The psychology of rituals: They mark big life events and give meaning to the mundane. Here’s how to make them work

Whether religious or secular, we humans love to incorporate ritual into our lives, from daily activities such as a morning coffee to ceremonies like weddings and funerals that help us to mark major life events

Even something as simple as a daily skincare routine can acquire a ritual significance for us. Photo: Getty

Suzanne Harrington

Christmas, weddings, BDSM, how you make your coffee in the morning — it’s all ritual. Humans everywhere create rituals for everything, from birth to death and everything in between. From how we prep ourselves for performance to quirky customs couples develop within their relationship, ritual is embedded in our daily life; either created privately by us, or one-size-fits-all legacy rituals like weddings or funerals.

Within these legacy rituals, we still play around with tradition. Philosophers Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir weren’t interested in what they regarded as the bourgeois institution of marriage, so devised their own commitment ritual after meeting in 1929: a ceremony on a beach, signing something that said “til two years do us part”, with an option to renew. They turned a ritualised tradition into a short term philosophical contract — ironically until death did them part in 1980.