Navigating Transitions: The Power of Personal Rituals

Last Sunday I drove my work car up to Everett, Washington. Before leaving, I ran through the mental travel checklist I created years ago when travel was a much bigger part of my work schedule. It still holds up:

• Clothes
• Charger
• Toiletries
• Audio books/podcasts
• Book
• Melatonin (to sleep in a new environment)
• Gummy bears (to keep me awake while driving)
• Work bag (checked last, when I'm already thinking about the trip's purpose)

When everything was checked off, I got into the car for the first two-hour drive of a week of much longer drives.

The drive was smooth. Relying on habits, reassured by having done this a million times before. Until I got out of the car and grabbed my bags to check into the hotel.

I had forgotten to pack tabling materials.

My travel schedule is not what it used to be. The rituals and habits I had come to rely on were out practice. Making this transition into a week of travel more challenging than it needed to be. 

Everything ended up just fine, but I spent the next week thinking about all the transitions I experience and how little things can make or break them. 

Why Transitions Matter

Transitions are hard for everyone. We experience far more of them than we'd like. During transitions, things can spiral out of control. Without proper support systems, transitions become difficult to navigate, much less overcome.

In this post, we'll explore how transitions work, why they can be so challenging, and what we can do to ease them, make the most of them, and perhaps even enjoy them.

Before becoming a parent, I had no idea what role transitions played in our lives. Growing up in a military family, I recognize now that my life was in constant transition. I just didn't have language for it. It felt normal. 

When I became a parent, the benefits of managing our kids' transitions became clear. Routine and consistency became a new religion. We suffered immediate consequences when we broke away from them.

What I didn't understand, partly because of how I was raised, partly because of my ego, was how transitions continue to affect me on a daily basis.

The Pandemic Awakening

When the pandemic hit and everyone was forced into a new reality, I became hyperaware of my daily transitions. Mostly because I didn't have the typical processes that supported those transitions.

When we first went into lockdown, I set up a temporary desk in my bedroom. Having work so close to my personal space quickly became too much. Two weeks at the bedroom desk, I caught myself checking work email as I was settling into bed to go to sleep. I was trying to maintain work boundaries in a space that had no boundaries. The physical proximity had erasied the mental separation I needed.

I needed a transition from home life to work. This transition is a natural boundary that helped me manage my daily activities and relationships.

After seeing that lack of transition and how it affected me, I started seeing them everywhere. Just about everything we experience involves a transition. If we don't have the things in place to help move from one step to another, there's an opportunity to be derailed.

This also became obvious at work. I watched my staff struggle to balance their own lives with their work schedules. We spent many staff meetings talking about what this larger transition felt like in our day-to-day lives and trying to figure out how to balance it all.

A Framework for Understanding Transitions

In my search for a solution, I came across William Bridges's Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes. In it, he outlines a process that every transition has and where we get stuck.

Each transition has three phases:

1. Ending - Letting go of the old situation
2. Unknown - The neutral zone where the old is gone but the new isn't fully operational
3. Beginning - The new situation takes shape

Not surprisingly, it's in step two, the Unknown, where we tend to get stuck. For many of life's transitions, there are no plans or preparations that can get us through. This is what the majority of Bridges's book addresses: catastrophic transitions like the sudden loss of a loved one, cancer diagnosis, or unemployment.

But for every catastrophic transition, there are a million small ones where we have a great deal of control.

How we handle these smaller transitions directly impacts the quality of our lives. The better we navigate these transitions, the better our lives become. Investing energy into understanding transition patterns, both universal and personal, will improve our experience with transitions and, therefore, improve the quality of life.

What Religions Knew About Transitions

Over millennia, religions designed rituals and rites of passage to help with small and large transitions. Things like baptisms, wakes, meditation and prayer, sacraments, Sabbath observances. While tied to specific belief systems, these practices offer practical wisdom for managing daily transitions, even in secular contexts.

It's easy to look on these practices as quaint and dismiss them as misguided relics of a different time. Because they tie so closely to the dogma they're a part of, we can throw out the baby with the bathwater without fully knowing what we're discarding.

Most religions preach peace of mind and a sense of relief in a very noisy world. As the world becomes more educated, faster, and more connected, more of us seek that sense of peace but without the religious baggage. I think one solution to continued progress lies in lessons from rituals created over thousands of years.

Transitions Hit Hardest with Stress and Decision Fatigue

Two factors directly affect how we manage transitions: stress levels and decision-making capability. These are moving targets that depend greatly on how the day goes, the type of work we do, and how well we manage both components together.

Both stress levels and how we make decisions have their own patterns and cycles and are, in a sense, transitions themselves. Understanding these patterns reveals when and how to implement rituals into our daily lives.

