Story line Dr Julia F Christensen was planning to become a professional ballerina until a back injury forced a career change and she retrained as a neuroscientist. Now the Danish native works for the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, a German medical research organisation, and writes about the brain. Her latest book, The Pathway to Flow, explores why dance and other creative activities are so good for our happiness.
Grooving together is good for your physical and mental health
Start line When I speak to Christensen on Zoom from her home in Germany, I tell her that I’m more interested in how dance can improve our mental, rather than physical, health. But it’s bad news for lazy people like me: according to her, both are ‘intimately tied’. As she says: ‘Our brain is dependent on movement for being healthy. What we see with people who have sedentary lifestyles are not just physical hazards but also [that] depression and anxiety go up. And ruminative, loopy thought patterns increase in people who sit a lot, too.’ Christensen has personal experience of this: when she stopped dancing and started neuroscience, she was spending a lot more time sitting down. All that perching made her mind go ‘astray in ways I hadn’t experienced when I was a dancer’. Put simply: ‘sitting is a health hazard’, both mental and physical – but dancing alleviates that.
Lifeline What separates dancing from other forms of exercise? Christensen says, ‘the human brain is a social junkie. It really needs other people.’ And dancing is mostly sociable. In a medical study of more than 6,000 people published this June, she examined their ‘big five’ personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. The results? Those in the group who danced showed about the same levels of conscientiousness, higher levels of extroversion, agreeableness and openness, and lower levels of neuroticism than non-dancers. (Strangely, the results varied depending on the style of dance: swing dancers, for instance, were even less neurotic than latin and standard dancers. Further research is needed to assess why.)
Party line All the extra openness and agreeableness that comes from dancing could be something to do with ‘synchrony’ – the act of people moving together. It releases bonding hormones like oxytocin and, says Christensen, ‘Research shows that people who have been moving together in a room will like each other more afterwards. They will also be more empathetic with each other and, if we pose them a problem, they will be more synchronised and faster in solving it.’
Helpline If you can’t imagine anything more embarrassing than dancing in a group setting, there’s good news: doing it on your own also boosts the brain. It’s partly because dance requires ‘expressivity’ – or ‘movements with emotions’, says Christensen – and this reduces stress. (Studies comparing people who listened to music without dancing and people who listened to music while dancing found that the latter had reduced stress hormone levels.) What’s more, Christensen thinks dancing – whether alone or in a group – improves your chances of reaching the ‘flow state’: the feeling of being totally absorbed in something and not stewing in your own thoughts. The Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who first established the idea of a flow state in 1990, called it ‘the secret to happiness’. Sounds pretty good.
Down the line Dancing can help your memory, too. One study, at Coventry University, ran various tests on amateur dancers before and after a 30-minute salsa class. It found that the participants’ visual-spatial working memory (the brain’s capacity to hold visual information) had increased by 18 per cent after salsa-ing. Apparently it’s because dance boosts activity in your hippocampus – the area of the brain responsible for taking short-term memories and transferring them into long-term memories. Another study is even more intriguing. It followed people in their 60s who were split into two groups: the first took up dancing once a week for 18 months, and the second lot were asked to do any other form of regular exercise. At the end of the study, brain scans showed that, while both groups experienced growth in the hippocampus, the growth among dancers was larger. So if you’ve forgotten where you put your house keys for the millionth time, get your dancing shoes out – sharpish.
The Pathway to Flow by Dr Julia F Christensen (Square Peg, £18.99).
Next week FITNESS: the under-desk treadmill
