Got no plans this weekend? Why not call your friends, play your favorite music, and dance the night away? This move can surely reduce your stress and other mental conditions, recent studies show.
Aside from laughter, dancing could be the real natural cure for anxiety and chronic pain, and it could even help Alzheimer’s patients feel better.
Dance helped Starre Vartan, a distinguished science writer and former geologist, get through difficult, lonely times during the COVID-19 pandemic, and specialists concur that the activity can have positive effects on the brain.
While there are proven associations between regular physical activity and enhanced mental health, experts believe that dancing may have additional benefits.
Vartan states that during the pandemic, her father’s illness and subsequently her own protracted battle with Covid put her in a bad mental position.
She would dance every day to relieve her concern about the conditions, and she found it to be really effective.
Vartan, like many other amateur hoofers, may just be flailing around in their bedrooms, but dance has a clinical quality to it.
Dance/Movement therapy extends the established advantages of physical activity to include emotional benefits.
‘We hold every experience we’ve ever had in our body, so being able to move may release something that we’ve been holding, tucked away in a muscle,’ Dr Angela Grayson, president of the American Dance Therapy Association, told the Post.
‘The muscle has the memory of it, and when we’re moving, we can release that.’
According to Dr. Jacelyn Biondo, a creative arts therapy expert at Drexel University in Philadelphia, the uniqueness of dance distinguishes it from conventional activities like riding a bike.
She claims that dance allows people to express themselves rather than merely doing a repetitive task that everyone else is doing.
According to Biondo, dancing therapy has a positive impact on persons who suffer from depression and anxiety, as is well documented.
Dance therapy’s ability to treat symptoms of schizophrenia, a serious psychiatric condition, is where it truly shines.
According to a 2021 study done by Biondo, schizophrenia patients who participated in dance therapies were less likely to experience auditory hallucinations, paranoia, and delusional thinking than those who received traditional talk therapy.
Those who participated in the more aggressive kind of therapy expressed more emotion and had lower levels of psychological distress.
While just dancing in your room, alone, can provide benefits, the rewards reaped could increase even more if that person receives tips from a trained therapist.