phase of the study, an experimenter in a white lab coat slid them out of the brain scanner and escorted them to a room down the hallway. The experimenter closed the door, then presented half of them with a nasal spray, telling them it contained a harmless saline solution that would improve the clarity of the MRI brain images that we hoped to collect during the next phase of the study. Then participants inhaled the spray twice in each nostril and returned to the scanner for a second round of brain imaging. The other group underwent the exact same procedure with one crucial difference. The experimenter told them that their nasal spray contained an opioid analgesic drug that would temporarily blunt their experience of pain. The salty spray was our placebo.
Both groups inhaled the same saline solution. But half of them believed that they consumed a substance that would relieve their pain. Now we measured the effect.
Participants who thought they received a painkiller reported experiencing substantially less distress when they relived their rejection. What’s more, their brain data told a similar story; they displayed significantly less activity in their brain’s social pain circuitry compared with people who knew they had inhaled a saline solution. We discovered that placebos can directly help people with chatter. A spray with nothing chemically meaningful in it could work like a painkiller for the inner voice. It was both strange and exciting: Our minds can cause emotional distress while simultaneously and covertly reducing that distress.
The findings from our study complemented other work documenting the benefits of placebo for managing a range of conditions in which chatter features prominently, like clinical manifestations of depression and anxiety. And in many cases the benefits aren’t fleeting. For instance, one large analysis of eight studies found that the benefits of consuming a placebo for reducing depressive symptoms endured for several months.
The wide-ranging effects of placebos raise the question of why they work so miraculously. As it turns out, the explanation isn’t miraculous at all. It relates to a necessity our brain generates every waking second of our lives: expectations.
On August 3, 2012, the comedian Tig Notaro took the stage at the club Largo in Los Angeles and performed a set that immediately became legendary. Four days earlier she had learned that she had cancer in both breasts, but this was only the climax of a recent string of misfortunes. She had been severely ill with pneumonia and gone through a horrible breakup, and her mother had died in a fall. None of this was funny in the least, but she grabbed the mic and started talking anyway.
“Good evening,” Notaro said. “Hello. I have cancer.”
The crowd laughed expectantly, anticipating a punch line.
“Hi, how are you? Is everybody having a good time?” she continued. “I have cancer.”
Some people laughed. Others gasped. The joke was that it wasn’t a joke.
If part of comedy is about going to uncomfortable places, Notaro did just that. And this was very uncomfortable. But genius that she is, Notaro walked the tightrope between laughing and crying, and got lots of laughs. For instance, she riffed about how her online dating life would change now, infusing it with new urgency. “I have cancer,” she said. “Serious inquiries only.”
Her set continued in this startling, tragic, brave, and hilarious vein for twenty-nine minutes in all, and eventually vaulted Notaro to a new level of fame and success (and thankfully, she beat her cancer). What I find so illustrative about it is the way it highlights the essential role that expectations play in governing how we function.
Notaro knew she could make people laugh, even when talking about one of the most somber and chatter-inducing topics imaginable. All she had to do was say the right words in the right order, with the right tone, and with the right pauses. She knew how to do this because of how well honed her expectations were—her expectations about what she could do and what the result would be. If we extend this idea, we begin to realize we all rely on expectations every second of our lives.
You walk. You move. You speak. Now think for a second about how you are able to engage in these actions. How do you determine where to put your foot when you walk, where to run to catch a ball, or how to project your voice when you’re speaking to a large group? We are able to do these things because we are constantly, both consciously and subconsciously, making predictions about what we expect is going to happen next, and our brain prepares to respond accordingly.
The brain is a prediction machine that is constantly trying to help us navigate the world. The more we are able to bring our prior experiences to bear on what is required of us, the better we should be at this. And this isn’t just relevant to our behaviors. It generalizes to our internal experiences in our bodies as well, which is where placebos come into play. They are a hack for harnessing the power of expectations to influence our minds and physical health.
