This is an iHeart podcast, guaranteed human.
I'm Michelle McPhee, and I've been unraveling the strangest criminal alliance I've ever reported on.
A Mormon polygamist and an Armenian businessman.
Multi-million dollar house, Ferraris and Lamborghinis, private jets.
A billion dollar fraud.
But how long can this alliance last?
Tell me what you know.
Is somebody coming after me?
Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
I am the therapy gecko.
I am an unlicensed lizard therapist who takes phone calls from real, anonymous humans about their problems such as this.
Sometimes I'll have my girlfriend preach you spicy food and kind of baby bird it into my mouth.
Is that weird?
This week on Therapy Gecko, we're hearing all real authentic, human stories about anything from relationships to family drama to serendipitous encounters with unexpected people and things.
If real people pique your interest, this is the podcast for you.
Listen to Therapy Gecko. on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're dissecting timelines, receipts, blind items, and previous episodes.
Amanda and Wes, watch out.
We're not going to be easy on you.
Listen to Two Teas in a Pod on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Every family has its secrets.
But what happens when you discover that your dad has been living a double life?
That is not the look of an innocent man.
Is everyone lying to me about who they are?
I felt such desperation.
I felt it was what I had to do.
Listen to Deep Cover The Family Man on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
For years, The Unhoused has been presented as a monolith in mainstream media.
We The Unhoused is a podcast that's changing the narrative.
I'm Theo Henderson, and I created the show while I was unhoused on the streets of Los Angeles.
We've grown into a two-time Webby Award-winning podcast, the only podcast that shares unhoused stories and news from the unhoused perspective.
Listen to We The Unhoused on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello everybody, I'm Gemma Spike and welcome back to The Psychology of Your 20s, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology.
Hello everybody, welcome back to the show, welcome back to the podcast.
It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we break down the psychology of our 20s.
So a few weeks ago I saw this book in the window at a secondhand bookstore in Amsterdam called The Psychology of Superstition.
It was like, you know when you see a book and it's like calling to you?
It was calling to me.
I'm a deeply superstitious person, have been since I was a kid.
I immediately bought it and I kind of put the question out to you guys, the listeners, asking if you wanted to hear an episode on it, and all of you said yes, absolutely we do.
So this is that episode.
Superstitious behaviors, as I learned from this book, show up in basically every single culture across every single time period that humans have been alive for.
They are an unspoken part of the fabric of humanity.
And it turns out they are more psychological than you would think.
They're also a lot less about actually controlling outcomes and creating good luck and more about emotional regulation and anxiety management.
When we perform superstitious rituals, Something deeply calming actually occurs in our minds that we can see and we can observe.
Not only that, they also connect us deeply to others.
They create self-fulfilling prophecies because they unconsciously influence our behavior.
And they may even have a little bit of an evolutionary purpose.
There are also some downsides to our superstitious beliefs that we're going to talk about as well.
Their relationship to conspiracy theories is one of them.
How they intersect with OCD and anxiety, to name a few others.
But ultimately, I think having rituals, small superstitions, small practices that you do to mentally protect yourself or help yourself is, for most people, an incredibly valuable thing to have, whether you're in your 20s and beyond.
And the science says it may actually help you live a more successful life to believe in something bigger than you.
So we're going to talk about exactly why that is, according to some fascinating research, plus some really interesting superstitious rituals from across the world that you may want to try.
Without further ado, let's get into it.
So what is superstition really?
Because I think you'd be surprised how many everyday things we do actually have superstitious origins.
So superstition is usually defined as like any belief that that a particular action object, symbol or coincidence can and will influence outcomes in a way that goes beyond ordinary cause and effect.
In other words, superstition links things that are objectively not connected So that they feel connected, often through some mystical otherworldly, maybe even religious karmic force.
So great example classic example is like touching wood after saying something you're hoping for that you don't want to happen.
So not to jinx things, unconsciously avoiding saying like oh, I feel excited or I feel good about this thing if it hasn't happened yet, because that feels like you're tempting fate.
Maybe you wear the same earrings to every job interview or every first date, even though they don't actually rationally influence the outcome.
You're superstitious about it, or you keep a lucky charm in your bag.
You blow on dice.
You don't want to step on the cracks, not walking under ladders, because you think it's going to kind of curse you.
Things that are objectively not related to the superstitious outcome but that we still do.
And these tiny rituals that might initially seem really insignificant, so much so that they don't even count for anything, but you still Do them.
You still involuntarily find yourself knocking on wood, not walking under ladders saying a prayer when you see a black cat.
So there's this concept called half belief that was first spoken about in a paper published in 2024.
And it talks about how many people, probably like you, practice superstitious things or practice superstitions even though they don't believe in them, because of how woven they are into human history and consciousness.
In this paper across two samples of participants.
Nearly half of these participants practiced some kind of superstitious belief or behavior, and even though the majority of them was not convinced that it was actually real.
So when they were asked, do you think this actually does anything?
Most of them would say no, but they still did it anyway.
Even if rationally, we don't believe or don't have evidence that these things work, superstitious behaviors again, are a deeply reoccurring human event that are part of our collective consciousness.
When you look at some of the oldest, most significant superstitions.
That is when we can see why they are so psychologically significant and therefore have survived for so long.
Take, for example, displaying the evil eye.
This is actually a 5,000-year-old superstition originating in Mesopotamia, in the Mediterranean.
And it basically says that when people are jealous or envious of you, this can actually poison our own good fortune.
So by wearing an evil eye amulet, which I'm sure you see everywhere these days, by displaying that blue eye charm,
This almost reverses, like the curse, back on the person who is thinking negatively about you and kind of strikes them down with their own envious thoughts.
Nowadays everywhere, every jewelry shop, every like, every girl has one of these necklaces.
But anthropological works suggest that people have been displaying some version of the evil eye, of this evil eye for thousands of years, and beginning with these amulets that they were finding in Egypt and in Greece.
This belief has been passed down through so many generations because it maps onto a lot of aspects of social psychology, in that things like envy and things like social threat have always mattered for our survival.
So we employ the use of symbols as protection to manage the sense of vulnerability that we have psychologically around people who may wish us harm.
The second example is Friday, the 13th, and this is another explanation for why and how superstition's come to be.
The origin of this is very tangled.
It's like a myth of religious, mythological, historical events.
The first notion that Friday the 13th might be a bit of a cursed date was because of the Last Supper.
Judas was the 13th guest at the Last Supper.
It occurred on the – I think on Friday the 13th.
I don't really know.
That was like the first –
I guess, inclination that this date might be cursed.
Other writers have linked XIII to Norse mythology, particularly the story of Loki arriving as an unwelcome extra guest, bringing chaos and death.
That explanation is historically a little bit harder to pin down.
Another reason why people think Friday the 13th may be a cursed date is because there's been a lot of occasions and historical events that have happened on this date.
Yes, also obviously the crucifixion, but also...
A number of just like random things that don't seem interconnected or relevant to each other.
Except for that they all shared this day.
So there was a very famous bombing of Buckingham Palace that fell on Friday the 13th.
The death of many significant figures has happened on Friday the 13th.
This shows the second way that you know superstitions come to be through repetition, through layers and layers of stories and history that, over time, create superstition purely because of repeated association.
Another example that explains the final way that superstitious beliefs come to be is knocking on wood, which is one that I find myself unconsciously doing all the time.
One of the most common theories links it back to ancient pagan beliefs, particularly in parts of Europe where trees were kind of thought to house spirits gods, protective supernatural forces.
In that view, when you touch a tree, or later just wood itself, you it was like your way of asking for protection and showing reverence, or like quietly calling on those forces for help.
It may have also come from a child's game called tiki tiki, touch wood, where when you touch a piece of wood you'd be safe from capture, you'd be safe from being it.
We have a game like this in australia called home base, where i guess, like when you touch the stump of wood, the guard is protecting, like you win the game.
Like there's a guard next to a stump of wood or a center piece of wood and everybody's running around trying to get it.
Before this episode, I had absolutely no idea that that's where this tradition comes from.
Yet every time I say something good or a wish or a desire, or even when I say something bad, that could happen and I don't want it to happen, I touch wood.
And this just goes to show that, over time, even as older religious or mythological beliefs die down and aren't necessarily something that we've been taught, the behavior still remains.
It's been absorbed into our everyday group thinking.
And those are three of the kind of ways that superstitions become global phenomena or become communal phenomena.
The big psychological question is, Why?
Why do some things become superstitions that are seemingly random and others don't?
Like why do we knock wood and not glass?
Why do our brains randomly find certain things comforting, even if there is no solid evidence to them, or just as much evidence for one thing over the other?
And One of the biggest factors behind superstition is pattern recognition.
Superstitions often begin just really randomly, with a few examples of where someone has displayed the evil eye and happened to experience prosperity.
Someone has knocked on wood and has been protected, maybe just out of coincidence, people start noticing and putting together these coincidences, and that's what gives what are seemingly random things an association and a significance.
Our brain only then sees the examples that confirm our beliefs, or confirm our superstitions, ignoring the ones that don't.
Because the pattern is so comforting it creates order.
Human brains are built to predict what will happen next in order to protect us.
And they are constantly trying to connect events, infer causes, detect regularities, to live up to that mechanism or to fulfill that desire.
Most of the time that is useful.
It helps us to learn what effects have what outcomes, but it also means that we are vulnerable to finding patterns in often complete randomness, just because our need for safety predictability, security demands it of us.
A rather old paper from 2008 from researchers at the University of Texas found that when people felt a lack of control, that is when they were more likely to perceive illusory patterns, which included leaning into conspiracies or leaning into superstitious thinking.
When things feel confusing uncertain, scary.
This paper showed that The brain often prefers having any explanation, even if it doesn't have evidence for it, even if it cannot fully rationally explain why two things are linked.
It just needs something to grab onto.
That same logic appears in research on illusory control.
Griffiths and colleagues in their paper found that people with stronger superstitious beliefs also showed stronger perceptions of control in situations that were actually determined by chance.
So what this means is that in ambiguous settings, some people are more likely to overemphasize The fact that certain behaviors they've done mattered.
They see themselves as more central because of their superstitions.
A charm, a ritual, a phrase, a certain seat choice, a certain angel number.
It starts to feel meaningful, because the mind is attempting to reduce ambiguity, to make us feel internally safe.
