2311. Rituals Rhythms and Routines

Rhythms, routines and rituals

by Digital Health & WellbeingOpinion Piece

We are creatures of habits and patterns. We celebrate life stages, mark significant events and have weekday and weekend schedules that we generally stick to. 

We make similar meals and go on relatively similar holidays. We wake up, eat and go to bed at a similar time. We form habits and patterns to help us manage our day-to-day lives. 

There are a number of reasons for this. A few of these are: 

Automatic (subconscious) behaviour

Learning and mastering new skills takes time and energy. If you think back to when you were last learning a new skill – like how to drive a car – you had to actively think about: ‘seatbelt on before starting the car’, ‘lights on after dark’, ‘check mirrors before changing lane’, ‘indicate before turning’. It was nerve-wracking, required intense concentration and was rather tiring.

After a few years, you do these activities habitually, and automatically. You don’t really have to think about it. How often do you find yourself driving down a familiar stretch of road and don’t have any memory of the previous five minutes of driving time? 

To conserve energy and to free up brain capacity for other activities, we naturally develop ‘muscle memory’ for a task and automate as much behaviour as possible.

This is partly why changing habits requires so much time, effort and energy.  

Meaning making

Being part of a community where you have at least one thing in common creates a sense of belonging within that group. It is grounding and engenders meaning and purpose. 

Rituals and rules give a group structure and boundaries to operate in and allow for progression and growth within that group. 

Belonging is an important human need. This is why solitary confinement and ostracisation are such harsh punishments. 

A group’s rituals and being recognised within that process is an essential element of group belonging. 

Beginning, middle and end

Everything in life has a beginning, a middle and an end. A number of these events are either recognised, celebrated or mourned.

Nature has ebbs and flows, night and day, winter and summer. These are the natural rhythms of life. 

What does this have to do with Digital Technology?

Amongst a host of ways digital technology has affected and enabled a disruption of these rhythms, rituals and routines, there are two that we can easily amend.

The first is a bit of an obvious one: sleep disruption

Many of us are still looking at a screen well into the evening, and sometimes late into the night.

  • We know that the blue light emitted from screens interrupts the melatonin production that helps us to sleep.
  • Even if you do have a screen on night-time settings, your brain is activated and stimulated by the app, content or program. It takes time to slow down brain stimulation enough for it to fall into sleep mode.
  • If you are looking at work and emails late at night, the emotional stimulation from the project, message or sender can increase fight or flight hormone levels that reduce the ability to easily fall asleep.

Matthew Walker, in his book ‘Why We Sleep’, suggests that we should turn off all screens at least two hours before we are due to go to bed and not allow any devices into our bedrooms.

The second is a more recent ‘invention’: remote and hybrid working

Research during the Lockdowns showed that most remote workers started their working day at the same time as they had originally left for work and continued until the time they arrived home from work. The research indicated that these workers showed no indication of improved productivity levels – despite working that extra amount of time each day.

Another research study showed that working parents, who needed to leave work at a very specific time, were more productive than those who didn’t. They knew they had limited time to get the work done, so were a lot more focused during the workday. 

We generally tend to get something completed within the time allocated to the work. If, for example, we have five hours, we tend to procrastinate and do the majority of the work within the last hour. If we only had an hour to get the same work done, we tend to get it done within that hour.

We also know that the commute to and from work is a time that we allocate to ‘transitioning’ between our home selves and work selves. It helps us to mentally, emotionally and physically delineate these two life realms and responsibilities, and helps us to better focus in each space.

We need to create rhythms, routines and rituals. Replicating the activities we normally engage in during our commute is a great way to engage our brain in this transition. If you normally read a book on a bus/train to work, sit in a comfortable chair at home and read a book during your traditional commute time. If you listen to music in the car, find a space at home where you can sit and listen to music. If you normally cycle or walk to work, cycle or walk around the block.

The key in all of this is to keep your body and brain within a work-home ritual and routine that gives you the mental, emotional and physical capacity to delineate between these two life realms. It may just be one of those key things that keep you focused and productive during your work day.

Related Articles
Social Media Love Affair

Confessions of a CyberPsychologist: Why I ended my obsessive social media love affair.

by Opinion Piece

6 months ago, I was semi-obsessed. I often checked my phone on the sly – making sure others didn’t notice. My WhatsApp was popping through notifications telling me to ‘quickly check the latest message’. I was flicking from one social media app to another, to make sure I’d caught all the potential messages that had come through. It had gone beyond the point of the teasing flirtation and the fun of the chase… It had even gone beyond the romantic thrill of the love affair… It had progressed well beyond that… I was, after all, doing the very thing I was encouraging others to try to avoid – I’d become obsessed with seeking that mini-feeling of satisfaction and the mini-brain-infused-dopamine-hit each time others engaged with my social media or blog posts. 

