Why is Dancing So Amazingly Healthy For You?
By: Marty Wolner
Tags: Dance, Dementia, Self Care, Brain, Mental Health

Do you like to dance?

Dancing is incredibly healthy for you and can actually help slow down your brain and body’s aging process.

Your brain loves rhythm.

Rhythm helps regulate your moods. In fact, steady rhythm has been sensorily and emotionally regulating you since even before you were born. Your mom’s heartbeat was your first connection to rhythm.

Your brain yearns to connect to synchronous rhythm and dance can help you with that. This has been known for a long time.

Way back in 1871, Charles Darwin concluded that “before acquiring the power of expressing their mutual love in articulate language, (most people) endeavoured to charm each other with musical notes and rhythm.”

Even if you don’t feel like much of an accomplished dancer, and may even have trouble “keeping the beat” — it doesn’t matter, get up and move!

Your brain’s neural entrainment helps you keep the beat — or not!

Just being able to tap your finger to the beat of your favorite song is determined by something called your neural entrainment. Even those with low neural entrainment can benefit from moving to music.

Whether it’s ballroom dancing, doing the foxtrot, breakdancing — or any other form of dance or structured movement — patterned, repetitive dancing is extremely healthy for your brain and body.

Find a partner or do it alone, but it’s healthy for you to put on some music every day and dance.

Consistent dancing will actually reduce your chances of cognitive decline and dementia.

A recent study measured eleven (11) different types of physical activity to find out which activities were best to help reduce dementia and other cognitive decline and dancing was the only activity that had an impact.

And what an impact!

Dancing reduces the chance of cognitive decline by 76%!

Dancing will improve your brain’s cognitive abilities, and slow down your aging brain. A recent study investigated the effects that leisure activities had on the risk of dementia on the elderly.

The researchers looked at the effects of 11 different types of physical activity — including cycling, golf, swimming, and tennis, but found that only one of the activities studied — dance — lowered the participants risk of dementia.

Dancing reduces dementia in seniors by an astonishing 76%! None of the other 10 activities in the study even came close. (Cognitive exercise like puzzles and reading also significantly reduces the chances of dementia.)

Music stimulates your brain’s reward centers, while dance activates your sensory and motor circuits.

It takes complex mental coordination to dance. A Columbia University neuroscientist suggests that synchronizing music and movement constitutes a “pleasure double play”.

There are two kinds of dance and coordinated movement that are at the top of the healthy brain list. Research shows that the Latin dance, Zumba, and the Chinese martial art, Tai Chi, are most effective at managing and reversing mental decline.

Using live brain imaging — that is, actually monitoring someone’s brain activity while they’re dancing — researchers can actually pinpoint the areas of your brain that are activated when you dance.

The parts of your brain that are involved in the planning, control and execution of your movement actually coordinate with the parts of your brain that connect to your body sensations.

The physical and expressive elements of dance actually alter your brain function. Dancing will help you have better memory, information recall, situational awareness and other improved cognitive functions.

According to the researchers, dancing involves both mental effort and social interaction and that this type of stimulation helped reduce the risk of dementia.

Another study by researchers in North Dakota found that the Latin style dance, Zumba, improves mood and certain cognitive skills, such as visual recognition and decision-making.

Other studies show that dance helps reduce your stress, increases levels of the feel-good brain hormone serotonin, and helps you develop new neural connections, especially in the regions of your brain involved in executive function, long-term memory, and spatial recognition.

Even more scientific studies on the primary motor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, indicates that dancing and rhythmic movement can be extremely therapeutic and that people with Parkinson’s “speak and walk better if they have a steady rhythmic cue.”

Even the Chinese martial art, Tai Chi, has been shown to be a healthy way to rewire the brain. Tai chi is actually considered to be a more ritualized, structured form of dance. This form of movement is beneficial for both balance and mental function and connects your emotional brain with your body movement.

You can be calmer, feel more rewarded and connected, and slow down the aging of your brain if you just get up and dance!

Let’s talk — Marty@mybrain.tools