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Last night I bought a Christmas tree. It was the first time I've bought one without Liane since 2011. Five years of tree buying makes it a ritual in my book - something to look forward to, to enjoy and to do with someone special. This year that's so different. I walked through rows of trees in the same place we bought our tree last year. I went with my mum who left me the space to go in alone. It hit home so many times -maybe most driving home not in Liane's Micra Oliver with the tree taking up over half the space in the car.

The month is only 5 days old and the pain is repeated and building. I have decided on an approach for this year - facing it all full on. No changes in routine, no new manoeuvres or cancelling of traditions. I love this season and have done for many years. It will be different this year in a deeply sad way but the love of family and friends will likely be more obvious and warmer than ever before. To that I look forward. For the now painful rituals I brace myself. What else can I do?

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Painful rituals may improve psychological well-being, according to new research published in Current Anthropology. The findings shed new light on why ritual practices involving pain and suffering are performed by millions of people around the world.

Xygalatas and his team were particularly interested in the kavadi attam, a ritual performed annually by millions of Tamil Hindus. During the ritual, male devotees often insert lances, hooks, skewers and other objects into their body before embarking on a pilgrimage to the temple of Lord Murugan.

For their study, the researchers examined 19 male participants who underwent body piercings during the ritual to 20 male participants from the same community who did not perform the ritual. All of the participants were recruited from the town of Quatre Bornes in Mauritius, an island nation in the Indian Ocean.

Xygalatas and his colleagues found that participating in the ritual was not associated with persistent harmful effects. In fact, the ritual was linked to positive effects on psychological well-being. Those who engaged in a higher number of body piercings tended to experience the greatest improvements in perceived health and quality of life.

The underlying mechanisms that link painful rituals to subsequent positive outcomes are still unclear. One possibility is that the physiological hyperarousal produced from strenuous ordeals can affect the levels of neurotransmitters such as endorphins and endocannabinoids, resulting in feelings of euphoria.

The Anastenaria are not alone. Despite great risks, similar rituals are performed by millions of people around the globe. The harms involved in those rituals range from prolonged exhaustion to burning, scarring, piercing, and other forms of bodily mutilation. In many societies, these activities are rites of passage that mark a transition to adulthood or group membership, and failure to participate may bring humiliation, social exclusion, or worse. But often such activities are undertaken voluntarily.

I started to study this in earnest in 2013, when I met Sammyh Khan, a social psychologist at Keele University, in England, who was intrigued by the same question. After chatting and meeting with other experts, we eventually managed to get a grant that allowed us to buy health monitoring equipment and assemble an interdisciplinary team of researchers to study the effects of extreme ritual practices in a real-life setting. The results of that collaboration were recently published in an article in the October issue of the journal Current Anthropology.

The more someone suffered during the ritual (measured by physiological stress and the number of piercings endured), the greater their perceived increase in their psychological health. The half of the group with the most piercings, for example, with dozens to hundreds of piercings each, rated themselves 30 percent higher on psychological health when compared to the half of the group that had only one or two piercings each.

Religious rituals in particular have additional important effects at the social level. Unlike a marathon, where people typically assemble only for the duration of the event, participation in religious rituals acts as a reminder of ongoing membership in a permanent community of individuals who share the same interests, values, and experiences. Thus, the cost undertaken by the practitioners becomes a signal of their commitment to the group. This helps to increase their status within that community and to build a social support network.

Scholars often define ritual as a cultural practice that lacks any direct causal relationship to its purported outcomes. But that is not to say that it lacks a function altogether. Traditional practices like the kavadi ritual have been around for thousands of years, which means that they have gone through a process of cultural selection and have successfully survived. This suggests that outsiders should not be too quick to dismiss the possibility that they have something important to offer to the millions of people who engage in them.

Dimitris Xygalatas is an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, where he directs the Experimental Anthropology Lab. He has previously held positions at Princeton University, Aarhus University in Denmark, and Masaryk University in the Czech Republic, where he served as the director of the Laboratory for the Experimental Research of Religion. His research focuses on some of the things that make us human, such as ritual, sports, music, and group membership, which he studies through a combination of ethnographic and experimental methods. Xygalatas has conducted several years of ethnographic fieldwork in Southern Europe and Mauritius. He is the author of Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living and over 100 articles published in journals and volumes across several disciplines. Follow him on Twitter @xygalatas, Facebook @xygalatas, and Instagram @xygalatas.

"Performing these painful, intense or stressful rituals increases social bonds between participants. This is why you see several organizations like military groups or university fraternities using pain in order to increase bonding between individuals."

While anthropologists and scholars of religion have tried to understand the role of ritual in individual and social life since the very inception of their fields, psychological research has rarely focused on ritual. Given that ritual is a universal feature of all human cultures, this neglect constitutes a second noteworthy puzzle in itself. This situation, however, is beginning to change in recent years.

A number of interdisciplinary projects have brought psychologists and anthropologists together to investigate the multifaceted effects and functions of ritual practices as well as the underlying cognitive mechanisms involved. These projects are expanding psychological research beyond the narrow confines of the laboratory to conduct field experiments that increase the ecological validity of their findings. Importantly, this work is increasingly part of collaborative, interdisciplinary efforts that combine qualitative observation with innovative methodologies that bring quantification and rigorous testing of those theories.

Moving on to the behavioral level, my team and I conducted a study of an extreme ritual in Mauritius.[ii] This was the annual Thaipusam Kavadi ritual, where Hindu devotees of Muruga pierce their bodies with numerous needles, hooks, and skewers, carry heavy objects for hours under the burning tropical sun, and drag large chariots by chains pierced through their skin. We devised a donation task to examine the effects of ritual pain on supporting a communal goal. We found that the more pain participants felt, the more money they donated, and that this effect also extended to those who merely watched them get pierced. It appears that high-intensity rituals have cohesive effects for the entire community.

Research on the psychology of ritual suffering has the potential to reveal valuable insights on human behavior that go far beyond religious rituals. From military drills to extreme sports and from fraternity ordeals to gang initiations, this research might shed more light on some of the ways in which human beings around the world find meaning, forge bonds, and build communities.

Response: Ever since I was a graduate student, I have been intrigued by the performance of ritual practices that involve pain, bodily harm, and other forms of suffering. These rituals carry obvious risks, including health risks, but despite these risks they are performed voluntarily by millions of people around the world. And even more intriguing is the fact that in various contexts such rituals are often culturally prescribed remedies for a variety of maladies. When I was doing my doctoral fieldwork, I studied the fire-walking rituals of the Anastenaria in Northern Greece, and I heard several people describing their experience of participation as one that involved both suffering and healing. And of course I am not the first anthropologist to document this link. But these observations seemed puzzling to me. Some years later, I met one of the co-authors of this paper, Sammyh Khan, who was asking very similar questions.

We got a grant to design this study, and put together a team of researchers that spent two months in the field collecting data for this project. We studied the Hindu kavadi ritual, which involves piercing the body with numerous needles, hooks, and skewers, and various other forms of suffering. Our study took place in the island of Mauritius, where I have been conducting research over the last decade, but this ceremony is performed by millions of Hindus around the world. We used portable health monitors as well as interviews and survey instruments to document the effects of this ritual of psycho-physiological health and wellbeing.

For example, we argue that one of the ways in which ritual suffering increases wellbeing is through forging social support networks. Precisely because these practices are costly, their public performance signals commitment to group values, and by doing this increases the status of the individual, who then reaps the benefits. e24fc04721