Don’t get me wrong. Like any relationship, spending time on social media has plenty of benefits and can be hugely rewarding. But we often don’t realise that we are headed into an obsessive relationship until we are in it. It’s only after we start to see the warning signs, that we may come to realise we don’t quite know how to get out of it. Or it may even be that we don’t even see the warning signs but wake up one day fully entrenched in a controlling ‘virtual relationship’. 

The same process of not realising you’re heading towards the issue until you’re in it is when you find yourself over-stressed, highly anxious or in burnout. We, humans, are generally a rather optimistic lot. We tend to think we are able to cope, that we’ll be fine, that ‘just one’ won’t hurt, that we can easily stop and that it’s easily fixed. We are familiar with these narratives. We’ve heard them before. We even tell ourselves these same stories. But the further we let ourselves go down the path, the more difficult it can be to get out – until something actually breaks. 

For me, it was the sensation of being overwhelmed by life. Even though I’d turned off most notifications, the constant WhatsApp messages, the regular flipping between social media accounts to check for engagement from others, the mental distraction of what was going on online while trying to be physically present offline, the regularly ruminating about the previous or next post and what needed to be written…. There was enough going on in the real world without the online world layering all its messages on top. I know what my tech boundaries are. But I’d let them slip. Again. For too long.

Although research has shown that taking a 1-month hiatus from social media doesn’t actually work in the medium term – in the same way as doing a ‘dry January’ doesn’t change your overall drinking habits, I knew I had to do a hard break from the online world. In a confession to a good friend, I was told ‘Psychologist, heal yourself’. They were right, if I was going to be genuine in my ability to help others with social media, online addictions and gadget obsessions, I couldn’t be up to my eyeballs in the mire myself. Fighting in the ditches with clients is not the same as being overwhelmed by the sinking social media I’d found myself in. 

So, I took the decision to break up with social media and the world of blogging. It was originally only meant to be a few weeks, but those few weeks quickly turned into a few months, which eventually turned into 6 months. And that’s when I noticed things had changed. I found myself being able to focus again. Reading physical books became enjoyable. Giving myself the space to be ‘bored’, i.e. not looking at my phone every time I was in a queue or in between tasks had shifted me back to myself again. Neurological research has shown that when we are not distracting ourselves with gadgets and allow our minds to wander, a midsection of our brain kicks into gear. The researchers called this the ‘idling brain’ and referred to by Bessel van der Kolk in his book ‘The body keeps the score’ as the Mohawk region of the brain. This part of the brain is what lights up when we are self-reflecting. So, if we are constantly distracting ourselves with gadgets, we don’t give ourselves the opportunity to self-reflect. And it seems that this has an impact on anxiety levels and self-image. Which, kinda makes logical sense. 

And what we do every day changes the structure of our brains. As the saying goes ‘neurons that fire together, wire together’. There are some interesting studies on this, from the classic psychology research of the larger hippocampus (the region of the brain involved in spatial memory) found in taxi drivers and a more recent study done in China with restaurant workers who have a greater ability to use their working memory due to constantly memorising orders and the customers who made them (https://www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/your-job-can-shape-your-cognitive-abilities).

I know that I am fortunate to be able to take a time-out from social media – with limited negative impact on my work. Not everyone has that luxury. But I would suggest that we all need to semi-regularly take our relationship with gadgets, gaming (or any other form of internet use) to ‘couples counselling’ and ascertain the mental and physical health of our relationship on our own mental well-being. 

In doing so, we need to actively decide how we are going to move forward with our gadget use. Even if things stay the same, it becomes our individual choice to do so, meaning we feel slightly more in control (as it was our choice after all) of the gadgets we use every day. We each have our individual abilities to let go, change things up and put boundaries in place. 

Regarding my future relationship with social media and blogging, social media and I are back together again. But, with conditions. I’ve put a 3-monthly reminder in my diary to do a ‘tech-check’ and make sure I’m the one in control of my gadget use, not the other way around. Having an obsessive relationship with gadgets was never my intention. I feel like I’ve now got the control in the relationship, and I fully intend to keep it that way.