Ritual, Superstition, and Compulsion in Sport

How to Tell Whether Your Sports Rituals and Superstions are Working for Your or Against You

If you play competitive sports, you probably have some version of a pre-game ritual. Maybe it’s a specific warm-up sequence, a song you have to hear before you take the field, or the way you lace your shoes. You might not even think of it as a ritual — it’s just what you do. Sports rituals and superstitions are more common than most athletes realize — and more useful. There’s real neuroscience behind why they work. But there’s also a point at which a helpful ritual can start to work against you — and knowing the difference matters for your performance!

What’s a Ritual, Anyway?

Let’s start with Turk Wendell.

Wendell was a relief pitcher who played 11 seasons in the MLB. Men’s Fitness once named him the most superstitious athlete in professional sports. Among his habits: he leaped over the foul line every time he entered or left the field, chewed four pieces of black licorice on the mound, brushed his teeth in the dugout between innings, waved to the center fielder and waited for a wave back before throwing a single pitch, and signed his contract with the Mets for exactly $9,999,999.99 — in honor of his jersey number, 99.

By most people’s standards, that’s a lot. But here’s what Wendell said about it: “I did them to make the game fun. That’s all.”

That quote is worth sitting with. Because it tells you something important about what a ritual actually is, and what it isn’t.

Why Rituals Actually Work

Here’s what the research shows: rituals aren’t just superstition or habit. They do something real in your brain.

But first, it helps to understand why athletes develop them in the first place. Anthropologist George Gmelch noticed something interesting when he compared baseball players to fishermen in the Trobriand Islands. The fishermen performed elaborate rituals when heading out to the dangerous open sea — but none at all when fishing the calm inner lagoon. Baseball, Gmelch found, works the same way. Hitters and pitchers, who operate in conditions of high uncertainty, develop rituals constantly. Fielders, who successfully execute their job more than 90 percent of the time, almost never do. Ritual rises and falls with uncertainty.

That tracks with how rituals form in the first place. A player touches a crucifix before an at-bat and gets a hit. The brain files it away. He does it again. Gets another hit. Now it’s a ritual. This is B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning — the same mechanism behind slot machines. Players don’t perform their ritual and get hits every time. They get a hit sometimes. That intermittent reinforcement is actually the most powerful kind, which is partly why these behaviors last so long, and feel so important. You can’t be sure it’s not working.

As for what rituals actually do once they’re established: a 2017 neuroscience study published in PeerJ used EEG (a non-invasive, painless test that measures the electrical activity of your brain)  to measure how athletes’ brains responded to mistakes during performance. Participants who completed a pre-task ritual showed a reduced error-related negativity (ERN), the neural signal your brain fires when it registers that you’ve messed up. In plain terms: ritual buffers the emotional sting of failure at a neurological level. You still notice the mistake, but it doesn’t hit as hard.

The study also found that athletes who genuinely believed in their ritual — who found it meaningful, even special — committed fewer errors and reported higher confidence going into performance. A 2023 study went further, finding that ritualized behavior improves self-control specifically under competitive pressure, and that the effect grows stronger the higher the stakes.

Sport psychologist Jonathan Fader, who has worked with the Mets and the NFL’s Giants, puts it simply: a ritual doesn’t change the uncertainty of competition. It changes how your body and mind meet it. What it produces is an illusion of certainty — and that illusion, it turns out, is doing real work.

The Spectrum: Superstition, Ritual, and Compulsion

Not all pre-game behaviors are the same, and it helps to understand the difference.

Superstition is belief-based and usually low-investment. The behavior that follows is minimal. For example, wearing your lucky socks, eating a certain flavor of sunflower seeds, believing it’s a good sign if it rains before a home game. These take almost no time, and if you forget your lucky socks one day, you’re probably fine — maybe a little annoyed, but fine.

Ritual is more structured. It’s a specific sequence of behaviors you repeat with intention. Wendell’s mound routine. A basketball player who always shoots two left-handed layups before warmups. A swimmer who puts on their cap and goggles in a specific order. These are patterned and personal, and athletes tend to feel better, more focused, and more ready, when they complete them. Crucially, the underlying belief is a positive one: this helps me perform. The ritual is in service of something. That’s why athletes who believe in their rituals tend to get more out of them. The behavior and the belief are pointed in the same direction.

A compulsion is something different. The behavior might look similar from the outside, but the internal experience is almost the opposite. Compulsions aren’t really about confidence or preparation: the driving goal is to reduce distress. There’s an anxious thought or feeling that won’t let go, and the compulsion is an attempt to neutralize it. You’re not doing it because you believe it will help you play better. You’re doing it because not doing it feels unbearable. And if you skip it or can’t complete it “right,” you don’t just feel off — you feel significant distress. You might find yourself repeating the behavior until it feels just right, spending way more time on it than you intended, or letting it crowd out other parts of your preparation, or your life.

The key question isn’t whether the behavior looks weird from the outside. It’s whether you feel like you’re in control of it, or whether it’s controlling you.

Why This Is Harder to See in Athletes

Here’s something that often gets missed: the culture of competitive sport can make compulsive behaviors harder to recognize, both for athletes and for the people around them.

In sports like baseball, where superstition is highly normalized, celebrated, and accepted as part of the culture, it can be really tough for outsiders to detect compulsion from superstition. What may appear as quirky superstition or ritual may in fact be compulsive behavior driven by the desire to reduce fear or anxiety. 