This is also where gut feelings come in.
Sometimes superstitions arrive more so as sensations.
Or feelings, kind of like a bit of tension that we feel, or a sense that something is off, or a pull towards a certain choice.
It feels, superstition feels more like that.
Listening to those things is what makes us superstitious rather than specific rituals.
Gut feelings happen because the brain is constantly scanning for patterns beneath conscious awareness such as these ones.
We know this from so many episodes we've talked about it in.
It takes in so much information.
We cannot deliberately think about it all at once.
Past experiences, emotional memories, subtle environmental cues, micro social signals, bodily feelings.
We just can't think about it at the same time.
It compresses all of that into a singular feeling that may be a gut instinct.
Sometimes that feeling is genuinely useful.
It can reflect real learning.
When we see a slight, momentary look on someone's face and because of past experiences, we remember that the person who betrayed us in the past once had a similar look.
And so, even if their true intentions aren't overtly obvious, we get a gut feeling that something's amiss.
That's a helpful situation, or that's a helpful cue.
But in situations of uncertainty, stress, fear, that same system can become oversensitive.
The brain starts trying to protect us not just from real danger, like that shady person, but just from the sense of ambiguity itself.
This is increased a hundred, if not a million fold.
If you are anxious because you already have a certain response to uncertainty that feels very physical, regardless of whether something is actually wrong.
You already feel a million gut feelings every day just because of your anxiety that's shooting in many directions.
When superstition is added in, we can make some incorrect calls, all in the name of trying to predict an outcome, trying to keep ourselves really safe.
And I think that helps explain why superstitions can feel so compelling.
Even when rationally, again, rationally, we know that these two things are probably not linked.
Having a rabbit's foot in your car and being able to drive safe like those things are rationally not linked.
The conscious mind Probably knows, but another part of our mind says maybe they're not linked, maybe there's no evidence.
But why risk it?
From an evolutionary perspective, it was, and is still, safer to overreact to possible danger than to ignore something that might matter or might protect us.
Superstitions grow in that space.
They Again.
The brain would rather do something symbolic or that it thinks might help than sit passively not knowing and not being able to do anything.
The only thing our brain can do in moments of uncertainty is just to kind of wait and see, or we can try out this cool little ritual.
A pretty notable paper from back in 1994 found that magical thinking increases under high stress conditions, especially among people with lower tolerance factors of uncertainty.
Researchers asked i think it was like 174 participants to basically complete questionnaires about magical thinking and tolerance to ambiguity.
All of these people, by the way, were living in war zones during the gulf war and they were either exposed to regular missile strikes so that was a high stress condition or not exposed low stress condition.
What the researchers found was that participants in the high stress condition who were actively living in a a war zone basically, were more likely to engage in magical thinking compared to those who weren't, Because under these situations where so little was in their control, they couldn't determine where a bomb or where a missile was going to drop and where it wasn't.
They weren't in control of the political forces that be.
The only thing the mind could reach for was symbolic control and was these superstitious beliefs that doing certain things might protect them.
Not doing certain things might leave them at risk.
This is such an important point.
Superstition is often about fear management as this example shows.
Psychological research proves that tiny actions regulate emotions, precisely because they are tiny, because they are doable.
And this ritualized behavior can counteract our anxieties about bigger things.
These ritualized four-leaf clover, knock-on wood, evil eye behaviors are powerful in that manner.
Researchers from Harvard actually demonstrated this further in a 2016 paper, where they got basically participants who engaged in rituals.
So a sequence of symbolic actions that were very repetitive, very formal.
When they did this before stressful tasks, it actually improved their performance.
This goes to show something very important.
Superstition is a form of emotional regulation.
Displaying the evil eye knocking on wood may not actually change your luck, but it changes your emotional state to feel more in control.
That is actually what influences the outcome.
Because somebody who is calmer can also think rationally, can problem solve better, will have a better outcome.
That is the power of the superstitious belief.
So do superstitions actually change outcomes?
The answer is sometimes yes. but not in the way that you would expect.
We're going to discuss all of that and more after this short break.
We were God's chosen kingdom on earth.
He felt destined for greatness.
So when a swaggering Armenian businessman catapults Jacob into an extraordinary world, he doesn't look back.
Ferraris and Lamborghinis, private jets.
Meeting the president of Turkey.
I'm Michelle McPhee and this is one of the most shocking criminal conspiracies I've ever come across.
When Jacob met Lavan, this went to a billion dollar fraud.
But with two kings from entirely different worlds, just how long can their empire survive?
The largest tax investigation in American history.
You need to tell me what you know.
Is somebody coming after me?
Jacob told Lavan, you're ruining my life.
Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
I am the therapy gecko.
I am an unlicensed lizard therapist who takes phone calls from real, anonymous humans about their problems such as this.
Or this.
I had my boyfriend over and I had dirty dishes everywhere.
And I put the dirty dishes in our closet so he wouldn't see them.
If you're the kind of person that would enjoy being a fly on the wall of a stranger's therapy session.
Or if you pass people on the street and constantly wonder what might be going on in their heads.
This is the podcast for you.
This week on Therapy Gecko, we're hearing all real authentic, human stories about anything from relationships to family drama to serendipitous encounters with unexpected people and things.
