Life-hack: Rituals spell anxiety relief

Date:
June 30, 2020
Source:
University of Connecticut
Summary:
Researchers are examining the important roles rituals play in
reducing our anxiety levels.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
With graduation ceremonies, weddings, funeral, annual parades, and many
other gatherings called off, it is apparent that our lives are filled
with rituals.

UConn Assistant Professor of Anthropology Dimitris Xygalatas studies
rituals and how they impact our health. In research published today
in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Xygalatas and
collaborators from Masaryk University, Czech Republic, including former
UConn student Martin Lang, examine the important roles rituals play in
reducing our anxiety levels.


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"In the current context of the pandemic, if you were a completely rational being -- perhaps an extraterrestrial who's never met any actual humans
-- you would expect that given the current situation people wouldn't
bother doing things that do not seem crucial to their survival. Maybe
they wouldn't care so much about art, sports, or ritual, and they would
focus on other things," says Xygalatas. "If you were to think that,
it would show you didn't know much about human nature, because humans
care deeply about those things." Further, Xygalatas says, rituals play
an important role in people's lives, helping them cope with anxiety and functioning as mechanisms of resilience.

This research started years ago, says Xygalatas. He explains that to study something as complex as human behavior, it is important to approach the question from multiple angles to collect converging evidence. First,
in a laboratory study, they found that inducing anxiety made people's
behavior more ritualized, that is, more repetitive and structured. So
the next step was to take this research out to real-life situations,
where they examined whether performing cultural rituals in their natural context indeed helps practitioners cope with anxiety.

"This approach also goes to show the limitations of any study. One study
can only tell us a tiny bit about anything, but by using a variety of
methods like my team and I are doing, and by going between the highly controlled space of the lab and the culturally relevant place that is
real life we are able to get a more holistic perspective." The experiment reported in their current publication took place in Mauritius, where the researchers induced anxiety by asking participants to prepare a plan for dealing with a natural disaster that would be evaluated by government
experts. This was stressful, as floods and cyclones are very pertinent
threats in that context. Following this stress-inducing task, one half
of the group performed a familiar religious ritual at the local temple
while the other half were asked to sit and relax in a non-religious space.



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The researchers found that the speech was successful in inducing stress
for both groups but those who performed the religious ritual experienced
a greater reduction in both psychological and physiological stress,
which was assessed by using wearable technology to measure heart rate variability.

Stress itself is important, says Xygalatas, "Stress acts as a motivation
that helps us focus on our goals and rise to meet our challenges, whether
those involve studying for an exam, flying a fighter jet, or scoring
that game- winning goal. The problem is that beyond a certain threshold,
stress ceases to be useful. In fact, it can even be dangerous. Over time,
its effects can add up and take a toll on your health, impairing cognitive function, weakening the immune system, and leading to hypertension or cardiovascular disease. This type of stress can be devastating to our
normal functioning, health, and well- being." This is where Xygalatas
and his team believe ritual plays an important role in managing stress.

"The mechanism that we think is operating here is that ritual helps reduce anxiety by providing the brain with a sense of structure, regularity,
and predictability." Xygalatas explains that in recent decades we
have begun to realize the brain is not a passive computer but an active predictive machine, registering information and making predictions to
help us survive.



==========================================================================
"We come to expect certain things -- our brain fills in the missing
information for the blind spot in our vision, and prompts us to anticipate
the next word in a sentence -- all of these things are due to this
effect because our brain makes active predictions about the state of
the world." Well-practiced rituals, like the one included in the study,
are repetitive and predictable and therefore the researchers believe
they give our brains the sense of control and structure that we crave,
and those feelings help alleviate stress. This stress reducing impact
of rituals could be a way to cope with chronic anxiety.

In today's stressful context, we see ritual taking different forms,
from people gathering to applaud healthcare workers, to virtual choirs
singing across the internet. Xygalatas also notes a recent study that
tracked the increase in people typing 'prayer' in Google searches. In
this unpredictable time, people are continuing to find relief in ritual.

"One thing I like to tell my students is that we as human beings are not
as smart as we'd like to think. But thankfully, we are at least smart
enough to be able to outsmart ourselves. We have many ways of doing
this, for instance when we look at ourselves in the mirror before an
interview and tell ourselves, 'Ok I can do this'. Or when we take deep
breaths to calm down. We have all of these hacks that we can use on our
very brain. We could rationalize it and tell ourselves 'Ok I'm going to
lower my heartbeat now'. Well that doesn't work.

Ritual is one of those mental technologies that we can use to trick
ourselves into doing that. That is what these rituals do -- they act
like life hacks for us." Going forward, Xygalatas points out that he and
his colleagues intend to do more work on the exact mechanisms underlying
these effects of ritual.

"Of course it is a combination of factors, and that is why ritual is
so powerful: because it combines a number of mechanisms that have to
do both with the behavior itself, the physical movements, and with the
cultural context, the symbolism, and the expectations that go into that behavior. To be able to disentangle those things is what we are trying
to do next: we are examining these factors one at a time. Those rituals
have gone through a process of cultural selection and they are still with
us because they fulfil specific functions. They are life hacks that have
been with and have served us well since the dawn of our kind."

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by University_of_Connecticut. Original
written by Elaina Hancock. Note: Content may be edited for style and
length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. M. Lang, J. Kra'tky', D. Xygalatas. The role of ritual behaviour in
anxiety reduction: an investigation of Marathi religious
practices in Mauritius. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society B: Biological Sciences, 2020; 375 (1805): 20190431 DOI:
10.1098/rstb.2019.0431 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200630111504.htm

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