When a doctor tells you that you’ll feel better, this provides you with information you can use to predict how you’re actually going to fare over time, especially if she has fancy medical degrees, wears a white coat, and talks with authority. That’s not a joke. Research shows that features that you might think are peripheral—if a physician wears a lab coat or not, whether she has acronyms attached to her name placards, and even whether the pills you take are referred to as “brand-labeled” or generic—subconsciously strengthen our beliefs.
Over the course of our lives, we develop automatic beliefs about how certain objects and people influence our health. Like Pavlov’s salivating dogs, we see a pill and we reflexively expect that consuming it will lead us to feel better, often without even knowing what it is or how it works.
This pathway for expectations, and by extension placebos, is preconscious. It’s not a product of careful thought but rather an automatic, reflexive response. Perhaps unsurprisingly, studies show that rodents and other animals respond to placebos via this same automatic channel. This type of response is adaptive. It provides us with very good guesses about how to react quickly and effectively across a variety of situations. Yet we also evolved an additional pathway in the brain that guides our responses: our conscious thought.
When my head aches and I take a painkiller, I remind myself that swallowing the pill will make me feel better. This simple awareness provides my brain with something invaluable: It helps silence all the doubts I may have about whether the headache will ever go away. What if nothing will help? I say to myself. This hurts so bad. What can I do? Taking the pill offers me hope that my discomfort is going to diminish and in doing so shifts my internal conversation. Indeed, research indicates that these conscious appraisals draw on the same default system in the brain where our inner voice makes its home.
In a simpler sense, what’s going on is that I have a belief. This belief shapes my expectations, which in turn makes me feel better. People tell us things that we later tell ourselves, and we also have experiences we extract ideas from, and this process creates an infrastructure of expectation in the brain. What particular beliefs we have depends on the people we know and the things that happen to us. But what’s really going on in the brain that allows this placebo “magic” to happen?
Because our beliefs pertain to so many different kinds of emotions, physiological responses, and experiences, there is no single neural pathway that creates the placebo effect. For instance, while believing that you’ll feel less pain is linked with lower levels of activation in pain circuitry in the brain and spinal cord, thinking that you’re drinking an expensive wine can increase activation in the brain’s pleasure circuitry. Believing you’re consuming a fatty (versus healthy) milk shake even leads to lower levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin. In effect, once you believe something, your neural machinery brings it to fruition by increasing or decreasing the activation levels of other parts of the brain or body related to the processes you are forming beliefs about.
Clearly, there are limits to the effects of placebos. You can’t completely believe your way out of any malady. Many medical interventions do provide additional value over and above placebos, and we now know that placebo effects tend to be stronger for psychological outcomes (like chatter) than physical ones. But these caveats notwithstanding, the power of placebos is both profound and undeniable. In fact, mounting evidence indicates that placebos can act as enhancers, supercharging the benefits of certain medicines and treatments.
The problem, however, is that the back door of placebos is tricky to access. For one to work, we have to be deceived into believing that we’re consuming a substance or engaging in a behavior that has actual healing properties. Outside of research, where people who participate in studies are typically informed about the possibility of receiving a placebo, such lying would be unethical. So we’re left in a bind: We can’t lie to ourselves about the medicine we take, which means that in the case of placebos we have access to a tool we can’t take advantage of.
Or can we?
If placebos are fundamentally about changing beliefs, then what if we could identify other ways of altering people’s expectations that don’t involve lying? Information from trusted sources is a potent persuasive device. If I want to convince you of something that you’re skeptical of, facts and science often help. Ted Kaptchuk and his team at Harvard capitalized on this idea in 2010 when they published a study that shattered how the scientific world thought about placebos.
First, they settled on a common illness that had already been shown to respond well to placebos: irritable bowel syndrome. After Kaptchuk and his colleagues brought participants with IBS into the medical center where they were performing their study, they explained to them what placebos are and how and why they work. In theory, just learning about the placebo pill should have changed the participants’ expectations, which in turn should have spurred their IBS symptoms to wane. And that’s exactly what happened.