Listen to Therapy Gecko on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
June is Black Music Month and on the Drink Champs podcast we're speaking with the hottest names in the culture, like Swae Lee.
Do you realize how legendary you are?
I appreciate that.
I be seeing it, but I'm like, man, I still got like so much more to do.
Like Prince, he dropped like 30 albums.
We dropped like five right now.
That's the rate we got to be going.
Yep, that's a good attitude.
You'll also hear stories from industry legends and hip-hop pioneers like Fab Five Freddy.
I directed one of Nas' early videos.
Which one?
One Love.
Wow.
I literally filmed in his apartment in Queensbridge.
His mom's was still up in that apartment.
Nas was just beginning to take off.
His pops used to live near me in Harlem.
His dad introduced him to a whole lot of, you know, conscious stuff.
And he made a young prodigy.
No matter the era, Drink Champs brings you the biggest names and the most unfiltered conversations.
Listen to Drink Champs from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Your husband is not who you think he is.
Your body is not what you thought it was. your identity is formed by a secret history.
I'm Dani Shapiro, and these are just a few of the stunning stories I'll be exploring on the 14th season of Family Secrets.
Just then we felt the plane turn in the air, so much so that the bags that were under people's seats just kind of flew into the aisle.
Each week, We dive headfirst into the complex power of secrecy, how it shapes our identities and relationships and how it ultimately can reveal to us our truest selves.
My daughter.
She's pretending she doesn't know, but is trying to cook and feed me and keep me alive because I wasn't eating anything.
And me pretending like everything was fine.
He kind of shoved me out of the way and said, move.
And he went out the front door and he jumped in a car and drove off.
And that was the last time I saw him.
Listen to season 14 of Family Secrets on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, everyone.
I'm Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things.
I'm excited to share that I have a new podcast called Mind Over Mountain.
In each episode, I interview athletes, adventurers and adrenaline seekers to discuss the inner landscapes and life experiences that informed and inspired their extraordinary feats.
I also bring a bit of advice into the mix, so we too can better understand how to face our own seemingly insurmountable challenges.
Do you know what I'm going to do?
I'm going to pull out what you already have inside.
We're coming into this world fighting for our lives.
All I'm going to do is pull out what you already got inside.
We're there to support and celebrate each other.
And that's not like a your story versus my story.
You're going to walk up and over that dang mountain.
You're not just going to put your mind over it.
Yep, yep, exactly.
And if I can't walk up and over it, I'm going to go through it.
Listen to Mind Over Mountain every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Superstitious people I think often get a bad rap.
We've explored why they come to develop these rituals, me being one of those people.
I think we get a bad rap for being irrational and for being a little bit woo-woo, or maybe not the sharpest tools in the shed, or being just anxious people who want and need anything to make us feel better.
I think that is a way too simplistic perspective and it overlooks some very deep, deep facts about human psychology and human behavior.
Yes, in a sense, it is irrational to believe in something that's not evidence-based.
But that doesn't mean that rituals do nothing.
As I said right before this break, they do and can and will continue to create a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy effect.
And here is how.
There is a heavily cited paper from researchers at the University of Cologne, published in 2010, that found engaging in some kind of good luck superstition improved performance on tasks involving motor skills, memory and persistence, in part because doing or performing a superstitious ritual increased an individual's self-efficacy, ie their belief that they could execute the behaviors necessary to change the outcome themselves.
The lucky charm, the behavior, the ritual made them calmer and gave them confidence to try something, anything compared to a previous situation where fear was made them do nothing.
And that ability, or just that slight course change towards doing something.
That is what changed the outcome.
I think it's kind of like when children bring their favorite stuffed toy to school with them.
Do you remember that when you were a kid, in the first couple of weeks you got to bring your toy to help us like settle in?
The toy doesn't change anything about the environment, apart from the fact that it makes it more comfortable and the positive associations the toy has induces a psychological effect in that it improves our mood and improves our emotions and makes us feel like we can cope.
This helps explain why athletes performers, musicians so often develop superstitions and rituals in high pressure domains.
Uncertainty is everywhere.
You can train for years and still have an off day, still have a weird feeling, still blank, still have somebody throw something at you, yell at you.
People create routines around their performances the same warmup, the same meal, the same playlist, the same socks, the same sequence of things because unconsciously, or even consciously, it helps them manage the anxiety that things could go wrong.
It helps them feel more in control of things that they're not in control of.
The ritual is less about luck.
I think that's the first thing we think.
We think that it's changing somebody's luck or they think it's changing their luck.
No, it's more about crossing this important mental threshold.
It tells the body, it tells the mind, that We're safe, we've done everything we can, and it enters them into a performance state.
It makes them feel prepared and in control for this big moment.
There's also a social layer to superstition that I think people often underestimate.
So many superstitions and rituals, when you break it down, are culturally inherited.
They are ways of staying connected to family heritage ancestors, in a way that makes us feel supported even in really hard situations.
For example, in China, the number eight, the color red considered very lucky, considered a symbol that's going to bring wealth and happiness.
This is a cultural-wide superstition.
It's also deeply tied to business, to daily life, to significant celebrations.
And I actually think a big role of superstition and why people are superstitious is because it's about belonging.
