A good ritual has meaning and is easy enough to follow regardless of your emotional or mental state.
A ritual is a intentional & powerful process of edifying the story you want about a given topic, rather than whatever story you may have about it or the story that’s been given to you by default.
It leverages the peak-end effect by providing a meaningful and intentional peak and leaves you with realistic actions to take, and by using the ritual you’re statistically offsetting the baked-in negativity bias. Committing to the actions becomes connected to the peak of the experience, and performing the actions edifies the validity of it.
A well-designed ritual will intentionally bring about chosen risky emotions or situations in a way that doesn’t feel risky, allow an opportunity to change the story around those experiences, and provide an opportunity to edify them.
Here are the basic components – in order – of a solid ritual: