Why astronauts, athletes and surgeons swear by ritualsAnd where the research falls apart

On May 5, 1961, Alan Shepard ate steak and eggs with John Glenn, climbed into a capsule called Freedom 7 and became the first American in space. Eight years later, on the morning of July 16, 1969, the Apollo 11 crew sat down to steak, eggs, toast, orange juice and coffee before flying to the moon. The launch breakfast is still a NASA tradition. The menu has grown since then, but the habit hasn’t gone anywhere.

Nobody thinks the eggs help the rocket. That’s the odd thing about pre-performance rituals. The people whose jobs depend most on precision, like astronauts, surgeons and tennis players with a title on the line, often keep the strangest routines. A card game the commander has to lose. A cake nobody eats. Two water bottles lined up just so.

So do these rituals actually do anything? The research says yes, sometimes, for a specific reason. One famous finding about luck didn’t survive a second look. Here’s what holds up, what falls apart, and how to build a routine that helps before your own big moment, whether that’s a launch, a surgery, a job interview or a hard phone call.

Crews who launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan follow a script that mostly traces back to Yuri Gagarin’s flight in 1961. According to the European Space Agency, they watch the 1969 Soviet film White Sun of the Desert the night before launch. On launch day, each crew member sips a glass of champagne and signs the door of their room at the Cosmonaut Hotel. Two days before, they get a haircut.

Then there’s the bus. On the way to the pad it stops, and the male crew members step off to relieve themselves on a back wheel, because Gagarin reportedly did the same. ESA’s own history page says the left wheel. Most other accounts, including Atlas Obscura’s, say the right. Even the people who keep the ritual don’t agree on the details, and it doesn’t seem to matter.

At Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the script is American. There’s the breakfast. There’s a sheet cake decorated with the mission patch, which, by tradition, nobody eats. Astronaut Winston Scott told the Chicago Tribune in 1998 that he figured it was ceremonial: whoever got the first cake didn’t eat it, so now nobody can.

And there’s the card game. NASA calls it a long-held tradition: before leaving the crew quarters, the crew plays cards until the commander loses. The idea is that the commander burns off all the bad luck on the ground. The SpaceX Crew-11 astronauts played it in August 2025. The Artemis II crew played it on April 1, 2026, a few hours before launching on a ten-day trip around the moon. They even rehearsed it, with a board game, during a launch-day practice run the summer before.

1961MAY 5

Steak and eggsSTARTED

Alan Shepard’s breakfast before the first American spaceflight becomes the launch menu.

1969JULY 16

Moon editionKEPT

Apollo 11: steak, eggs, toast, juice, coffee. Same idea, bigger trip.

2011STS-135

The card gameKEPT

Crews play until the commander loses, then walk out.

2025AUG 11

Rehearsing the ritualPRACTICED

In a launch-day practice run, the Artemis II crew plays a board game before walkout.

Photos: NASA (public domain). Sources: NASA, European Space Agency, Atlas Obscura.

Former NASA astronaut Paul Lockhart, who piloted two shuttle missions in 2002, told Atlas Obscura that these rituals help soothe frayed nerves on a day full of excitement. He also pointed out something practical. If a launch slips because of weather or a failed system, the crew runs the whole routine again. Sometimes two or three times for a single mission.

That second detail matters more than it looks. A ritual you can repeat on demand, anywhere, isn’t just a superstition. It’s a tool. Keep that in mind for later.

In 2016, a team led by Alison Wood Brooks at Harvard Business School tested rituals in a situation built to make people nervous: singing Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” out loud in front of a stranger.

Before singing, some participants did a short ritual. Draw a picture of how you feel right now. Sprinkle salt on it. Count to five out loud. Crumple the paper. Throw it in the trash. Others simply waited. The people who did the ritual reported less anxiety, had lower heart rates and performed better.

The most telling result came from a later experiment. People did the exact same actions, but half were told it was a ritual and half were told they were random behaviors. Only the ritual label helped. The researchers also found that rituals improved performance when the situation was stressful, and didn’t do much when it was calm.

So it isn’t the salt. What seems to matter is that your mind files the actions as a ritual, something with meaning and a fixed order, at the exact moment it’s bracing for a test.

READ NEXT ↘Why humans need rituals

READ NEXT ↘Why humans need rituals

READ NEXT ↘Why humans need rituals

One caveat you should know about. A co-author of that paper was Francesca Gino. A Harvard investigation concluded she manipulated data in other studies, and Harvard revoked her tenure in May 2025. She denies wrongdoing. According to the Many Co-Authors project, which reviews her papers one by one, she wasn’t involved in collecting the data for most of this paper’s studies. We’d call the finding promising, not proven, until more independent teams repeat it.

In 2010, a team of German psychologists led by Lysann Damisch handed people a golf ball. Some were told the ball had been lucky so far. Those players sank 65 percent of their putts. The rest sank 48 percent. The study was widely reported as proof that believing in luck makes you better.

In 2014, Robert Calin-Jageman and Tracy Caldwell ran the lucky-ball experiment again, with larger groups. The lucky ball did nothing. Both groups putted about the same.

So here’s a split worth keeping. A lucky charm asks luck to do the work. A routine gives your attention a job. The evidence for the first is shaky. The evidence for the second is better, even if it isn’t settled.

Rafael Nadal is the famous example. Between points he set two water bottles at his feet, one behind the other, angled toward the court. Every time. In his 2011 autobiography, Rafa, he described it as a way of placing himself in a match, putting the things around him in the same order he wanted in his head.

That isn’t a request to the tennis gods. It’s a signal to himself: I’m here, this point, now.

In 2006, psychologists Michaéla Schippers and Paul Van Lange asked athletes about their pre-game rituals and when they used them. Ritual commitment went up when a game was uncertain and when it mattered more. The link ran through tension. Higher stakes meant more nerves, and more nerves meant more ritual. Athletes who felt outcomes were outside their control leaned on rituals the most.

Rituals were the norm, not the quirk. In their sample, 80.3 percent of athletes reported at least one pre-game ritual, with 2.6 on average.

Put that next to the astronauts and it makes sense. Launch day is the definition of high stakes and low control. You can train for years, but on the morning itself you sit in a seat and wait for thousands of people and machines to do their part. A card game is something you can do.

If rituals help mostly by calming nerves and focusing attention, the best ones might not look like rituals at all. Look at the operating room.

In 2009, a team led by Alex Haynes tested the World Health Organization’s Surgical Safety Checklist, a list of 19 items, in eight hospitals: Seattle, Toronto, London, New Delhi, Auckland, Amman, Manila and Ifakara in Tanzania. After the checklist arrived, deaths after surgery fell from 1.5 percent to 0.8 percent. Major complications fell from 11 percent to 7 percent.

The checklist takes about two minutes. One of its items asks every member of the team to introduce themselves by name and role. That’s a small ritual of its own: a pause, a fixed order, a moment when everyone arrives in the same room at the same time.

One caution. The study compared results before and after the checklist. It wasn’t randomized, so other changes in those hospitals could explain part of the drop. Still, the shape is clear. A checklist is a ritual with the superstition taken out: same steps, same order, every time, and every step has a reason.

Here’s how we’d put the research together. This is our reading of it, not a formula, so adjust it until it fits you.

Make it yours. The astronauts’ rituals work partly because they tie each crew to everyone who flew before. You don’t need Gagarin. A phrase your grandmother used, a short prayer or a song from home can carry the same weight, and it comes with a history.

Ritual OS is built around that idea. It matches you with short practices drawn from the world’s traditions, each with a clear beginning and end. One is a breath practice: in for four, hold for two, out for eight. Another is a weekly check-in that opens with a simple question: if this week were weather, what would it be?

Inside Ritual OS

Two minutes, start to finish

Ritual OS matches you with short practices drawn from the world’s traditions, each with a clear beginning and end, so it fits right before the moment that matters.

BREATHE INMeetbreath · in 4 · hold 2 · out 8

Real screens from the Ritual OS iPhone beta.

Before a big moment, you don’t need more information. You need two minutes that feel the same every time.

The Ritual Connection

The astronauts didn’t invent their rituals from scratch. They borrowed them from the people who flew before. Ritual OS works the same way: short practices from the world’s traditions, matched to the week you’re actually having, each with a beginning and an end. Ritual OS can match you with practices for this.

Take the Spiritual DNA Quiz. Free.