Felt slightly happier today, possibly because I had no work and no lectures, but correlation is not causation.
Just an amazing coincidence then.
I read a brilliant piece of writing by Rafael Behr, about how politics and the personal are deeply, and sometimes dangerously, entwined.
He suffered a heart attack while out jogging:
"[Now] I try to run to a place where I can see the horizon. I venture along the Brighton seafront, or up into the South Downs, clocking up around 45km a week – way more than I ever managed (or even attempted) in the years of battling through angina. I can fit into the suit I wore at my wedding 15 years ago. I have read a bit about running technique. It turns out I had developed all sorts of bad habits. The worst was my tendency to stare down, hunched, focused on the ground just in front of me. I’m working to correct that now. The trick is to relax the shoulders, don’t clench the fists, breathe evenly. Look out, look up."
That last line - look out, look up - got me wondering about how posture affects your mood.
A HuffPost article called Smiling Really Can Make You Feel Happier, Says (Some Of) The Science describes how a recent meta-study found facial expressions do have a small impact on feelings.
And after all, Tories wouldn't pay their consultant mates a fortune to advise them to stand like this if they didn't think body language projected something:
(I found an essay on this phenomenon that argues, with some interesting tangents, that "the so-called Tory Power Stance, far from being a posture depicting authority and control, is actually a defensive masquerade, displaying a postural articulation of the ‘fragile phallus‘.")
Quite. But anyway, staring at the magic rectangle, my head's usually bent forwards and my eyes are downcast. I'll feel awful, call it "doomscrolling" and blame the awfulness on what I'm reading online, but could it also be something to do with that hunched-up, downwards angle?
A cursory search for 'looking upwards' brought up two Psychology Today articles; there'll be many more out there I'm sure, and proper research too:
Gaze Raising by Shelagh Robinson
Look Up: The Surprising Joy of Raising Your Gaze by Colin Ellard
I'll have a look for the proper research once I've conquered the more immediate problem of my own degree work. There's a deadline on Friday chaps! Huzzah!
I watched La Jetée, the short film composed entirely of still photos that inspired 12 Monkeys.
It almost exactly captured the experience of shopping in The Range the other day:
I splashed out in the online shop of False Knees, one of my favourite Twitter artists:
Had to walk into town to collect a library book this afternoon, and on the way back I saw these guys:
This is going to be Photo of the Day because I didn't realise quite how much I needed to see daffodils before I saw some.
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