How Clothes Affect Your Confidence
Clothes are part of the mind-body connection and affect your emotional state, performance, and confidence
There is a connection between the clothes you wear, and your self confidence and performance. You might think it only goes one way: when you feel confident then you can be comfortable wearing certain clothes–like you wouldn’t feel comfortable wearing a lab coat unless you were an actual medical doctor or scientist. It actually goes both ways. By wearing a lab coat you’ll also feel more confident in your ability to perform like a doctor or scientist.
One study cheekily coined the term “enclothed cognition” to describe the effect clothes have on a person’s psychological processes. They determined in a pretest that a lab coat was associated with attentiveness and carefulness. The study then went on to put participants in a lab coat and found they performed better on cognitive tasks that tested attentiveness. Another group was given the same coat, but it was described to them as a painter’s coat. They did not see the same cognitive benefits.
Another study examined the cognitive effects of wearing formal vs casual clothes and found that participants performed abstract cognitive processing better while wearing formal clothes. Abstract cognition is connected with our ability to think long term–doing things that will benefit us in the long term over the short term such as deciding to eat healthy today so we can live longer. So if you want to help yourself create better habits and make better decisions for the long term then consider upping your style game and dressing a bit more formally.
It’s the mind-body connection at work. How you feel physically, as a being occupying space in the world and outside your own mind is extremely important to your well-being. We like to think that if we could only be more stoic, more internal, we could live a life where we can control ourselves entirely within the confines of our own minds and ignore the external world. It’s that feeling that if you want to be confident you just have to find a way to be confident internally and ignore what’s outside your skull. But that’s unrealistic. You do exist in the physical world and how you exist in it will affect your mind.
One study had participants sit in an upright or slouched position, gave them tasks to perform, and assessed their mood and self esteem. The results found that participants with an upright posture had higher self-esteem, better moods, and reduced fear. It even found that participants who were slumped used more negative emotion words when talking. Your mind isn’t just an organ inside your skull. It is extended through your nervous system, your sensory inputs, the space you occupy, and your emotions towards the world around you.
Clothes are just an extension of this same mind-body connection. How you dress will affect how you feel. There’s nothing about the clothes themselves that do this (except of course how hot or cold they make you feel). Instead it’s what we as a culture and you as an individual associate with particular clothes. If you dress in a way that makes you think of a competent person you will feel more competent. If you dress in a way that makes you think of an attractive person you will feel more attractive. Want to make yourself more competent, attractive, physically capable, and suave? Consider dressing like James Bond I guess.
This might make some people feel uncomfortable because they’ll feel they’re betraying their core identity, or perhaps their core identity isn’t so solid and unalterable. This implies we can adapt our identity to some degree by the masks we wear. Of course this isn’t a new revelation in human history. Spiritual traditions since the most ancient times have taken advantage of this human ability to change behavior based on the masks we wear
But your identity is still there underneath whatever clothes you wear. You are what you choose to be, and it is something inside you, exercising your free will, deciding what to wear. The clothes and masks just help bring out what you choose to bring out.
Even if you aren’t interested in wearing a different mask it’s still important to remember their power. It isn’t just the kind of clothes you wear but how well you wear them. If you are wearing clothes that are poorly fitted, tattered, and wrinkled, those are the kinds of feelings you’ll bring out of yourself. You’ll feel far more confident wearing a well fitted T-Shirt than something that’s three sizes too large. A suit probably won’t make you feel more professional if it’s too small and wrinkled.
So if you like your personal style and don’t want to play with your identity then remember that the quality and fit of what you wear should still be as good as you can make it. Being your best self means physically embodying your best self. If you physically feel your best you will start to feel at your best internally as well.
There’s the social side of clothes too. We are social creatures and we enjoy feeling admired by others and hate being ignored or disliked by others. Your mental health and ability to perform is also affected by how you feel when around others. Your own confidence in your abilities rises when others feel confident in you and vice versa. Dressing your best (in accordance with your personal style) will have a positive effect on how others view you, and you will in turn benefit from their views.
None of this means you always need to dress formally, or even that there is one way you should dress. Styles are, as Twitter’s famous men’s fashion guy likes to put it, “cultural languages.” The classic suit and tie is one cultural language and it is suited to certain occasions, places, and cultures. To dress well in that cultural language means following certain rules. Another, completely different cultural language, would be a cyberpunk look. To make that look work requires following another set of rules and is appropriate for a different set of occasions, places, and cultures. Perhaps the only universal rule that will apply is fit. Make sure whatever cultural language you decide to go with, you have ensured the clothes fit you properly.
So don’t forget that how you physically exist in the world–your clothes, your posture, your gait, and even your facial expressions affects who you are internally. Your identity doesn’t just flow out from your mind into your body and into the world. What happens out in the world and your body flows back into your mind. To feel confident, dress and present yourself as someone who you imagine should be confident. Exist in the world in that person’s mask and your mind will adapt and change to integrate that mask internally.