Dress up to Stay In

Dressing up in these lockdown times has become a ‘thing’; if you have not heard of it, here are five benefits:

ONE: Your mood

The body is “the vessel of the individual’s sense of self, his most personal feelings and aspirations….” - Howard Gardner

What you do with your body will impact on your mood - including how you dress it. I, for one, have done PJs until lunchtime during the lockdown and it did not lead to a particularly productive morning for me. My body and mind were getting the signal that this was downtime and so, I was particularly inclined to be distracted and start wandering off into those black holes of time known as Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.

TWO: Positive Emotions

We are embodied, we don’t just live ‘above the shoulder’. Our emotions are embodied. How our bodies feel can actually generate emotions. If you think you look really great, you will generate positive emotions. And you know what they say about positive emotions? Well, some pretty good things - that’s for another blog. But in brief, the more positive emotions you can generate, the more creativity you will have.

THREE: Environmental mastery! (And fun)

Sorting out your wardrobe and thinking about what you have, what you would like to have, what you would like to give away is an act of improving your environment. It lets you know that you are worthy of this consideration - how to best work with the spaces and resources that you have. As you are doing it, you can play around with outfits and make the whole thing fun. I hope you realise the importance of fun time for their intrinsic value - but for your creative life, they are off the scale. More on that another day.

"I was thinking of trying this look for the garden"

FOUR: Social activity

You can (people have been) make this a social activity by sharing your photos of your latest outfits; again, it’s another playful activity with others that is harder to create in lockdown living.

FIVE: Mindfulness

It’s an opportunity to be mindful of how your body makes you feel. Pay attention. Breathe and notice how you are feeling; if you get changed into something different, does that change your mood at all?

Here comes the science…..

For anyone interested, there will be a more technical blog on this topic, going into more of the science - so anyone who is a geek, like me, can look forward to that!