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Relaxation Hoodie. Neuro Navy edition

Name: Relaxation Hoodie. Neuro Navy edition
Brand: Vollebak
SKU: SWH113NVYXSM
Price: 695 GBP
Availability: InStock

Like being shot with a tranquilizer gun. But less painful.

£695

Colour: Neuro Navy edition

Relaxation Hoodie. Drunk Tank Pink edition

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Model is 6ft 2 / 189cm with a 40 inch / 101cm chest, and wears size Large.

Laser-cut eye mask lets you see out but nobody see in
2 concealed sling pockets designed to hold your arms across your body in a comforting hug
Rebuilt in a super warm wool twill woven in Italy by Manteco

Clothing can help you go places, do things or make some kind of statement. It can help you run faster, climb higher and survive colder conditions. But can it help you do less?

In 2015 we launched a hoodie that zipped over your face. It came in a dusty bubblegum pink developed by a scientist to calm violent prisoners.

The Relaxation Hoodie was our attempt to create a womb-like, wearable isolation tank, clothing that could slow you to a complete stop. Or as Wired magazine put it at the time, to "induce calming oblivion".

Just over a decade on, with more and more science insisting on the need for meditative time-outs, we've rebuilt it in a better material and a more engineered design.

Technical details

Shell, hood and eye mask woven in Italy by Manteco: 48% wool, 32% polyester, 20% polyamide

Hoodie weighs 968 grams

Laser-cut eye mask with 2mm perforations

2-way centre front zip with extension pull, zipping fully over the face

2 concealed sling pockets with invisible zips

2 zipped side hand pockets

Bungee cord hem adjusters

Coverstitched seams

Relaxed fit

Made in Portugal

Gentle dry clean only

Shell, hood and eye mask woven in Italy by Manteco: 48% wool, 32% polyester, 20% polyamide

Hoodie weighs 968 grams

Laser-cut eye mask with 2mm perforations

2-way centre front zip with extension pull, zipping fully over the face

2 concealed sling pockets with invisible zips

2 zipped side hand pockets

Bungee cord hem adjusters

Coverstitched seams

Relaxed fit

Made in Portugal

Gentle dry clean only

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Your body's emergency setting

In 1956 the endocrinologist Hans Selye published The Stress of Life. The book made a deceptively simple point. Stress isn't just a feeling, it's a biological event. Your heart rate climbs, adrenaline and cortisol flood your system and blood is diverted to your muscles. Digestion, repair and growth are put on hold. It's a useful response when you need to get out of a burning building or give a sharp-toothed predator the swerve. It isn’t a long-term recipe for health and wellbeing.

Stress isn't just a feeling, it's a biological event.

The problem is switching it off

Selye found that when stress doesn't let up, the body moves from resistance into exhaustion and starts to break down. Decades later the neuroscientist Bruce McEwen named the cumulative cost allostatic load. Repair keeps getting postponed, and blood pressure, immunity, metabolism and sleep all pay the price. And while deadly threat is rare in modern life, deadlines, notifications and 3am emails are not. The alarm signals never stop.

A room with nothing in it

If stimulation sets the alarm off, what happens when you take it all away? In 1954 the neuroscientist John C. Lilly built a machine that did exactly that. At the US National Institute of Mental Health he suspended subjects in warm water, in darkness and silence, with a breathing mask and almost nothing for their senses to work with. It proved technology could take stimulation away as well as pile it on. Lilly's tank became the flotation tank, and decades of research since have found that an hour of floating can lower blood pressure, stress hormones and anxiety.

Deep relaxation means more than just stopping what you are doing, it means finding empty space.

The body has an off switch

In the 1970s the Harvard physician Herbert Benson found that the body doesn't just have an emergency setting. It has an opposite one, which he called the relaxation response. Heart rate falls, breathing slows, oxygen consumption drops and the parasympathetic nervous system takes over the work of rest, digestion and repair. And crucially, you can bring it on deliberately.

Relaxation Zip Through Hoodie. Pink edition

A colour designed to slow you down

At the same time, a scientist named Alexander Schauss was running the life sciences programme at the American Institute for Biosocial Research in Tacoma, Washington. He wanted to know whether looking at a particular colour could create that kind of response. After years of testing, he concluded that a specific bubblegum pink could slow a subject's heart rate and reduce aggression, producing an effect close to meditation.

Think pink

In 1979, 2 officers at a US naval correctional facility in Seattle painted an admissions cell in it. New prisoners spent less than 15 minutes inside before processing, and the navy reported no erratic or hostile behaviour during that time. Pink cells spread to other prisons. And others saw different applications for the colour. The University of Iowa painted its visitors' locker room pink to soften up the opposition. The colour was named Baker-Miller Pink after those 2 Seattle officers, Gene Baker and Ron Miller. Along the way it also picked up the tags Schauss Pink, P-618 and our personal favourite, Drunk Tank Pink.