Over the course of the twenty-one-day experiment, the participants who were educated about the science behind placebo effects and then informed that they were taking a placebo displayed fewer IBS symptoms and greater relief compared with people who were educated about placebos and didn’t receive any pills. Understanding how a placebo could make their IBS better actually did just that.
Intrigued by the strange new possibilities of nondeceptive placebos, my lab conducted our own experiment to examine whether Kaptchuk’s findings would generalize beyond problems of the bowels to problems of the mind. We used a similar method and divided participants into two groups, one of which was informed about the science of placebos. In effect, we told them, “If you think a substance will help you, it will.” Then we gave them a placebo—a nasal spray again—and told them again that if they thought it would make them feel better, it would.
Next, we stirred up their negative emotions by showing them aversive pictures, such as scenes of blood and gore (participants had agreed to view such images in advance). Sure enough, the people in the placebo group experienced less distress. They also displayed less emotional activity in the brain within two seconds of viewing a distressing image.
Several labs have extended this line of research to other conditions. For example, nondeceptive placebos have been shown to improve allergy symptoms, lower back pain, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and depression. We still need to perform more work to understand how powerful and long lasting nondeceptive placebo effects can be. But these discoveries open up a new set of possibilities for how people can cope with physical and emotional pain, and demonstrate how powerfully beliefs affect our inner voice and health. They also reveal something else important—the role culture plays in passing down chatter-fighting practices.
Many of our beliefs are transmitted by the culture we come from, such as the expectations we have about doctors and lucky charms and all sorts of other superstitious influences in our environments. In this sense, the families, communities, religions, and other forms of culture that shape us also provide us with tools for dealing with chatter. Yet beliefs aren’t the only “magical” tool that our cultures pass down to us. They offer another approach too: rituals.
World War I turned out remarkably well for Bronislaw Malinowski.
A Polish-born, thirty-year-old anthropology student at the London School of Economics, he traveled to New Guinea in 1914 to conduct fieldwork on the customs of native tribes. Soon after he arrived, however, World War I broke out. This put Malinowski in a politically awkward situation, because he was technically behind enemy lines. He was a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now at war with Britain. Meanwhile, New Guinea was an Australian territory and thus an ally of Britain’s. As a result, Malinowski couldn’t travel back to England or home to Poland, but the local authorities decided to let him continue his work. So he sat out the war in the remote Southern Hemisphere, where he embarked on a quest to understand culture and the human mind.
Malinowski’s most important work grew out of the two years he spent in the Trobriand Islands, an archipelago near New Guinea, living with the tribes there to experience their culture firsthand. With his glasses, high boots, white clothing, and pale balding head, he stood out from the islanders, who were dark-skinned, shirtless, and chewed betel nuts, a stimulant like coffee, that turned their teeth red. Yet Malinowski succeeded at gaining their acceptance and a deep understanding of their traditions, including the “magic” involved in their fishing practices.
When the islanders went out on fishing expeditions in safe, shallow lagoons, they simply grabbed their fishing spears and nets, hopped into their canoes, and glided off along the island waterways until they found their preferred spots. But when they fished in the shark-infested unpredictable waters that surrounded the island, the Trobrianders behaved differently. Before setting off, they offered food to their ancestors, rubbed herbs on their canoes, and chanted magical spells. Then they offered more magical incantations when they were out on the open sea.
“I kick thee down, O shark,” they intoned in their language, Kilivila. “Duck down under water, shark. Die, shark, die away.”
Of course, the Trobrianders weren’t actually engaging in magic. The elaborate choreography of preparation that they engaged in before going on dangerous fishing trips transcends the particularities of their tribe. They were doing something entirely practical on an emotional level that speaks to the psychology of human beings.
They were engaging in ritual—another tool for mitigating chatter.
When people are filled with grief, religious institutions prescribe mourning rites to engage in, such as ritual bathing, burying the dead, and having funerals or memorial services. When cadets attending the U.S. Military Academy at West Point experience stress before an exam, they are told that dressing up in their uniform and walking across campus to spin the spurs on the back of a bronze statue of a Civil War general named John Sedgwick will improve their exam performance. We see rituals increasingly finding their ways into the business world as well. When Southwest Airlines rebranded in 2014 with a new heart-shaped logo on the sides of its planes, pilots began touching it as they stepped on board, and this spread throughout the company, presumably as a source of comfort when facing the daily, inescapable risks of flight.
