An acquaintance recently bought something to improve his bad attitude. It is a kind of cross between a dog harness and a sports bra, which pulls the shoulders back so that you are no longer bent. The nice thing is that not only his posture, but also his mood has improved since then.
“Maybe because my head now thinks there’s nothing to weigh down,” he said with a laugh.
Wow, I thought. Influencing the mind through the body. Of course, many have been trying to do that for a long time, by exercising, by eating consciously or by taking pills, but I found the idea that your posture can do something for your mind fascinating. When I talked about it with my sister-the-psychologist, she was skeptical.
“There could be many reasons why he’s feeling better now,” she said. “You had a study in the late 1980s that claimed that people who put a pencil between their teeth become happier because it makes their faces smile. So it turned out to be nonsense.”
“So the psychological effects of that harness are a coincidence?”
“You don’t know,” she said. “There are just so many variables. Anyway, I actually have no right to speak, after all I have left my bank.”
God, yes. Six months ago, things went so downhill for her that she couldn’t get off the couch. She spent most of her free time horizontally. And suddenly she was fed up and replaced the sofa with two armchairs.
‘When I couldn’t hang up anymore and had to really sit up, things quickly got better,’ she muttered. “Of course I will never know for sure whether it was because I changed furniture and therefore attitude. It might as well have been something else.”
“They are very nice armchairs,” I said. “That may have helped too. I mean, the eye wants something too.”
“Secure. But kidding, how you place your body in space certainly has an influence. We can just never know for sure how far it extends.”
So really it’s just a matter of trying. As always, try again and again, to go from temporary relief to temporary relief. As long as we think that there are still possibilities and chances to escape from our moods, from our thoughts. From the vain hope that someday there will come a time when we are no longer at the mercy of the vagaries of the mind.
Ellen Deckwitz writes an exchange column with Marcel van Roosmalen here.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of October 13, 2022