Dancing: the 5 psychological benefits of dancing

According to evolutionists, dance was established among the human species playing a fundamental role in the evolution of social relations, due to its ability to bond with individuals emotionally, regardless of language skills.

This turns the dance into a Universal language existing in all cultures. In 2009, the Hungarian Istvan Winkler showed that people are born with a rhythmic-musical sense, which makes the desire to move to the rhythm of music an innate ability of human beings.

Dancing benefits

It has been known for many years that physical activity and sports have many benefits physical, helping for example to improve the functioning of the respiratory, circulatory and bone. But when we dance, we get the benefits of aerobic physical activity, and we also benefit on a psychological and emotional level..

1. Dancing helps us connect with ourselves

Dancing awakens emotions and fantasies through movement, which facilitates the expression of sensations, emotions, feelings and states of mind in a natural and uninhibited way. In this way we can connect

with ourselves and with the emotions we suppress, such as rage and anger, or anxiety and anguish, that dancing can be channeled in a healthy way, which helps emotional control on a day-to-day basis.

In addition, dance is a form of creative expression which helps to connect with oneself, enhancing and fostering spontaneity and creativity that we carry inside.

2. Helps us connect with others

As we have mentioned in the first lines, dancing is a social activityl, which provides many opportunities to connect with other people. Attending dance classes can improve interpersonal relationships, as it is a meeting point to make friends and improve the development of social skills.

Another example of dancing as a socializing agent can be observed when young people reach adolescence (and initiates the secondary socialization process), a vital moment in which it is very common for boys and girls to start going to nightclubs. In these types of venues, the effect of dance acts as a disinhibitor and social enhancer, and again dancing and meeting new people go hand in hand.

3. Improves mood

Dancing is a pleasant and relaxing distraction that almost everyone enjoys, for That is most likely that if we observe a person dancing we will surely find a smile in his expensive. By assuming a distraction, helps the mind to focus on problems and concerns that flood it during the day, making it easier for us to stop thinking in a negative key, and thus reducing states of tension and stress, obtaining feelings of well-being.

It also helps channel the adrenalin and induce joy, increasing vitality, motivation and enthusiasm for life, which makes people more positive.

By improving the mood of people who practice it, various researchers have wanted to study its effects on disorders of mood, one of the most conclusive investigations is a study carried out in Korea in 2005 and published in the journal International Journal of Neuroscience where dance movement therapy (DMT) in adolescents with mild depression was found to regulate stress by lowering dopamine levels and improving mood by increasing levels of serotonin.

4. Improves self-esteem and self-confidence

As we mentioned in the second point of this list, dancing helps to establish relationships with other people, and it has been shown that maintaining good emotional ties and socializing with people contribute to increasing self-esteem and positive attitudes towards oneself and others. Attending dance classes is an excellent method to overcome shyness by helping people to overcome their fear of "ridicule" since, for example, a Falling while dancing is a typical failure that all dancers have ever had and it is not seen by them as a reason to be ashamed.

Another of the ways in which it also helps to improve self-confidence is that each time a mastery of a new dance step, the person experiences an increase in confidence when considering this fact as an achievement, and each achievement that get positively reinforces self-concept, transferring self-confidence to other aspects of life.

5. Dancing increases intelligence and prevents brain aging

A few days ago we elaborated in Psychology and Mind a curious list of tricks to increase intelligence. Ballroom dancing, like most structured dances, requires memorizing the steps and working in pairs, for this the person has to concentrate and maintain your sustained care, all this together, provides mental challenges that are key to maintaining mental alertness and health cerebral.

One of the purposes of the human intelligence It is decision making, while dancing you have to make quick decisions continuously and in many cases it is not useful to resort to a pre-established fixed action pattern, as happens when we do other physical activities such as running, cycling or to swim. In this way, when dancing, the brain has to continually "reinvent itself" and make use of brain plasticity, which causes neurons to be very active.

The psychologist Peter lovattAs a former professional dancer, he has proven that dancing helps us with decision-making. His studies conclude that improvisation when dancing helps us to better face problems in which there are multiple solutions different (divergent thinking), while highly structured dance is a type of dance that relies on very precise and highly structured means that thinking is exercised in problems in which we have to find a single answer or solution (thought convergent).

Another of the most relevant studies that relate dancing to an increase in intelligence is the one led by M. Joe verghese (2003), who attributes this effect of dance to the fact that when we learn to dance and we link new steps, the neuronal synapse.

Benefits in the structure of the brain

His team of scientists from the Albert Einstein School of Medicine in New York, reveal in their study that the aerobic exercise of dancing can reverse the loss of volume of the hippocampus, a structure brain key to memory, which over the years shrinks and causes memory problems, which can degenerate into dementias. With this they showed that the physical and mental effort required by dancing can increase memory by reducing the risk of dementia and reduces its effects, indicating that dancing protects the brain in the long run term.

To reach these conclusions, what they did was, among other things, what they did was compare the dance with other mental activities such as reading, solving crosswords and hobbies, etc. and with other physical activities such as playing sports, cycling or walking. According to their results, while crossword puzzles decrease by one 47% the risk of dementia, dancing frequently reduces it by up to a 76%. So we can conclude that dancing is one of the best remedies against brain aging.

Following the line of Joe Verghese, researchers from the Canadian university McGill in 2005, they studied the effects of dancing tango in people with Parkinson's disease and concluded that dancing stimulates the central nervous system and brain activity much more than other sports, since the emotional report when dealing with a social activity is much higher. But perhaps it is more interesting what the patients themselves report, some of them express that when the music plays the trembling of their body fades to flow with the tango itself and also helps them improve coordination and Balance.

In short: don't forget to dance

After this exposition of the beneficial effects of dancing on the human psyche, it has to be admitted that dance has therapeutic effects on most people, and I would like to end this article with a sentence that sums it up very well:

"Dance is medicine through rhythm, space, energy, form and time, which covers the body with substances that cure physical and psychological ailments."