Rituals can strengthen social identity and cohesion and this sense that we are all held together and being guided or supported by something larger than ourselves.
Studies on rituals, and particularly participation in superstitious rituals within a community, have linked ritual engagement with increased social bonding, increased social well-being and increased individual satisfaction, especially in communities where shared practices signal identity and mutual care.
Think about it.
Who is going to perform better during an exam or a game or a job interview?
Someone who feels like they belong and have people believing in them, silently encouraging them, who has a superstition that connects them to those people, or someone who feels the burden of going at it alone and who has nothing to relate to their community through.
I think it's a common sense answer for most of us.
So again, this is why superstitions are so effective psychologically.
They make us feel in control.
They unconsciously manage our emotional state for us.
They're a form of anxiety management and they connect us to something bigger than ourselves.
That is again, very calming.
Is there a downside?
Yes, of course there is.
There always is.
Firstly, the biggest downside of superstitions that we need to talk about.
The same thing that pushes people towards superstitions during uncertain times is also what drives people towards conspiracies.
Conspiracies are...
A similar form of what psychologists call compensatory control.
When things feel unsafe, we want an explanation and we want someone else or something else to blame, the same way that we want to think that something else gives us luck.
Think about time periods when superstitions and conspiracies have been the most ripe.
During the Black Plague, during the Salem witch trials, after 9-11, during COVID.
What is something that all those things have in common?
There were very, very uncertain times.
Very scary things were happening that threatened our individual sense of safety.
And so people flock once again to things that they think are an explanation or could provide a rational explanation, or could provide a rational cause and effect explanation, even when there isn't any evidence for it, just because they are seeking anything.
They are looking for any answer, anything that could help them, anything that could ward off a bad spirit, anything that could explain a situation so that it is more manageable to them emotionally and mentally.
Superstitions can also, alongside that, become something that is very individually punishing rather than helpful, when they become negative rather than positive.
And I think here is a very good place to make the distinction between positive and negative superstitions, because they are very different.
Positive superstitions are usually organized around luck hope, the possibility that something really good is going to happen.
These are the rituals and beliefs that people use to invite success confidence, protection in uncertain situations, good fortune psychologically.
These superstitions do often function as a form of emotional and psychological support.
In that sense, as we've explored, positive superstitions are often less about fear, the more about comfort.
They help people approach challenging situations with a stronger sense of agency, a stronger sense of control, hope structure.
Negative superstitions tend to work very differently.
These are often built less around attracting luck, more around avoiding danger, warding off bad outcomes, protecting yourself from the unknown.
The emotional tone here is threat based.
Rather than the superstition offering encouragement, these superstitions can increase vigilance fear avoidance, maybe even guilt.
If something bad happens and then you find out that there was a superstition all along that you shouldn't have done something wrong.
They're often bound up with the idea that something bad could happen if you get it wrong, which makes them feel psychologically heavier and more significant.
It feels there's more of an urgency to perform them.
That is why negative superstitions can become more time-consuming or just mentally consuming compared to positive ones, because we are pulled into this preventative, anxious mindset that there is something we must do to avoid bad luck.
We must do so that the bad thing doesn't happen to us.
Research has again found meaningful differences between people who are more likely to lean towards positive versus negative superstitions.
Specifically, people who are more drawn towards negative superstitions are more likely to have severe anxiety, more likely to have a fear, or what we call an intolerance for uncertainty, and typically have a higher sensitivity to threat.
Similar papers have also found that negative superstitions may be more likely to be repeated on an obsessive scale.
Why?
Simply because, again, they are threat-based.
Not doing them makes us feel like something bad is going to happen, and our brain pays more attention to the possibility of bad things happening over good things happening.
Hence, they capture more of our attention purely from this ancient survival mechanism point of view.
The greater the imagined danger, the harder the ritual is to dismiss.
And I think this is an important caveat, because this is when superstitions start to morph from a playful habit, a social habit and closer to a more threat-driven coping strategy, where the person is no longer asking could this help me, but can I afford not to do this thing?
So this is when we need to talk about one specific mental condition in particular that does not mix very favorably with superstitious rituals.
I'm going to give you a chance to guess what that may be.
OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder.
Superstitions quickly become very complicated and sometimes genuinely risky for people with OCD because they overlap with the same, I guess the same core logic that often drives obsessive behaviors.
The same thing that drives people to check locks multiple times, to obsessively clean their hands, to excessively ruminate over the same thought again and again and again also drives superstitious beliefs, and that is namely magical thinking.
Magical thinking sounds very fun, doesn't it?
Very whimsical.
Magical thinking, very magical.
It's not.
With OCD.
It is the sense that a thought image feeling word, small action can influence an outcome in a way that it is not realistically connected to.
So, for example, someone might fear that they like, if they don't tap a doorframe exactly five times in a specific place before leaving the house, everybody in their family is going to die.
They may believe that having a violent, intrusive thought somehow increases the chance that that's going to come true.
They're superstitious mentally.
So many, so many.
Somebody might believe that you know, if they don't say a prayer a certain way or do a certain ritual a certain way, bad things will happen to them.
The central idea is very similar to superstition, if not the same.
It's that you may be able to influence an outcome through an unrelated act.
If only you know about it, if only you are part of the group who understands the superstition.
