Use A Hat To Improve Your Wellbeing

I don’t know about you, but January is my least favourite month. There is a natural anticlimax following the festive season, it’s cold & wet, and low moods seem to be a ‘norm’.

This is exacerbated by the fact that emotions, particularly unpleasant ones, are contagious.

Here’s a quick, and fun, way to boost your energy and mood…

Experiment with my daughter’s go to wellbeing strategy for processing unpleasant emotions.

When she feels anxious, low, bored, tired etc she, and her house mates, put on a silly hat and they just can’t help feeling lighter!

It changes the energy, lifts the mood and inspires new thinking and she uses different hats to create specific emotions.

For example, she has a hat that inspires:

• Learning for when she needs to write a report or revise
• Contemplation for when she needs to make a difficult decision
• Happiness for when she needs a mood boost
• Curiosity for when she needs to research or find out more about what’s going on

And so on.

Indeed, physical items are great emotional anchors, meaning that they can hold a specific emotion if you associate the hat with an occasion (place or person) where you experienced that emotion.

A well known example of this is the white coat syndrome. Many people who see a doctor experience increased blood pressure. This is why they take several readings to adjust for this.

So next time you want to shift a mood, put on a silly hat. Do it with others for even more impact, as you’ll be using more of your senses and you can feed off each other’s emotions.

What hat will you choose?

Here’s some pictures of her hats and even a complete duck costume – I wonder what prompted that one?!