Discipline, repetition, perfectionism, high self-monitoring — these are celebrated in athletic environments. They’re what coaches ask for. So when those same traits start becoming excessive or distressing, it can be easy to mistake “I’m just being competitive” for something that’s actually getting in the way.

A 2017 study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry found that college athletes are more than twice as likely to meet criteria for OCD than the general population — around 5% compared to 2.3%. Factors like pressure to perform, fear of failure, and a culture that often discourages vulnerability all contribute.

That doesn’t mean your sports rituals and superstitions are a problem. It means it’s worth being honest with yourself about how they feel.

Questions Worth Asking Yourself

If you’re wondering whether your pre-game sports rituals and superstitions are working for you or against you, here are seven questions to consider:

1. What drives it — focus or fear? Is the ritual helping you get locked in, or is it primarily about reducing anxiety? There’s some overlap here, but if the main function is avoiding dread, that’s worth paying attention to.

2. What happens if you can’t do it? Missing a ritual might leave you feeling a little off. That’s normal. But if skipping it sends you into real distress — panic, inability to concentrate, the feeling that something bad will happen — that’s a different thing.

3. How much time is it taking? A pre-game routine should fit inside a reasonable window. If your rituals are expanding, adding new steps, or taking over an hour of your day, that’s a signal worth taking seriously.

4. Is it flexible? Life interrupts routines. Can you adapt, or does any deviation feel catastrophic? Healthy ritual has some give to it. Compulsion usually doesn’t.

5. Does it feel like yours? This one might sound strange, but it matters. When you think about your rituals, do they feel like part of who you are as a competitor — something you’d describe with some ownership? Or do they feel like something you’re trapped by, something that doesn’t quite fit your values or sense of self? Is it something you’re embarrassed by? If so, it may be more of a compulsion and less of a ritual. 

6. Do you genuinely believe the behavior helps? If so, and the behavior isn’t interfering with your focus, your preparation, or your ability to notice other things (like what play the coach called, what the count is, details about the scouting reports, etc.), then it may truly be helpful. If you don’t believe the behavior helps, but feel you have to do it anyway, that’s worth noting. 

7. Is the behavior designed to prevent something bad from happening? If a pitcher is repeatedly throwing to first base when they feel like they have to — not because the situation calls for it — that’s worth noticing. If a fielder has an elaborate between-pitch routine that takes their focus away from the field or interferes with their readiness for the next play, these may be signs of compulsion. While compulsions can look similar to rituals from the outside, if your primary drive is prevention-based (“I have to do this to prevent something bad from happening”), if it interferes with your on-field presence, or if it drives in-game decisions that aren’t actually strategic, you’re likely dealing with a compulsion. That’s where building tolerance for uncomfortable thoughts and feelings during competition may be your best path to both improving performance and reducing in-game anxiety.

When to Talk to Someone

If you answered those questions and something felt familiar — not just quirky, but genuinely sticky — it might be worth talking to a therapist, especially one who has experience working with athletes or anxiety.

OCD in athletes often goes unaddressed because the symptoms blend into the background of competitive sport. That’s a real shame, because it’s very treatable. The gold standard is a form of therapy called Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), which involves gradually learning to sit with uncertainty rather than neutralizing it through compulsive behavior. Athletes who get good treatment often report that not only does their anxiety decrease, their performance gets better too, because they’re not spending mental energy trying to control distress. When athletes can learn to accept the fundamental uncontrollable nature of sport, it can be easier to tolerate the inherently emotionally challenging aspects of competition. 

If what you’re dealing with sounds more like a healthy ritual, that’s worth honoring. As the research indicates, building an intentional, meaningful pre-performance routine is genuinely useful. 

The Bottom Line

Turk Wendell pitched in the MLB for 11 years with his foul-line leap, licorice chewing, and teeth brushing. He did it because it made the game fun. Cleveland Guardians outfielder Steven Kwan said it more plainly: “It ain’t weird if it works.”

That’s the thing about ritual at its best: it’s yours. It serves you. You’re the one in charge of it.

When it stops feeling that way, that’s information. Awareness of that experience can help you get the help you need to reshape your relationship to the uncontrollable nature of competition. 

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If you’re a high school or college athlete navigating anxiety or performance pressure and want to talk to someone, feel free to reach out. I work with athletes throughout Oregon.

Sources

1. Hobson, N.M., Bonk, D., & Inzlicht, M. (2017). Rituals decrease the neural response to performance failure. PeerJ. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5452956/
2. Yun, D., Zhang, L., & Qiu, Y. (2023). Does pregame “compulsive action” truly help athletes? Ritualized behavior enhances physical self-control. Sport, Exercise, and Performance Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/spy0000314
3. Cromer, L.D. et al. (2017). OCD in college athletes. American Journal of Psychiatry. https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2017.16101124
4. Gmelch, G. (1971). Baseball magic. Trans-Action.
5. Kaplan, E. (2026). Baseball rituals and the neuroscience behind them. The Athletic.
6. Passan, J. (Host). Baseball superstitions with Turk Wendell. Sources Tell Jeff Passan [Podcast]. ESPN. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vY0_YZUujlM
7. Anxiety in Athletes / International OCD Foundation. Ritual in sport. https://anxietyinathletes.org/ritual-in-sport/