And, just like superstition, compulsions are often again attempts to cope with the discomfort, the human discomfort of not knowing.
They are ways of trying to prevent harm, create certainty, neutralize danger and therefore feel temporarily safe.
The problem is because I don't think superstitions are the problem.
The problem is that in OCD This never actually resolves the fear.
It just teaches the brain that the ritual mattered, that the threat must have been real and that uncertainty isn't tolerable.
This is the interesting thing, right?
You perform the ritual, you do the compulsion, the bad thing doesn't happen.
But you have no way of knowing whether the bad thing wasn't going to happen all along, because now you can't stop performing the ritual.
One time there's been this coincidence that you've done this thing and the bad thing hasn't happened.
In the mind of somebody with OCD, that is an amazing thing. thing to cling onto.
We're just constantly looking for anything that can tell us or give us a sense that we can control what is uncontrollable.
For somebody who's just superstitious, these things are kind of fine, fun, light, enjoyable.
For somebody with OCD, a superstitious belief or ritual or activity or routine, to them it is life and death.
It cannot be ignored.
I remember for me, I used to have to stare at the sun once a day when I was a kid, to make sure it.
Well, everybody was cursed.
Completely irrational.
So irrational.
But I did some very serious damage to my eyes because of that.
And it's just a part of superstition and its interaction with OCD we need to be aware of.
Similar process can happen with anxiety.
People with high anxiety are often especially sensitive again to uncertainty.
Superstitions are extra appealing because they offer a quick sense of structure, something to put into action that they can do right now, instead of sitting with the distress of not knowing.
Instead of seeing how things may play out, the anxious mind gets to do something.
So then in that moment yeah, the superstition, the belief, the ritual does reduce the intensity of the anxiety.
That makes it more likely to be repeated, but you never get to see what's on the other side of if you didn't perform the superstition.
Even if they don't rationally think that this ritual is doing anything, it becomes what we call a maladaptive coping mechanism.
So whilst superstition and OCD, or anxiety-related behaviors, are not the same thing, They do rest on similar psychological foundations.
One of the clearest, clearest differences and ways for you to tell if it's something you're worried about is how the behavior feels.
If the behavior is flexible occasional, more lighthearted than it is distressing, it's more likely to be an ordinary ritual or an ordinary superstition.
But if it starts to feel rigid urgent, exhausting or impossible to resist, if you feel like you have to do it, that may be a sign that something more than everyday superstition is going on.
The same is true if the ritual keeps expanding.
If one rule turns into many or if the relief never really lasts for that long, that is a sign that your superstition is becoming its own unmanageable beast.
And if that's the case, like that's when you do need help, professional help, because it is very much manageable.
That's the thing.
Superstitions or magical thinking is manageable.
You just need somebody who can guide you through it.
And again, not all superstitions are going to turn out that way.
Not all people who are superstitious are have OCD or have intense anxiety.
It is just one link and one relationship that is just important to be aware of.
Okay, we are going to take one more short break, but when we return let's go back towards the positives of superstition and rituals and talk about why having superstitions and habits is maybe is important in our 20s.
Maybe is something that more of us should be looking to adopt.
Stay with us.
Jacob kingston grew up in an isolated polygamous sect.
We were god's chosen kingdom on earth.
He felt destined for greatness.
So when a swaggering Armenian businessman catapults Jacob into an extraordinary world, he doesn't look back.
Ferraris and Lamborghinis, private jets.
Meeting the president of Turkey.
I'm Michelle McPhee and this is one of the most shocking criminal conspiracies I've ever come across.
When Jacob met Lavon, this went to a billion dollar fraud.
But with two kings from entirely different worlds, just how long can their empire survive?
The largest tax investigation in American history.
You need to tell me what you know.
Is somebody coming after me?
Jacob told Lavon, you're ruining my life.
Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
I am the therapy gecko.
I am an unlicensed lizard therapist who takes phone calls from real, anonymous humans about their problems such as this.
Or this.
I had my boyfriend over and I had dirty dishes everywhere.
And I put the dirty dishes in our closet so he wouldn't see them.
If you're the kind of person that would enjoy being a fly on the wall of a stranger's therapy session.
Or if you pass people on the street and constantly wonder what might be going on in their heads.
This is the podcast for you.
This week on Therapy Gecko, we're hearing all real authentic, human stories about anything from relationships to family drama to serendipitous encounters with unexpected people and things.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
June is Black Music Month and on the Drink Champs podcast we're speaking with the hottest names in the culture, like Swae Lee.
Do you realize how legendary you are?
I appreciate that.
I be seeing it, but I'm like, man, I still got like so much more to do.
Like Prince, he dropped like 30 albums.
We dropped like five right now.
That's the rate we got to be going.
Yep, that's a good attitude.
You'll also hear stories from industry legends and hip-hop pioneers like Fab Five Freddy.
I directed one of Nas' early videos.
Which one?
One Love.
Wow.
I literally filmed in his apartment in Queensbridge.
His moms were still up in that apartment.
Noms was just beginning to take off.
His pops used to live near me in Harlem.
His dad introduced him to a whole lot of, you know, conscious stuff, and he made a young prodigy.
No matter the era, Drink Champs brings you the biggest names and the most unfiltered conversations.
