Everyday Entropy
see how small rituals help us bring order to all the chaos around us
Earlier this month was the final of the Australian Open, and if you don’t follow tennis, a Spanish player named Carlos Alcaraz defeated Novak Djokovic and won his first AO title, completing his career Grand Slam in the process. I follow tennis, but almost from the sidelines. We have living legends like Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, and now a new generation rising in Alcaraz and Sinner. I love the players, their sportsmanship, and above all, the sport itself, and even though I never thoroughly followed it, I was always charmed by Rafael Nadal in particular. There’s something special about left-handers, I guess.
But more than his game, what fascinated me was the rituals. Before every serve, he goes through the same sequence, adjusting his clothing, fixing his hair, in the same order, every single time. He arranges his water bottles so that the labels face the side of the court he’ll be playing on next. He never crosses the court markings with his left leg, never steps on the lines. And this is just a handful of the ones I know of; the full list is much longer. From the outside, it can look obsessive, almost superstitious. But I think there’s something much more interesting going on here.
There’s already a lot of research around rituals, and I don’t want to go too deep into all of that, but two things about them genuinely stuck with me: how they help you reset your focus, and how they help you deal with anxiety.
On Resetting Focus
A tennis match is long. It can stretch over three, four, five hours, and within those hours, there are hundreds of individual points, each one its own small battle. The mental state you’re in at the start of the match is totally different than when you’re about to play your 3rd set when you’ve lost the first 2, if this is lost, you lose the game, which builds up the pressure. On the 3rd set, you have some information that you didn’t have at the start of the game. But a ritual like Nadal’s possibly helps him cut through all of that and resets him so that his every serve or every rally is independent of its past or future.
We all have our own versions of these rituals, knowingly or unknowingly. Because when we do a specific action that our brain is aware of, it comes to a state of calm, overcoming that anxiety.
On Overcoming Anxiety
This one runs a little deeper. Our brain fundamentally hates uncertainty; it needs to know, or at least have a reasonable guess at, what is about to happen. That’s why doing anything for the first time is hard. Not just because you lack the skill, but because your brain has no reference point for it, so those neural pathways don’t trigger. It doesn’t know what this new state feels like, what to expect from this new action, and so it does what it always does when it doesn’t know something - welcome anxiety.
But don’t we get anxious about some things even if we have done them a lot of times before, like say addressing a crowd, and before every such occurrence, we still feel the same. Why, you ask? That might just be because the crowd is different, or the stakes are higher. Otherwise, hasn’t Nadal played tons of games already? Why does he need a ritual?
The moment we enter an unknown situation, our brain goes like, “Oye, just what are you trying to do? What is this? I don’t like where this is going”. A ritual, even a tiny one, hands it something familiar. It says: you’ve been here before, you know how this starts, you have a process. And your brain, bless it, believes you.
Nadal described his rituals as “a way of placing myself in a match, ordering my surroundings to match the order I seek in my head.” I think that’s the most honest and precise way to put it. It’s not about the bottles or the hair or the lines on the court. It’s about bringing order to all that chaos that surrounds us.
That’s all I had for today, and before I say goodbye for today, here’s a quote I’ve been pondering,
"You have to know how to use your accidents."
Please don’t forget to share it with your friends, family, and strangers.
Have a Great Day 💖