You won’t believe this one weird trick for amazing emotional health . . .
Apologies for the click-bait headline, but something like that popped into my head when I saw this figure from a recent study that suggests exercise is more effective than SSRIs for depression. It’s not just any old exercise –– it’s dancing in particular that has the biggest effect, by quite a big margin.
But why? I have five ideas, none mutually exclusive.
1. Dancing gets us out of our heads and into our bodies. I believe there is some pathway from our ears to the muscles in our feet, legs, hips, torso, arms and neck that completely bypasses the analytical, judging, critical, ruminating, and defensive parts of our brain. This pathway is lost to many, but when it’s rediscovered, a new spiritual energy is unlocked in us.
2. Dancing is likely older than language. Anthropologists note that dance is a fundamental part of ritual in all hunter-gatherer communities ever observed. It is likely that dance was a crucial building block for later forms of communication and forms of social cohesion like religion. When we dance, I believe, we unlock ancient and deep resources of energy.
3. Dancing allows us to feel emotions in a more immediate way. When a music evokes an emotion and we allow our bodies to move with this emotion, we can actually feel it in a fuller way.
4. Dancing allows us to express emotions in a fuller way. The saying goes: you can only heal what you can feel. As dancing allows us to feel emotions, we can finally express emotions. And when we express emotions, we open up a space for healing.
5. Dancing combines a lot of “causal mechanisms” for emotional health together. Here’s what the study’s researchers think is going on with exercise in general: “We hypothesise that a combination of social interaction, mindfulness or experiential acceptance, increased self-efficacy, immersion in green spaces, neurobiological mechanisms, and acute positive affect combine to generate outcomes.” I think all of these are at work except for the green spaces. Most dancing is done in doors, I think. But now I’m going to have to figure out how to get my dances outside!
So don’t think about it. Don’t wait. Just flip on some tunes (I offer two new ones at the bottom of this email!) and move . . .