Listen to Drink Champs from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Your husband is not who you think he is.
Your body is not what you thought it was.
Your identity is formed by a secret history.
I'm Dani Shapiro, and these are just a few of the stunning stories I'll be exploring on the 14th season of Family Secrets.
And just then, we felt the plane turn in the air.
So much so that the bags that were under people's seats just kind of flew into the aisle.
Each week, we dive headfirst into the complex power of secrecy, how it shapes our identities and relationships and how it ultimately can reveal to us our truest selves.
My daughter.
She's pretending she doesn't know, but is trying to cook and feed me and keep me alive because I wasn't eating anything.
And me pretending like everything was fine.
He kind of shoved me out of the way and said, move.
And he went out the front door and he jumped in a car and drove off.
And that was the last time I saw him.
Listen to season 14 of Family Secrets on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Happy Pride from the Outspoken Podcast Network.
All month long and all year round, we're celebrating being loud, proud and always original.
It's me, Brandon Kyle Goodman, host of the podcast Tell Me Something Messy.
Check out my show for unfiltered takes on dating, relationships and adulting.
The more you get comfortable with someone, the more their real self comes out.
They're going to be gross.
What's the grossest thing about a man?
Burping.
Shut it down.
Listen to High Key for the best pop culture takes, and there are no girls on the internet for all your tech news.
For your favorite celebrity kikis, check out Outlaws with T.S.
Madison.
Wait, so Luke was the son of Vader, and Vader was turned by RuPaul?
Yeah, well, somebody turned him.
Some old, old, old witch.
Learn to love yourself unapologetically with BFF Black Fat Femme and start your day with intention, with Waking Up With Ryan coming in July.
Celebrate pride with the Outspoken Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search pride and listen now.
I think we all need more rituals, superstitious or not.
A hill I will die on.
Humanity is sadder and less connected because we no longer have the same spiritual practices we used to.
Now let me say this because people always get mad when I talk about the importance of spirituality.
But there are some very, very scary sad, destructive parts about religion.
No denying religion has a very terrible history for many people.
But one thing most major religions did get right was that humans feel better when they have a practice like prayer, when they have a practice like visiting an altar, like saying grace, specific traditions they can return to.
It provides a much needed center for people.
It provides, once more, something they can control when life is uncertain.
So when we talk about why superstitions and rituals matter so much, especially in our 20s, I think the answer is because this is the decade where we are most often asked to create stability without actually being given very much of it externally.
We are in probably peak uncertainty times right now.
Your 20s are just full of just everything could go wrong.
Everything may be going wrong.
And you're just trying to figure it out.
You're trying to figure out what you actually care about.
You're trying to make choices without complete information.
You're trying to build a life whilst probably still grieving the life you had only a few years ago.
You are changing at such a rapid rate.
You literally...
Some days you think you know everything about yourself.
The next day you know absolutely nothing.
Some days you love your friends.
The next day you feel lonely.
Some days you feel great about your career.
The next day you have no clue how you're going to do this for the rest of your life.
This is an incredibly psychologically intense thing to live through for anybody.
Rituals and superstitions become important during this time because, much like the spiritual rituals we spoke about before, they become this grounding force to return to.
They're always going to be there.
They are stable.
They are consistent.
Wearing the same earrings to every job interview, wearing red on your first dates, saying a mantra to yourself every morning before you walk out the door, watching the same movie every year on your birthday to ensure that you have good luck for the year ahead is a powerful form of uncertainty management in an uncertain time, even if it's a very, very small thing to do.
Here are some other superstitions, superstitious rituals.
I should say that you guys provided that, I think, Maybe something you want to consider doing in your life.
You guys, the listeners, wrote in with these.
Thank you for your contributions.
Let me read some of them out.
Okay, you guys ready?
Always sitting in the same seat at the movie cinema.
Love that one.
This one comes from Maggie.
Keeping every single birthday card you receive, because throwing them out would mean slash, would signify that you want that relationship with that person to end.
I will be doing that one.
Again, superstitious.
I want my relationships to be good and healthy.
That seems like a smart way to do it.
This person says I cut my hair off after making a big decision to signify slash.
Prove to the universe God, the world, question mark that I'm serious about it.
Not telling anyone good news until it absolutely is confirmed.
I do this one.
My mom was such a big believer in this when we were growing up, so I will continue to do this.
I reread old journals every single new year so that I don't have to repeat the same lessons twice.
Watching the sunrise every year on my birthday.
I love this one.
You guys know I do this, such a version of this.
Always donating the first 10 of every paycheck to show abundance and that I am protected and supported enough by the universe that I can give money away.
Having cold showers on the first day of every single month.
In brackets, I have never missed a month for five years.
Crazy.
Another one that I love my friend Erica actually keeps wine bottles from important meals in her life as a way to just kind of show gratitude and love.
I don't know why she does it.
I think it's like a superstition that, like if she doesn't keep these bottles, it shows that she's not grateful and she won't have more nights like that.
So it's like a, a gratitude practice of like collecting and a gratitude practice of keeping mementos.
Those are just some examples that you guys sent in.
Sometimes again, like I love these.
They're not always about superstition.
They're not always about luck.
I think a lot of them are about faith and they're about repetition and they're about control.
