Improving Mood through Movement and Dancing

Dancing leads to an increase in positive mood. However, you won’t have to break out in full dance to enjoy the benefit dancing and music has on your mood. Even the smallest of “dance moves” such as bobbing your head, tapping your feet, and waving your hands contribute to a positive mood. The region of the brain that is most impacted by music is also the area that makes us want to move. In the brain, the cerebellum is highly activated when we listen to our favorite songs. The cerebellum is involved in coordination and movement. Activating our cerebellum increases our “urge” to dance. Dancing helps to release endorphins and serotonin in the brain, both of which are known to have a positive impact on one’s mood.

Greater Motivation during Exercise

There is a reason why music and working out seem to go hand in hand. First, music helps to reduce the feelings of fatigue, allowing one to push to the end of an exercise when they might otherwise give up. Listening to music during exercises such as running/jogging or timed interval exercises can help one to keep their pace throughout the workout because people have an instinct to synchronize their movements to music and it’s tempo. Listening to music during exercise also helps people to exercise longer without realizing they are doing so. The human body is constantly monitoring itself, therefore, with music as a distraction in the brain, there is less effort placed into thinking about how tired one may be or how much time they have left in the workout.

Enhanced Memory

Everyone has had it happen where they had a song “stuck in their head”. A lot of people have also experienced, when listening to a certain song, getting a “flashback” to a time that you listened to that song or to a time that you are reminded of because of that song. Possibly, you have even experienced remembering facts better by coming up with a song to sing the facts along to. Listening to and performing music activates areas of the brain associated with memory as well as speech, reasoning, emotion, and reward. Listening to music also invokes emotion, emotion alone can help one to remember memories when visuals by themselves cannot. Music helps to improve one’s memory so effectively that music therapy is now being used to help Alzheimer’s and dementia patients. It is known that dementia destroys parts of the brain responsible for episodic memory, while procedural memory is left untouched. Musical activity is stored within procedural memory where other routine and repetitive activities are. Music assessing these less damaged areas of the brain helps to support other areas of the brain that are not functioning as well.

Increased Immune System

This benefit is probably the most surprising on the list! Scientists have found that after listening to 50 mins of uplifting music, the levels of antibodies increased. Specifically, the antibody immunoglobulin A, which is the immune system’s first line of defense. They also found that stress hormone levels, which weaken the immune system, decreased. Long periods of stress can increase the chance of developing an illness and can even increase the time it takes for the body to recover from a disease. Two hormones that help to fight stress are adrenaline and cortisol. Studies have shown that the levels of both of these hormones decrease after just an hour of listening to or singing music.

Maintain Focus while Studying or Working

Many people will argue that listening to music as a background noise helps them to focus on tasks. Though this statement may seem like an oxymoron, there is science to back up this claim.  People have two attention systems: a conscious one that focuses on the tasks at hand and an unconscious one that uses our peripheral senses to monitor and alert us for anything of significance while we are focused on our task. For example, have you ever been trying to focus on a task at work but kept becoming distracted because of people talking, doors shutting, and papers shuffling? This is your unconscious attention at work alerting you of any abnormalities in your surrounding areas. Music helps to “tame” your unconscious attention, blocking out the noise changes around you and allowing you to focus better on your tasks.