The Stress Cycle

In their book Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, Emily and Amelia Nagoski outline the stress cycle as:

The goal is to create ways that get you back to recovery faster, shortening the activation and resistance stages.

If you're unaware of how you manifest stress, you can see how this cycle mirrors the transitions cycle, where activation and resistance become the Unknown.

When navigating activation and resistance, the Nagoski sisters offer these recommendations to shorten the cycle:

1. Physical activity
2. Deep breathing
3. Positive social interaction
4. Laughter
5. Physical affection
6. Crying
7. Creative expression

Making these regular practices could be considered rituals. Which stress-relief practice works depends on the transition type:

• Physical activity works best for morning transitions (gym before work)
• Deep breathing helps in micro-transitions (between meetings, before difficult calls)
• Creative expression aids evening transitions (journaling before bed helps close the workday)

After observing my own transition for three months, patterns emerged.

Decision Fatigue

When we make many decisions throughout the day, it leads to mental exhaustion that results in decreased willpower, increased impulsivity, and a decline in decision quality. This is why it feels like our worst decisions are made late at night or after a stressful day at work.

Understanding stress cycles and decision fatigue reveals when rituals are most crucial. In Bridges's "Unknown" phase, our stress peaks and decision-making weakens, precisely when pre-established rituals can carry us through.

If we know our decision capability will decrease throughout the day, we can determine where rituals may best serve us. We can implement rituals throughout the day so we rely on the system to make decisions for us. Or we can implement them at day's end, when our decision-making ability has weakened. The ritual can bolster us as we let go and give in to the process.

A good example is meal planning and prep. Our Sunday meal prep ritual eliminates 14 dinner decisions per week:

1. Tuesday: Review calendar for the week's schedule
2. Wednesday: Plan 7 meals based on time available each evening
3. Wednesday Evening: Grocery shop with specific list
4. Thursday + Friday Morning while making lunches: Prep proteins and chop vegetables
5. Each weeknight: Follow the plan (takes 20 minutes vs. 45 minutes of deciding + cooking)

The ritual isn't the cooking, it's the decision-making session on Sunday that removes daily friction.

If you're getting hung up on the word "ritual," you can use system, routine, practice, or habit. Anything that denotes building a process structured enough so you don't have to think about it. This allows you to give in to the process and let go of other things.

Lessons from Religious Rituals

Sabbath: The Rhythm of Rest

Different religions approach the Sabbath differently, but the concept stems from verses in the Old Testament:

"Six days thou shalt work, but on the seventh day thou shalt rest: in plowing time and in harvest thou shalt rest." - Exodus 34:21

While many of us assume this is a commandment rather than a ritual, the perception stems from the duration and how different religions define "rest." I want to clarify that the ritual portion is this: one day a week should be set aside for rest.

In America, we love work. I'd even go so far as to say work is the new American religion. We pride ourselves on putting in long hours, hustling, working hard, and resting very little. It's a badge of honor, awarded socially as much as monetarily.

There's plenty of research now about the benefits of rest. Sleep, in particular, now joins exercise and diet as a pillar of health regimens. If you were to talk to anyone who exercises seriously, they'll tell you about the importance of rest days. Recovery becomes part of the process. After all, muscles grow during recovery, not during the workout itself.

When it comes to non-physical activity, rest plays a major role as well. One of the key steps of the creative process is incubation, the place where you allow the material you've been consuming to take a back seat, letting your subconscious do the heavy lifting. Stop forcing a solution and see what comes.

This can be hard to schedule because it feels intangible, and we're a culture that loves being in control. But if you've experienced it, you know the power your subconscious can wield after you've exhausted yourself with trying.

I think the ratio is also important: 1:7. Six days is still substantial work, and taking that seventh day will boost your productivity and make your work more sustainable.

Your weekly rest day doesn't need religious framing. Some questions to design yours:

• What's your equivalent of "no work"? (No email? No household projects? No social obligations?)
• What ratio works for your life? (1:7 might be 1:6 for some)
• What marks the beginning and end of this rest period? (Friday dinner? Sunday morning coffee?)

My version: Sunday is no obligations. Sleeping in. Prolonged morning coffee. Late brunch with my family. Jack Johnson’s Banana Pancakes is my anthem. Just pleasure, play, and presence.

Wake: Structure for Grief

Judaism holds a wake, not just a funeral, but a series of rituals over a period of time. It's the structure I find most interesting.

After the funeral, Jewish tradition continues with "shiva," a structured seven-day mourning period held in the mourner's home. Friends and family visit, comfort the bereaved, and participate in rituals such as lighting a memorial candle, sitting on low stools, covering mirrors, and refraining from entertainment or grooming. Shiva focuses on comforting the living rather than on the deceased's body or the funeral service itself.

