A few years ago, I bought two candles from an art book fair from the hands of an Australian writing legend...

She’d had them printed with the sometimes-inspiring sometimes-taunting phrase ‘200 words per hour’, the other side, ‘10,000-word candle’. I bought them with the promise that I was going to take on ‘a serious writing project’ that year, and that I’d only light the candles when I was at the desk. While I was two years late to starting the project, those two candles lit the way through the first draft of my first book – the one you’re reading now. 

Lighting the candle has become a ritual that I respect. It sanctifies the works somehow, and symbolises to my mind and my body that I’m taking this seriously, it’s time to get the work done. I don’t have a separate space to go to do this work, so the candle marks a mental time/space oasis I enter – when the candle is on, I don’t check my phone, I don’t look at the time, I don’t worry about emails I haven’t responded to. When the candle is on, nothing else needs to happen.

Each time I light the candle and begin to write, the writing becomes easier. The words flow better, I’m faster, I have to do fewer drafts. By now, sitting at the computer isn’t a daunting task, it’s a rote part of my week that I almost look forward to. The ritual of lighting the candle became the trigger that helped me create an intention to take my seat habitually. It helped me make my promise to myself true.

A charm for the unknown

Ritualistic, ceremonial acts are transformative. They snap us out of autopilot and give us a blessing to bestow upon ourselves and the moment we are about to experience, a moment we want to go well with such intensity that we will call in every bit of help we can get, even if it’s thus far unproven by empirical science. 

Humans, bless us, are anxious creatures. We feel stressed and uncertain in a range of situations – typically new and unfamiliar ones – and rituals have historically helped us handle the stress and get on with it. At the turn of last century, anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski observed the use of ritual as a psychological valium when he saw that the inhabitants of the small island in the South Pacific that he was living with, would only perform rituals to invoke magical powers when they fished in the shark-infested waters beyond the coral reef. When they fished in the calm waters of the lagoon, they didn’t perform any rituals – they had no need for protection or good luck. 

Everyday life in Japanese culture is also highly ritualistic. Their many aesthetic arts – ikebana flower-arranging, the meditative endurance of Butoh dance and the raking of sand in minimalist Zen gardens – are all designed as antidotes for the stress and anxiety of their high-performance culture.

Children are also instinctively ritualistic, it’s part of the self-soothing we all learn. The made-up garbled songs they sing before bedtime to keep monsters away, their beloved ragged bunnies that must be kissed and tucked in before they are. 

These structured, repetitive actions act as a buffer against the anxieties of the outside world, specially designed to make an unpredictable situation more predictable, safer, manageable. If they could calm anxieties about fishing for food in shark-infested waters, how might ritualistic actions help us as we fish for ideas or creative success in shark-infested reality?

Ritual as a habit-forming trigger

Studies show that 45% of our activities on any given day are habitual – ‘performed automatically without much thought’. It’s a mad idea that nearly half our lives are enacted without much thought. While this might free up some mental space for some more intentional daydreaming (as long as you’re not cramming your attention with texts, podcasts and Instagram content-farming), it’s an inspiring thought that learning how to become aware of habits and design new ones might give us back half our lives. 

Habits are hard to build by design – what if every stupid thing we did accidentally became a habit? But they are an essential part of our survival skills. If we had to be conscious for the thousands of tiny decisions we make every day, we would never have gotten anywhere. It’s not evolutionarily smart to weigh up the pros and cons of which order to put my clothes on in the morning, so our minds figured out if they can automate actions that we clearly do all the time, it could free up space for us to think about something else. 

This is where triggers come in. Once your mind observes you taking an action consistently, it looks for an opportunity to optimise – to turn that action into an unconscious habit. A part of creating that ‘rule’ for your mind is knowing when to tell your system to turn on the autopilot – it needs a trigger. We know the classic ones. Trigger: wake up, Habit: brush teeth. Trigger: phone lights up, Habit: pick it up and look at the notification. If the trigger is the all-important moment where habits get created, this is where the power of ritual can be used to hotwire our habits. Ritual is about trying to achieve a state of mind – it’s inherently transformational. 

When you design your ritual, what you’re doing in the eyes of psychologists is forming a trigger – a chequered flag to tell you it’s time to hit the accelerator. You’re going to need to do this ritual, dare I say, habitually.

PRACTICE - Design a ritual

A ritual is a moment of metamorphosis into the mindset you need to have to get into the task at hand. It doesn’t have to involve crystals or fire and it doesn’t need to take long.

The declaring of intentions and a renewal of your will to do what needs to be done for your project, can be aided by embedding that intention into an object (a favourite pen for example), or an act (the lighting of a candle). Take a moment to define your intention to do the work, and tie that intention to an object, an act, a time of day …

1.     Define your intention. Is it to write every day at a certain time, or to write an application for a scholarship or simply to dive into a topic you want to spend more time on?

2.     Choose the object or act that you will attach the intention to. Is it a cup of coffee at dawn like Toni Morrison, or lighting a candle as I did, or something else completely?

3.     Clearly set out in your mind how the ritual will be carried out. The time, the place, what needs to be present, what must be said or thought, and what will happen after.

4.     Do it.

5.     Do it again.

6.     Do it for two weeks.

7.     How did it make you feel?

This is an edited extract from How to be a Creative Thinker by Roya A. Azadi, published by Hardie Grant Books, RRP $19.99, available in-stores nationally