Making Your Own Rituals (and Why They Matter More Than You Think)
We talk a lot about routines, habits, and “self-care,” but rituals are something different. A routine is what you do. A ritual is how you do it. It’s the meaning you choose to attach to a moment. And that meaning, even if the moment lasts 10 minutes, is often what keeps a ritual in place.
Rituals don’t need candles or crystals or a perfectly curated vibe. They don’t even need to look spiritual. The best ones are usually the simplest: the things you repeat on purpose because they make you feel like yourself again.
When Jess and I were building Arcana Club, everything was chaos in the best way, ideas & test prints everywhere, endless “wait, what if we changed this” moments, and weird late night tangents that lead us to taping a 30 X 40 grid of sticky notes on our wall (Explanation on this coming soon lol). It would’ve been so easy to skip everything that wasn’t directly “productive.” But what is the fun in that? Despite all of our crazy ideas & sleepless nights, we didn’t skip our Coffee Saturdays. No matter how busy we were, that little ritual stayed. A small weekly pause to connect, reset, and talk through the week. Looking back, it was probably the thing that kept us grounded enough to build something meaningful.
That’s the thing about rituals: they create anchors. Not the heavy kind that keep you stuck, the kind that keep you steady. A ritual is a moment you can rely on in a world that doesn’t always feel reliable. It gives shape to your days, direction to your intentions, and space for your thoughts to catch up to your life.
People often think rituals need to be elaborate to “count,” but the truth is they work best when they’re lightweight and easy to repeat. A morning stretch before checking your phone. A few minutes to set an intention before you open your laptop. A nightly walk where you let your brain breathe a little. These tiny moments shift your nervous system out of autopilot and back into awareness.
Another reason rituals matter: they turn the ordinary into something you can look forward to. They create pockets of meaning inside days that might otherwise blur together. When you choose a ritual intentionally, you’re not just doing an activity, you’re giving yourself a moment that’s yours, a moment that tells your mind, “We’re slowing down now. You can land here for a bit.”
Good rituals also evolve with you. Some rituals last years; some last a season. Some you outgrow and replace. None of that means they failed, it means you’re paying attention to what you need now. A ritual is only useful if it’s meaningful, if it fits the person you currently are, not the person you were three years ago.
If you want to create your own ritual, skip the pressure to make it perfect. Start with something simple. Ask yourself:
What moment in my day already feels good?
What’s one thing I always wish I had time for?
What helps me feel grounded or calm, even for a few seconds?
Your ritual might be a slower cup of tea. A playlist you start every morning. A journal you touch, even if you don’t write in it. A five-minute reset when the day gets away from you. You don’t have to force meaning onto it. Meaning of a ritual may grow as you repeat it.
The real magic of rituals is that they end up guiding you without trying to. They give you a rhythm. They help you hear yourself more clearly. They create space for your inner voice to speak up in ways it can’t when everything is loud and rushed.
And you don’t need to wait for the perfect moment to start one. You can build a ritual out of something you already do as long as you give it just a little intention, a little consistency, and a little room to matter.
Little rituals won’t fix everything. But they will steady you. They’ll give you something solid to return to. And sometimes, that’s exactly what you need.
