Dopamine dressing - can you dress yourself happy?

So-called dopamine dressing is everywhere this season. Based on the idea that wearing overtly fun clothes can help lift your mood in depressing times, it begs the question: can wearing "happy clothes" really make us happier?

The fashion industry is certainly trying to convince us that it can be done. The catwalks have been a Skittles packet of brights - from Fanta orange at Armani and scarlet at Maison Margiela to Beauty and the Beast yellow and candyfloss pink at Giambattista Valli. Accidentism is in full flow; eyeshadows are fizzy tangerines and lemons, and hair's gone blorange. Grazia magazine is encouraging us to test the power of positive thinking in Bella Freud Good Times tops. And elsewhere it's all about head-to-toe green and rainbow bags in the shape of elephants.

But does the idea hold water? In a word: yes. But it's not necessarily about dressing as an Opal Fruit. According to Carolyn Mair, a psychologist who has developed an MA course in fashion psychology at the London College of Fashion, it's as much about you - and what meaning you believe your clothes have - as it is about the clothes.

Mair says that, while there's some "less than scientific evidence" to suggest certain colours lift your mood, whether or not La La Land yellow will chirp you up is actually down to how you see that colour. Colour is culturally loaded - in the UK, we wear black for mourning; in China, it's white. So, doing like Emma Stone will lift you only "if you believe that wearing a certain colour - it doesn't need to be bright yellow, it could be black - lifts your mood ... it's a simultaneous wearing and believing that has been found to have significant results." And it can be potent: "When people believe in the symbolic meaning of their clothes, it can affect their cognitive processes, and part of those are your emotions."

So Victoria Beckham stepping out, as she recently did, in tangerine-orange palazzo pants with a WKD-blue shirt will only feel better if she buys into the edifying quality of her clothes. Ditto the stars, from Viola Davis to Natalie Portman, who have taken to the red carpet recently in La La Land yellow dresses. And the likes of Anna Dello Russo and Man Repeller's Leandra who, over on Instagram, have been peppering our feeds with the rainbow-coloured Alberta Ferretti day-of-the-week jumpers.

Mair cites a 2012 paper by Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky that delved into this idea of "enclothed cognition", clothes' ability to affect our thoughts. In one experiment, some participants wore a garment described as a doctor's coat and others an identical garment described as a painter's coat. Participants wearing what they thought was a doctor's coat performed better in a task than those who thought they were in a painter's coat - the influence of clothes, the paper suggested, depends on "wearing them and their symbolic meaning".

So, lucky pants start to make more sense - if you truly believe that pair of old Sloggis are lucky, they may well help you feel better/more confident.

Mair quotes a study testing the theory that people wearing red are seen as more attractive. Participants were asked to rate the attractiveness of people wearing different coloured T-shirts. Those wearing red were seen as more attractive. The researchers then blanked out the colour of the T-shirts in pictures - participants still rated those wearing red as more attractive. "The researchers," Mair explains, "concluded that the reason was that when people wore red they felt more attractive."

There is also an external element to dressing yourself happy. If you wear a top with a kitten or smiley face you might not "actually see what's on your T-shirt except for when you look in the mirror," says Mair. "But you're projecting it to other people, and they project it back to you."

But what, I ask, trying to prod the limits of dopamine dressing, if you wear a jumper with a positive slogan on it, but it's not a garment you feel good about? Or you wear a garment with a negative message, but it's one you feel good about? Punks or Hell's Angels would be unlikely to feel happy in a kitten T-shirt, after all. Well, that would be an interesting study, Mair says.

So, how can we dress ourselves happy, having debunked the idea that simply sticking on a yellow frock is the sartorial equivalent of Prozac? "Wear clothes that you feel confident enough to move in," advises Mair. "Go with a critical friend when you're buying something, particularly if it's something that you've never worn. But if you really want to go for it and if you feel good it in, you'll project that. If you don't feel good at something, don't wear it just because it's fashionable."

So, by all means, taste the rainbow, but only if it makes you feel good.

https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2017/feb/03/dopamine-dressing-can-you-dress-yourself-happy

Francis Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/171/american-short-fiction/3461/rip-van-winkle/

Shakespeare

Sonnet XVIII.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer's lease hath all too short a date:

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;

Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st;

        So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

          So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

We read this sonnet during one class of British Literature in the spring semester 2019, and it made a great impression on me. It is about love which is like a summer's day but more beautiful than that. It reveals also bad sides of summer as well as love, which is truthful - I like that point of view. The thought I like the most in this poem is that love expressed by poetry is eternal, it has the power to wake beauty every time when reading it. I know it is quite idealistic but I love it.