Again, not necessarily religious faith, but faith in the broader sense, faith that this moment we're in means something that you can do hard things, that you are protected in some small way, that hope is still allowed, that there is a meaning in the mystery of life and that you are in control, that you get to come back to the things that are important to you and you have a way of, I guess, managing the unexpected.
I think there's something very beautiful about this that we kind of need now more than ever yes, during our twenties, but also just in this weird time of humanity.
We talk about superstition as if it's silly or embarrassing or something to grow out of.
But I do think a lot of the time again thinking of those examples.
What we are really doing is creating our own magic, creating our own alchemy.
We are taking an ordinary moment, an ordinary object, an ordinary routine and saying this matters to me.
Therefore, it must matter full stop.
This helps me.
This makes me feel brave.
This gives me a small point of steadiness.
It doesn't matter if it does or doesn't based on the evidence.
It's important to me.
And studies have shown that people who do have rituals, who do have routine, who do have superstitions, a belief system, grounding habits, are happier, they're more well-adjusted and ultimately, they feel more capable of handling difficult things because they have coping measures, because they have something that redefines their self-efficacy.
That is one of the most human things about us.
We are actually not just creatures of logic.
We are creatures of meaning.
It doesn't matter that these things are irrational.
It's why we make art.
It's why we sing songs.
It's why we are superstitious.
It's why superstitions show up in every single culture in the world, why they are part of humanity.
We want to believe in something bigger and we want to believe that there is something significant in the small things that we do that is psychologically important and in a way that doesn't always make sense, but just happens to be true.
So that is the psychology of superstition.
I hope you enjoyed this episode.
As a little summary before I say goodbye to you.
Superstition is in every single culture in the world, because it says something really, really important about our emotional and psychological state as humans, which is that we like order, we like structure, we like feeling that we are in control.
When we are faced with uncertain things.
Believing that a four-leaf clover gives you good luck, even though it's just a clover.
Believing that knocking on wood somehow protects you, even though there's no science to that.
It's anxiety management.
It's fear management.
It's emotional regulation.
And I think one that is overlooked far too often.
Superstitions definitely can go a little bit off the rails, especially when they get mixed up in conspiracy theories and in OCD and anxiety.
But ultimately, they are very, very valuable.
And if they are not hurting anybody, there is probably a chance that they are helping you, because it brings back a sense of agency.
It means that you feel safe.
I don't know safe enough to actually do something rather than nothing, and therefore does create self-fulfilling prophecies.
As we've seen from these examples, it does end up changing outcomes for people, not because what they did actually mattered, but because what it made them feel and what it then allowed them to do.
So there we go.
The psychology of superstition.
I hope you enjoyed this episode.
If you have made it this far and you were listening on Spotify, leave a little comment down below.
What is a superstitious belief that you have?
I was just saying to a friend of mine my belief and this is like totally not related to my life right now
People are going to be like, oh my God, she's going to have a baby.
But no, I really believe that before, like if you're pregnant slash expecting a child, you should not bring any like baby stroller, baby crib into the house before the child is born.
Don't know why, but I am so superstitious about it.
And I think when I have kids, I will not be doing that.
I think it's something like an old wives tale that my mom told me.
So share yours down below.
Thank you, as always, to our amazing researcher, Libby Colbert, for her assistance and help with this episode.
You can also watch this episode and many others on Netflix.
Check it out.
Go have a look.
It's really cool.
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So go check it out.
But with all that in mind, be safe, be kind, be a little bit superstitious and be gentle to yourself.
We will talk very, very soon.
I'm Michelle McPhee and I've been unraveling the strangest criminal alliance I've ever reported on.
A Mormon polygamist and an Armenian businessman.
Multi-million dollar house, Ferraris and Lamborghinis, private jets.
A billion dollar fraud.
But how long can this alliance last?
Tell me what you know.
Is somebody coming after me?
Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
I am the therapy gecko.
I am an unlicensed lizard therapist who takes phone calls from real, anonymous humans about their problems such as this.
Sometimes I'll have my girlfriend pre-chew spicy food and kind of baby bird it into my mouth.
Is that weird?
This week on Therapy Gecko, we're hearing all real authentic, human stories about anything from relationships to family drama to serendipitous encounters with unexpected people and things.
Listen to Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, everyone.
This is Tati Mellencamp.
And Tamara Judge from Two Teas in a Pod.
There's been one scandal that's consumed our lives these last couple of months.
We're recapping the three-part Summer House reunion.
And as always, we're being brutally honest.
We're dissecting timelines, receipts, blind items, and previous episodes.
Amanda and Wes, watch out.
We're not going to be easy on you.
Listen to Two Teas in a Pod on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Here's something that should not be as complicated as it is, getting a racist statue removed.
And here's something that should be a whole lot easier than it is getting a new one put up in its place.
I'm Akilah Hughes and Rebel Spirit.
Season two is about both of those things.
As I was watching these statues come down, I was thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority black city in which there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslaved people.
Listen to Rebel Spirit Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Every family has its secrets.
But what happens when you discover that your dad has been living a double life?
That is not the look of an innocent man.
Is everyone lying to me about who they are?
I felt such desperation.
I felt it was what I had to do.
Listen to Deep Cover The Family Man on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is an iHeart Podcast.
Guaranteed human.
