ritual · same wick · less unsure

They did the same ritual they already knew. They felt less unsure after.

JM Thomas · 21 August 2026

You strike the match and bring it to the same side of the wick you always use.

The candle is already standing where you left it. You do this before you have to talk, the way someone lights the same candle before a speech they have been carrying all week.

You already know which side of the wick takes the flame. You wait until it catches. That set of steps is the ritual you kept.

You already knew the steps before you started

A ritual is a set of steps you do the same way. You pick the order first. Then you walk through that order, whether you light a candle or bounce a ball the same way before a free throw.

Hobson, Schroeder, Risen, Xygalatas, and Inzlicht wrote that in 2018 in Personality and Social Psychology Review. They called rituals predefined sequences, which means you set the order before you begin. The steps that look extra still belong in the set. Read the review at doi.org/10.1177/1088868317734944.

How many places the next move can go

When you feel unsure, you have a lot of places you could go next. How many places the next move can go is the thing researchers later called entropy.

Shannon used information entropy in 1948 as his name for how unsure a next item is, a count of how spread out that next item can be. The 1948 paper is at doi.org/10.1002/j.1538-7305.1948.tb01338.x.

Thermodynamic entropy is how mixed a room of heat is, so a ritual you already know does not cool the air in the room. Hirsh and colleagues used psychological entropy in 2012 for how unsure you feel. They were talking about uncertainty you can feel. Once you already know the steps, you have fewer places to go next.

After a speech they cleaned one object

Lang, Krátký, Shaver, Jerotijević, and Xygalatas watched 62 people in 2015. After a speech that made people anxious, they had them clean a decorative object. People wore a wrist band that tracks how you move, a band the lab called an ActiGraph. People who felt more anxious repeated the same motion more, and they kept that motion more rigid, which means they stayed on the same path. The 2015 paper is at doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2015.05.049.

Boyer and Liénard wrote in 2006 about why people do this. They talked about getting ready for a threat, and about breaking a move into small bits. They also talked about dropping the usual goal for a while, so the motions take up room in your mind. Wikipedia keeps a short page on that idea at wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritualization.

Malinowski wrote an older map of Trobriand fishing. People used more ritual on the open sea than in the lagoon. He wrote that map long before the wrist-band study. A public page on that book sits at wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_Gardens_and_Their_Magic.

People who already had a temple practice felt less anxious

Lang, Krátký, and Xygalatas ran that work in 2020 on Mauritius, the island where they watched the temple walk. They watched 75 people who already had a temple practice in a Marathi Hindu community, which means they already knew those temple steps. After a speech, some people did their usual ritual in a temple, and other people sat down and rested. The temple group said they felt less anxious. They also tracked how the time between heartbeats changes, a body measure people call HRV. The 2020 paper is at doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0431.

A new classroom pattern only moved a little

The same team watched 268 people in a classroom in 2022. After a speech, some people did a ritualized set of steps while other people did different work. The authors wrote, “If anything, ritual is structure.” The ritualized group dropped anxiety a little more than the other groups. A confidence interval is the range they would still bet on, and that range often included zero, so they could not claim a large drop from the new classroom steps. Open the 2022 paper at doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-23885-4.

The steps you already knew still left people less unsure. People in the new classroom pattern only dropped a little more than the other groups.

A player who bounces the ball the same way before a free throw is doing a ritual they already know. They already know the count. Then they shoot.

If you want a change that matches Will, open the miracles page. If you want a syllable you repeat, open the mantra page.

If a loop owns the hour, talk to a clinician. This page is educational.

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