Virginia Woolf
The Mark on the Wall

Breaking the silence

I din't get where I am today without...
Successful people talk about their inspiration and motivation

We were supposed to read this article in our Student's Book in the third semester and notice the highlighted phrases. I chose it because I like to read such inspiring stories and it always encourage me to work harder on my plans and dreams. I also wanted to share it because there is a useful range of vocabulary and instructive short stories which are the best for lazy readers.

Ann Patchett - US novelist

Revenge is a terrific motivating force for young creative people and it certainly kept me going right through to the publication of my first novel. I'd been late to learn to read, and as a result the nuns at my school in Tennessee had me marked down as being somewhere between slow and stupid. They taught me for 12 years and even after I'd caught up and got smarter, I was still thought of as a dumb. They'll be sorry when they discover I'm a great writer,' I'd say to myself. 'In retirement, the single thing they'll be most proud of will be that they had me as a pupil.' And so it continued right through into the workplace where, in my first teaching job after leaving graduate school, the male head of the department would come to me whenever the secretarial staff were off. 'Type this up for me, will you, Ann?' he'd say habitually. 'One day,' I would think, gritting my teeth, 'One day...'

John Malkovich - US actor, producer, and director

There must have been something unique or, at least, different about me as a boy, beacuse I recall it would sometimes amuse my brother and his friends to throw beer cans at me. Why? Because of the clothes I wore, which they didn't like, or because I wouldn't do whatever it was that they wanted me to, or jist because it was fun. But being different is fine. It was my father who encouraged in me the notion that I and I alone am responsible of my own life, for what I do and don't do, for my opinions na beliefs, and it's proved to be a great source of strength. I'm often asked if I read and také notice of critics. Which ones? Those who love the work? Who hate it? Or are different? As a director, as in life, you have to know you own mind and be prepared to stick to your guns.

Marcus Wareing - UK chef

One of my tutors at Southport Catering College knew Anton Edelmann, the chef at the Savoy, and recommended me to him. I was very nervous of leaving my comfort zone and coming to London. I was a loner who'd never made friends because I was always working, and I was happy enough being alone and busy. But I did come to London, and even though it was a very tough environment, I worked like a trouper and was very quick to learn. The hardest aprt was being away from my family and having to deal with other people while having no management or interpersonal skills whatsoever. So I called my dad every day, to fill him in on the goond and bad, and ask him how he would deal with this or that.

Paulo Coelho - Brazilian writer

The family is a microcosm of society. It's where your spirit and beliefs are first tested. My mother and father wanted only the best for me and my sister, but had very rigid ideas of what that 'best' should be. For me to become a lawyer or even an engineer would have satisfied them, but a writer? Never. I was a determined and rebellious kid, though, and havig failed to change my mind by conventional methods, they looked for more dramatic and extreme ones. In a sense, though, I thank them for that. I wouldn't have got where I am without fighting to live the life I wanted for myself. I long since forgave them. We all make mistakes, parents included.

Sleep

In the second semester, we were supposed to read some articles about sleeping and then we were talking about it during the lesson. I chose this article because I am interested in this topic and I really like to sleep and learn more about how it works. Reading this type of texts is not difficult as it is divided into short sentences which are also easy to remember.

10 INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT SLEEP

-The record for the longest period without sleep is 18 days, 21 hours, 40 minutes during a rocking chair marathon. The record holder reported hallucinations, paranoia, blurred vision, slurred speech and memory and concentration lapses.

- Anything less than five minutes to fall asleep at night means you're sleep deprived. The ideal is between 10 and 15 minutes, meaning you're still tired enough to sleep deeply, but not so exhausted you feel sleepy by day.

- A new baby typically results in 400-750 hours lost sleep for parents in the first year

- REM sleep occurs in bursts totalling about 2 hours a night, usually beginning about 90 minutes after falling asleep.

- REM dreams are characterised by bizarre plots, but non-REM dreams are repetitive and thought-like, with little imagery - obsessively returning to a suspicion you left your mobile phone somewhere, for example.

- No-one knows for sure if other species dream but some do have sleep cycles similar to humans.

- Some scientists believe we dream to fix experiences in long-term memory, that is, we dream about things worth remembering. Others reckon we dream about things worth forgetting - to eliminate overlapping memories that would otherwise clog up our brains.

- Humans sleep on average around three hours less than other primates like chimps, rhesus monkeys, squirrel monkeys and baboons, all of whom sleep for 10 hours.

- Snoring occurs only in non-REM sleep

- Some studies suggest women need up to an hour's extra sleep a night compared to men, and not getting it may be one reason women are much more susceptible to depression than men.

What's your soundtrack?