Life, Character and Enclothed Cognition

Life, Character and Enclothed Cognition (April 18, 2012)

Most of the time, people are in trouble because they tend to look at life as an event.  Even our culture is guilty of reinforcing this perspective.  Just look at the annual celebration of birthdays, anniversaries and other important occasions.

People tend to look at life as marked and defined by these events that are supposed to measure the quality of life.  This in turn leads to a lot of unmet expectations thus creating a lot of psychological baggage’s and problems later on. 

The key to lessen one’s stress is changing one’s perspective.  How about looking at “life as a process” instead of a “life as an event”.  If life is a process, everything that is happening to us right now is just a platform towards something else.  There will be happy times and occasions defined by sadness but all in all, it is a journey, never static, life moving forward to something bigger, happier and a better evolution.

A person’s character is defined by the conditioning he acquired from his parents.  More often than not, because our parents love us so much, there is the tendency of spoiling children but recent researches have confirmed that spoiling children weakens character.  So if we want our children to become successful in life, let us not spoil them by giving in to their irrational whims and fancy.  A little denial every now and then makes them appreciative of their lot and points them to the reality of “not everything they want in life is quickly achieved”.  Denial teaches them the lesson of limitations, patience and the virtue of waiting.

Enclothed cognition is the phenomenon where there is a tangible effect of clothing on the cognitive process of an individual.  This validates the assumption that clothing affects how  other people perceives us as well as how we think about ourselves – simply put, our outfit affects our mood and our interaction with the outside world.

The reverse of this is that if we dress shabbily, we feel shabby internally and we will treat the others shabbily as well.