A cup of tea, a walk, a song on the way home. Small rituals are tiny fences around your peace.

Small repeated actions mark the edges of your day and separate one part of it from another. Without those markers everything runs together, work into evening, other people’s demands into your own time, and you arrive at night having never actually changed state. A ritual does very little except signal, and the signal is the part you need.

Choose one small thing and attach it to a transition, the walk home, the first ten minutes back, the last half hour before bed. Keep it the same each time. Its power comes from the repetition rather than from what it is.