A colour once used to calm prisoners and soften up visiting football teams.

Relaxation Zip Through Hoodie. Navy edition

The nervous system nobody trains

Since then sports science, usually dedicated to keeping you moving, has caught on to the need to slow down and stop. And as quickly as possible. Recovery is no longer just the empty space between efforts. It is where the body restores energy, repairs tissue and adapts to the work you have already done. The parasympathetic nervous system plays a central role in that shift: it is active when you rest, digest, sleep and recover. That’s why we built a hoodie to stop you moving and kickstart that system.

A hoodie built to help you do nothing

The Relaxation Hoodie is fitted with a laser-cut eye mask that lets you see out but no-one see in, and 2 concealed sling pockets that hold your arms across your body so you stop moving. It comes in the original Drunk Tank Pink, a colour developed in a laboratory to slow the human heart rate, and Neuro Navy.

Made from Italian wool twill

The original Relaxation Hoodie was built from a technical soft shell. This one is built from a wool twill woven in Italy from 48% wool, 32% polyester and 20% polyamide. It's dense, warm, quiet and hangs with the weight of a blanket rather than the crackle of a shell. It holds temperature without needing insulation, because it's impossible to relax if you're cold.

Bonded wool that's soft on the inside

The material is a bonded construction, which means 2 separate layers are laminated together into a single material with a different job on each face. The outside is a dense Italian wool twill that holds its shape and blocks the wind, while the inside is soft against the skin. The whole thing weighs 968 grams, which is heavy for a hoodie but just right for a mobile cocoon.

We’ve remade the original Relaxation Hoodie in a dense, warm wool from a mill that makes very little else.

A laser-cut eye mask

Zip the hoodie all the way up and the eye mask closes over your face. Where the original used a mesh visor, this version uses a panel of the shell material perforated with 2mm laser-cut holes spaced on the diagonal. You can see out, nobody can see in. And in the pink colourway everything you look at arrives filtered through the same shade used in the original experiments.

Sling pockets for your arms

2 concealed pockets sit behind invisible zips at the centre front, set at different heights so that when you slide your arms in, one rests on top of the other and they cross over your stomach and stay there, held in a comfortable hug. You stop moving, so you stop burning energy. And your forearms rest exactly where they need to be for you to feel your stomach rising and falling with each breath rather than breathing shallowly into your chest.

More outdoor jacket than traditional hoodie

The original was cut like a hoodie. This one has a more relaxed fit but is engineered like a piece of outerwear, with raglan sleeves and a raglan yoke that run in a single unbroken line from the collar to the underarm. There's no shoulder seam pressing into the top of your shoulder when you lie down, and darts at the back of the elbow mean the sleeve is already shaped for a bent arm – which is the position your arms are in the entire time you're wearing it.

Flat seams so nothing digs in

The inside has been engineered as carefully as the outside, because anything you can feel is something that will stop you relaxing. The seams are coverstitched so they lie completely flat rather than standing proud against your skin, the pocket bags are French-seamed so there are no raw edges anywhere inside the garment, and the internal seams are bound in an elasticated suede binding that stretches with you. Lie down in it and there is nothing pressing into your back.

Wired magazine called this a hoodie that borders on obsessive in its dedication to designing for relaxation.

2 pockets so you can wear it all day

The sling pockets do 1 very specific job, so we added 2 more that do the ordinary one. 2 side hand pockets are now hidden in the face of the material so they don't interrupt the silhouette, and they take your phone, keys and hands. It means a hoodie originally designed for 15 minutes of total stillness now works as something you can put on in the morning and not take off.

A 2-way zip that's soft against your face

The centre front zip runs 2 ways so you can open it from the bottom while your face stays covered, and it's fitted with an extension pull so you can find it and move it without looking. Behind it runs a strip of grosgrain tape, sitting between the zip teeth and your skin along the full length of your face and throat. It's a small detail that decides whether you can stand to have a zip closed across your face for 15 minutes.

A hem that seals warmth in at your waist

The hem runs level with no dropped tail, and it's fitted with bungee cord adjusters that pull through rubberised eyelets and lock with rubberised cord stoppers, so you can cinch it tight and stop cold air getting in underneath. The hem and cuffs are double turned and stitched to hold their shape rather than curling with wear. It's the difference between a hoodie that keeps you warm while you're moving and one that keeps you warm while you're lying completely still.