These are all examples of culturally transmitted rituals, but you can probably think of several idiosyncratic rituals you have created on your own, or those of others. The Hall of Fame third baseman Wade Boggs fielded precisely 150 ground balls, ran wind sprints at exactly 7:17 P.M. (before a 7:35 start time), and ate chicken before every game. To cite another example, for thirty-three years Steve Jobs would look at himself in the mirror each morning and ask himself if that day was the last day of his life whether he’d be happy with what he was going to do. Idiosyncratic rituals of this sort are by no means restricted to famous people. In one study, the Harvard organizational psychologists Michael Norton and Francesca Gino found that the majority of rituals people performed after experiencing a significant loss, such as the death of a loved one or the end of a romantic relationship, were unique.
Regardless of whether the rituals we engage in are personalized or collective, research indicates that when many people experience chatter, they naturally turn to this seemingly magical form of behavior and it offers relief for the inner voice.
A study performed in Israel during the 2006 Lebanon conflict found that women living in war zones who ritualistically recited psalms saw their anxiety decrease, unlike those who didn’t. For Catholics, reciting the rosary is a similar dampener of anxiety. Rituals can also help with meeting goals. One experiment found that engaging in a ritual before meals helped women who struggled to eat healthier consume fewer calories than women who tried to be “mindful” about their eating.
Rituals also positively influence performance in high-pressure situations like math exams and (much more fun but even more chatter inducing) performing karaoke. One memorable experiment had participants sing the band Journey’s epic song “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” in front of another person. Those who did a ritual beforehand felt less anxiety, had a lower heart rate, and sang better than the participants who didn’t. Lesson learned: Start believing in rituals.
It’s important to point out that rituals aren’t simply habits or routines. Several features distinguish them from the more prosaic customs that fill our lives.
First, they tend to consist of a rigid sequence of behaviors often performed in the same order. That’s different from a habit or routine, in which case the sequence of steps composing those behaviors can be looser or frequently change. Take one of my daily routines as an example. When I wake up every morning, I do three things: I pop a thyroid pill (my gland is just a teeny bit underactive), brush my teeth, and drink a cup of tea. While my physician would prefer I take my medication first (it metabolizes better on an empty stomach), that doesn’t always happen. Some days the tea comes first. On others, I’ll brush as soon as I wake up. And that’s okay. I don’t feel compelled to repeat the sequence of behaviors if I don’t do them in a particular order, and I know that their order won’t have a significant effect on me for good or ill.
Now let’s contrast what I do every morning with what the Australian Olympic swimmer Stephanie Rice does before every race. She swings her arms eight times, presses her goggles four times, and touches her cap four times. She always does this. This progression of behaviors is Rice’s personal and peculiar invention, as are lots of other personalized rituals. In fact, the specific steps that compose rituals often have no apparent connection to the broader goal they’re aimed at bringing about. For example, it’s not clear how Rice tapping her goggles and cap four times will help her swim faster. But it has meaning for her, and this connects us to the second feature of rituals.
Rituals are infused with meaning. They are charged with significance because they have a crucial underlying purpose, whether it’s putting a small rock on a cemetery headstone to honor the dead, engaging in a rain dance to nourish crops, or taking Communion. Rituals take on a greater meaning in part because they help us transcend our own concerns, connecting us with forces larger than ourselves. They simultaneously serve to broaden our perspective and enhance our sense of connection with other people and forces.
The reason rituals are so effective at helping us manage our inner voices is that they’re a chatter-reducing cocktail that influences us through several avenues. For one, they direct our attention away from what’s bothering us; the demands they place on working memory to carry out the tasks of the ritual leave little room for anxiety and negative manifestations of the inner voice. This might explain why pregame rituals abound in sports, providing a distraction at the most anxiety-filled moment.
