Change Your Clothes, Change Your Life
I might be the first person to brag about wearing pants when I work from home.
And when I work from a coffee shop, sure, I could be in yoga pants, but I choose not to be.
It’s not that I’m a fashionista. Rather, when I wear pants to work from home, I’m taking advantage of the power of my clothes.
No, I don’t mean anything mystical. I don’t keep crystals in my underwear drawer or anything like that. Instead, I take advantage of the power of perception.
You see, your outfit changes not only how others perceive you, but how you perceive yourself.
Psychologists Hajo Adam and Adam D. Galinsky devised the term enclothed cognition to describe how your clothing, and the symbolism of those pieces, can affect your thoughts.
In their experiments, Adam and Galinsky demonstrated that participants wearing a white lab coat had higher selective attention than people wearing their own clothing. And in further experiments with the same coats, they demonstrated that sustained attention only increased when participants were told they were wearing a doctor’s coat versus when they were told it was a painter’s coat.
But we don’t need science to tell us that we think differently about other people—or ourselves—based on clothing.
Now if you’re wondering how you can use your clothes to improve your experiences…
Here are two ways you can dress yourself to elicit more helpful feelings and behaviors:
Get Comfortable
Many individuals develop a strained relationship with the contents of their closet when their body size increases. Sometimes that means squeezing into clothes that are no longer a comfortable fit. Or displaying “goal” items that don’t currently fit in hopes of kindling motivation to shrink.
But when you refuse to accept the size of your current body, it only serves to increase your mental discomfort.
This reminder is served up not only when you dress in the morning, but throughout the day as you’re pinched, pulled, and squeezed by your clothes.
Wearing clothes that fit is an act of self-care.
It displays acceptance and respect for your body, and of course, is more physically comfortable.
When you buy clothes that you feel good in, and that you don’t have to fight to get into, each day, you’ll get an enclothed reminder that you care about the way you feel and want yourself to feel good. If that means living in leggings, live in your leggings.
If you want to develop a peaceful relationship with your body, let how you dress be an expression of that intention.
Dress for the Occasion
I used to use clothes to help get myself to the gym when I wanted to collapse on the couch after work.
I would get home and think about how hard it was going to be to get dressed, drive to the gym, find a parking space in San Francisco (the biggest nightmare of the whole ordeal), work out, and drive home. That was enough to put me off the whole task.
To fix the problem, instead of focusing on how daunting the task was, I would think, “just get dressed.” It was much more manageable. Once inside the familiar compression of my leggings, I had some momentum going. I was over the first hump of starting my gym ritual. Not only that, I was reinforcing my identity as someone that works out.
Between the momentum of changing my clothes, and the “click” they created in my self-perception, getting myself out the door and into my car was MUCH easier. Once in the car, there was no turning back.
Now here’s the case against living in your leggings….
If you habituate yourself to wearing workout clothes on a daily basis, as you perform non-athletic activities, they’ll lose their meaning.
Instead, wear clothes that are appropriate for the type of activity you’re doing, or the behavior you want to generate.
If you want to feel more motivated to work out, save your athletic clothes for exercise. If you want to feel more focused at work, try changing into something less comfortable. Then try identifying with the person you believe your clothes make you out to be.
As you can see, what matters isn’t so much that you set hard rules about what you should wear or what you shouldn’t. I’ve made a case for both living in your leggings and not living in your leggings.
What matters is what you think and how you feel in the clothes that you wear.
Because what you think and how you feel determines how you will act.
There are lots of ways to change the way you think, and if you enjoyed this sample, you can feast on the buffet of mindset techniques inside Food Body Self. Learn how to rewire your thoughts so you can stop feeling preoccupied with what you eat and how you look and start using your mental bandwidth on what’s truly important to you.
Note: This article was originally published on February 12, 2019 and was revised on February 9, 2023.