Why Dancing Is Good for You (2024)

The song plays, and your toe taps. The sport crowd chants, and your body sways. The band shreds and your head bobs to the beat. “You” don’t decide to tap, sway, or nod. The movement happens, and you notice. Why? Research suggests these small, subconscious movements hold keys to your mental and physical health.

Dance Research

Over the past 10 years, research into the health benefits of dancing has exploded. Reported benefits include not only physical outcomes (building strength, flexibility, coordination, and balance),¹ but emotional (impacting mood, happiness, and resilience)² and cognitive (enhancing memory, orientation, and concentration)³ as well. These benefits span human life and appear across populations, from healthy college students to patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease and dementia.⁴

As evidence builds, researchers ask, "How does dancing enhance our emotional, mental, and physical well-being?" What makes dancing effective?

Sensorimotor Synchronization

One focus of this research is sensorimotor synchronization (SMS) or entrainment: dancing exercises a human’s instinctual ability to match a beat.

As Laura Cirelli at the TEMPOLab at the University of Toronto has found, humans not only respond to a beat within months of birth,⁵ their ability to do so – their tempo flexibility – grows over time. A child can easily speed up and slow down by age seven, changing tempos within a 117 to 166 bpm range.⁶

In learning any technique or tradition of dance, a person practices this capacity to synchronize, training it consciously to sense and respond to the rhythmic patterns of a given culture.

Elements of Synchronization

But what does SMS entail? For one, it requires a readiness to be moved by sound waves that occur in rhythmic patterns. In other words, the human auditory system is wired to notice spaced, repeating beats. This capacity is not surprising, perhaps, given the regular rhythms of our own hearts and lungs. A fetus swims in the pulse of a mother's heartbeat before laying down neural pathways needed to sense it.

Second, humans perceive rhythmic sequences as we hear them, and our bodily selves also mobilize a response that expresses itself in physical action. We tap, sway, and nod. Even if we try to suppress these outward actions, our heart rate, breathing, and even our brain waves align with the rhythms we perceive – regardless of whether those rhythms come from a passing train, a partner's pulse, or a favorite song.

Third, these movement responses are not simply reactions to what we hear. Our tapping, nodding, and swaying anticipate the next beat in the sequence so that our movements happen on or very close to the next beat.⁷ We tap, sway, or nod in time. We get into the “groove.”⁸ In other words, the rhythms humans perceive stimulate us to act anew.

Finally, evidence is growing that as humans synchronize to a beat, our brains release co*cktails of “happy chemicals” – endorphins, serotonin, dopamine, and more.⁹ Propelled by a beat to move with it, humans feel more aware, alive, and resourceful, and more able to push through fear and tolerate pain. This effect, moreover, is distinct from – though it may be enhanced by – the effects of physical exertion.

The Evolutionary Purpose of Synchronization

Ever since Émile Durkheim’s account of “collective effervescence,” anthropologists and sociologists have explained the evolutionary purpose of sensorimotor synchronization in terms of social bonding.¹⁰ When humans move together in time, they share an experience of heightened joy. They perceive themselves as part of the larger community that made this joy possible. The distinction between self and other blurs.

Such experiences of melding, researchers suggest, primed humans to cooperate,¹¹ learn language,¹² and develop morals, religions, and cultures.¹³ Dancing (as well as music) may have helped bridge the gap between primates and humans.¹⁴

Yet, social-bonding explanations for the health benefits of dancing gloss over what may be even more fundamental: as humans exercise their capacity to synchronize, they get better at it. A trained sensorimotor synchronization integrates subconscious and conscious processes.¹⁵

The implications are twofold. On the one hand, as humans dance, they grow more sensitive and responsive to the rhythms in and around them – even when they are not actively dancing. A heightened sensitivity to rhythm stays with us as we move through the day, boosting moods and cognitive abilities.

On the other hand, as this awareness develops, so does our capacity to discern whether or not synchronizing with a particular rhythm will enhance our health and well-being. Not all beats are life-enabling. As autocrats throughout history know, humans are vulnerable to being seduced to commit atrocious acts by speech and music, parades, and displays – that is, by rhythmic movement.

By training our capacity to synchronize, dancing provides us with a way to beneficially engage and enjoy what we are born ready to do.

Conclusion

Dancing is not a technology of the past beyond which humans have evolved. Dancing remains a vital practice for generating joy, motivating action, building physical strength and agility, and above all, cultivating awareness of how we are always sensing and responding to a rhythm.

So next time you feel the impulse to tap, sway, or nod, do yourself a favor.

Get into the groove.

References