Death is another topic where we struggle to create space. Having the space predetermined before death occurs, and having practiced similar rituals during smaller losses, makes it easier to enter that space when needed.

Connecting Small Rituals to Big Transitions

What does this have to do with daily transitions rather than big transitions? It's easy to see how these kinds of rituals and structure help with major life transitions. But it's less intuitive when we're working with our daily transitions.

Here's why daily transition rituals matter for major life changes: When restrictions around the pandemic loosened we were balancing going back to work and school, I couldn't make any new decisions. My morning coffee ritual continued automatically. Weighing beans, grinding, brewing. These mindless actions created 15 minutes of stability each morning. I didn't have to decide to do them; muscle memory took over.

If I hadn't already established this ritual during normal times, I'd have had nothing to fall back on during times of stress. You can't build new habits in the moment, you can only rely on existing ones.

When our daily transitions become strong and structured habits, we're more likely to maintain them during major transitions. These habitual smaller transitions keep us afloat during larger life-altering transitions.

Habits and daily rituals can be done without much thinking. We can allow the habit to carry us through while our emotions and minds wrestle the larger transition.

In this case, the ritual is like a conveyor belt we can step onto while navigating the unknown. We can remove our thinking and decisions from the mix and continue forward movement.

The unknown can compound itself and make navigation more challenging. Having some stability that handles the daily transitions has the ability to bolster and sustain.

Part of the reason the pandemic caused such disruption was that it upset so many routines simultaneously. Making it hard to know what to do, how to make decisions, or what the best way forward looked like. Overnight, the things we counted on became unreliable. Those dominos led to other dominos, and we faced a mess.

Building Your Own Rituals

Identify Your Transitions

Before you can deliberately build your own rituals, you need to identify where you need and want them. This requires observation and note-taking.

Track your transitions for one week:

• Set phone alarms at 9am, 1pm, 5pm, 9pm
• When the alarm sounds, note: What am I transitioning to/from right now? How smooth was it? (1-5 scale)
• End of week: Look for your lowest-scoring transitions, these need rituals

My tracking revealed my worst transition was 5pm (work to home). I'd arrive home mentally still at work, unable to be present with my kids. That insight led to my "commute” ritual.

For me, the morning is the most important transition. It either sets up my day for success or leaves me feeling like I'm running downhill, chased by a boulder.

To manage this, I have a few different rituals for different morning transitions.

My Morning Rituals

First Thing: Getting to the Gym

When I can get to the gym, my day tends to move more smoothly. I have more energy throughout the day and sleep better at night.

My morning gym routine addresses all three phases of Bridges's framework:

• Ending: Setting out clothes the night before acknowledges I'm ending my personal evening
• Unknown: The physical act of going to the gym occupies the uncertain space between sleep and work
• Beginning: Coffee ritual marks the clear start of my productive day

To help with this transition and combat the morning fog and infinite possibilities that await each new day, I:

1. Set out my gym clothes the night before
2. Pack my bag the night before
3. Set out my shoes

These smooth out the process of getting from my bed to the gym. Getting up before everyone in my house cuts down distractions even more.

After the Gym: The Coffee Ritual

This one is probably my favorite and the one with which I am most consistent: Coffee.

I came late to coffee and fell in love with the process as much as the taste. For this example, it's more about the process than about drinking it.

It helps with the transition from gym to home, which then leads into the transition to work/school.

This process shifts my mood and mentality, getting me into the right frame of mind for taking on the next steps:

1. Weighing the beans
2. Grinding the beans
3. Brewing
4. Clean up
5. Enjoy

My methods have varied, but it's the process that matters. I do it without thinking, so I can then settle into the next phase.

Starting Work: The Physical Transition

My next morning transition is entering the office to start work. This is where I've felt a huge difference from making a physical move.

Working from home, while I enjoyed it, meant I was consistently fighting justifiable distractions: laundry, dishes, another cup of coffee. They're all decent things to do, but if I can't fully transition, I'll constantly fight distractions and struggle to achieve focus for deep work.

Going back into the office made this transition key to starting my day well. It all starts with leaving the house on time.

I catch the bus into work, and if I miss it, I'm 20 minutes behind schedule.

I have a 10-minute ride to campus. Not having to worry about driving provides mental space to ease into the day ahead. I'm often listening to a book, but if I'm not holding my second cup of coffee, I have both hands free to write on my phone. I try to avoid scrolling.

When I get into the office, I set up the space. This means:

• Putting my lunch away
• Filling my water bottle
• Looking at my closing note from the day before [link]
• Doing a little bit of writing. This helps clear my head before getting into work. Dumping my thoughts onto the page makes space for the work I need to complete that day.