Many rituals also provide us with a sense of order, because we perform behaviors we can control. For example, we can’t control what will happen to our children throughout their lives, and we can protect them only to a limited degree, which is a source of chatter for many parents. But when they are born, we can baptize them or perform any other of a variety of birth rituals that provide us with an illusion of control.
Because rituals are infused with meaning, and often connect to purposes or powers that transcend our individual concerns, they also make us feel connected to important values and communities, which fulfill our emotional needs and serve as a hedge against isolation. This symbolic feature of rituals also often furnishes us with awe, which broadens our perspective in ways that minimize how preoccupied we are with our concerns. Of course, rituals also frequently activate the placebo mechanism: If we believe they will aid us, then they do.
One of the most intriguing aspects of rituals is that we often engage in them without even knowing it. An experiment performed in the Czech Republic found, for instance, that inducing college students to experience high levels of anxiety led them to subsequently engage in more ritualized cleaning behaviors. Similar findings are evident among children. In one experiment, six-year-olds who were socially rejected by their peers were more likely to engage in repetitive, ritual-like behaviors than other children in the study who weren’t rejected.
I have personal experience with similar ritualism myself. While I was writing this book, when I was stuck staring at my computer screen with writer’s block, my inner stream of thoughts filled with doubts about whether I’d ever finish, I found myself going to the kitchen to do the dishes, wipe down the counter, and then organize the papers strewn across my home-office desk (a new set of behaviors that my wife found strange, though not objectionable given my usual predilection for making messes rather than cleaning them up). Only when I began researching this chapter did I realize that this was my ritual for dealing with the despair of the writing process and my looming deadline.
This organic emergence of rituals is seemingly a product of the brain’s remarkable ability to monitor whether we are achieving our desired goals—for our purposes, the goal of avoiding an inner voice that turns painfully negative. According to many influential theories, your brain is set up like a thermostat to detect when discrepancies emerge between your current and your desired end states. When a discrepancy is registered, that signals us to act to bring the temperature down. And engaging in rituals is one way that people can do this.
I should stress that we don’t have to wait to be subconsciously prompted to engage in rituals when we experience chatter. We can engage in them deliberately as well, as I now do whenever I’m feeling stuck at work (my kitchen and home office have never been so clean). There are multiple ways to do so. One approach involves creating our own rituals to engage in before or after a stress-inducing event or to help us deal with chatter. Experiments show that cuing people to engage in completely arbitrary acts that are nevertheless rigid in structure has benefits. For instance, in the karaoke study in which participants had to sing Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’,” they were asked to draw a picture of their feelings, sprinkle salt on it, count to five aloud, then ball up the paper and toss it in the trash. This mere onetime reliance on a ritual improved their performance.
Rituals that we see people engage in in lab settings, however, are stripped of their cultural meaning, which we know has additional benefits because it provides a sense of awe, social connection, and feelings of transcendence. With this in mind, another ready avenue for taking advantage of rituals when facing chatter is to lean on those transmitted by our cultures—our families, workplaces, and the broader social institutions we belong to. You might draw on your religion and go to a service, or even the quirky but meaningful rituals of your family. For instance, I make waffles for my kids every Sunday morning after I get back from working out at the gym. It doesn’t matter where rituals come from or how exactly they form; they just help.
The power of placebos and rituals doesn’t reside in supernatural forces (though some people believe it does, and that in no way diminishes the benefits of such practices). Their benefits lie instead in their capacity to activate chatter-fighting tools that we carry inside us.
Considering their potency, it’s interesting to note that while many people develop their own personalized rituals and placebos, the cultures we are a part of provide us with a vast assortment of these techniques. Culture is often compared to the invisible air we breathe, and much of what we inhale are the beliefs and practices that shape our minds and behavior. You can even think of culture as a system for delivering tools to help people combat chatter. Yet our scientific understanding of these tools is continually advancing, which raises a question: How do we spread this newfound knowledge and integrate it into our culture as a whole?
I never truly contemplated this question until I was forced to confront it when a student of mine raised her hand in class.
What she asked me changed everything.