What Didn't Work

Failed experiments teach us what pitfalls to avoid. Here's what I tried that didn't work:

• Meditation before work: I just can’t fit it all in
• Elaborate breakfast ritual: Too time-consuming, felt like another obligation
• Evening journaling: When tired, I'd skip it and feel guilty

The lesson: Rituals must match your energy level at that transition point. Morning gym works because exercise energizes me. Evening journaling failed because it required mental energy I didn't have.

Rituals Have Costs

Setting up these rituals and habits is all well and good, but what happens when they don't work? When you fall off the train?
Rituals have costs: time, mental energy to maintain them, rigidity that can frustrate others. My morning routine requires waking at 4:45am. Which means I need to go to bed early. This has been hard to balance as my kids are getting older and don’t want to go to bed at 8:00pm anymore.

Before building a ritual, ask: Is the transition problem bigger than the ritual's cost? For my morning, yes, absolutely. My pre-ritual mornings were chaotic enough to affect the whole family. But not every rough transition deserves an elaborate ritual. Sometimes "good enough" is fine.

When Rituals Break Down

At the end of the day, we're all human. Holding to a strict code of work, while ideal and required by hustle culture, simply won't happen consistently.

I never thought of myself as a perfectionist until I examined my approach to habits. A common thought that ran through my head was, "I'll do it tomorrow."

I saw this as giving myself grace, but underneath this grace narrative was a fear of failure. I feared my inability to keep up, to do it properly, to be consistent.

Rather than get started and try, I held off until a “better time”.

The problem is tomorrow never comes.

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

Even after identifying where we'll benefit from rituals, building them, and having moderate success, there will come a day when it all stops.

We're too busy, we get sick, we're traveling. Something will eventually interfere with habits we desperately want and need. It's at this point where we have a decision.

We can either let this derail us or dismiss it and keep going.

The Triage System

When everything falls apart (sick kids, work crisis, travel), identify your keystone ritual, the one that, if maintained, keeps you minimally functional.

For me: the coffee process. Even when I skip gym, work from bed, eat cereal for dinner, I still make coffee properly. Those 10 minutes preserve my sense of self.

During my worst work crisis, I did nothing else consistently for two weeks. But daily coffee ritual signaled: "You're still you. This chaos is temporary." When the crisis passed, I rebuilt other rituals one at a time, starting from that anchor.

The Self-Criticism Trap

I have been a practitioner of this my entire life. Turning inward toward my inability to meet my personal commitments brings out my harshest critic: myself.

It's at this point where the negative self-talk comes out in droves. Like a fresh wound discovered by my tongue, I can't leave it alone. I am convinced that if I can get to the bottom of the missing ritual, then I can prevent the mistakes from happening. Believing that self-criticism is the path to perfection.

And so I press on with incessant callouts to what I've clearly done wrong and why I'll never actually reach my goal.
Instead of being a way out, this is a vicious cycle that prevents me from moving forward. This process pushes me back to square one rather than letting me pick up where I left off.

At this point, when feeling like a failure for not keeping up with what I've promised and set out to do, I am reminded of something that Gandhi said:

"Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn."

Failure is something I learned at an early age to avoid. Despite knowing this wasn't what I wanted to do, I did it anyway.

This framework is based on how I compare myself to others. According to Robert Greene, we see others not as they are but as they appear to us. This perception misleads us, creating myths around simple humans.

It's in this comparison where I get stuck.

The solution, akin to what Gandhi said, is to see people, including myself, as they really are: fallible human beings.

Dying and Being Reborn

Gandhi's "die and be reborn" isn't metaphor. It's a method. Here's how I practice it:

Each night laying in bed: I go through the day and close it out. This mental ends my day, giving me a chance to let it go.
Each morning: I mentally start fresh. Setting aside everything from the day before.

The mental act of closing and opening the day creates the boundary. Without this ritual, I'd mentally rehearse failures while trying to sleep, then wake up already defeated.

When I can accept this truth, I am better able to let go and allow myself to die, so I can be reborn, not starting over, but continuing from where I left off.

The Purpose of Rituals

Ultimately, the rituals and habits we create are designed to help us navigate transitions that can throw us for a loop and disrupt our forward momentum and sense of self. These rituals can guide us through the Unknown when our expectations get interrupted.

Rather than leveraging the habit or ritual primarily for productivity, we can use them as stability anchors.

When framed in this way, it can eliminate the judgment that comes with any kind of outcome or lack of consistency.

I have found establishing these rituals helpful for maintaining a level of equilibrium when I face the unknown.

Start Small

Start small. Choose one daily transition that consistently derails you, morning wake-up, work start, evening wind-down. Design one simple ritual for it this week.

When you inevitably miss a day, remember: the ritual exists to serve your transition, not to judge your consistency. Each morning offers a chance to begin again.