Whether you are looking to pick up a new hobby, add something to your workout routine, or relearn an old skill, try considering learning how to dance. You do not have to fear about having two-left feet, being clumsy, or not being a professional to find that dance has many surprising benefits to both your mental and physical well-being. There has been countless studies performed proving that dance can not only help in increasing our well-being through social interaction, but also provide us with multiple health benefits that can help us later down in life. Here is some incredible research we found about the surprising benefits of dance.
Dancing Can Help Aid In Decreasing the Risk of Dementia
With a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 469 subjects over the age of 75 were chosen to partake in an experiment in which questioned whether leisurely activities, such as dance, can help lower the risk of dementia and help decrease the symptoms of dementia. It was found that subjects who participate frequently more times in dance compared to others had a much lower risk of dementia. While there is no definitive way to help alleviate or reverse dementia, the study did find that in participating in activities such as dance can help build and improve the elderly's global cognitive function.
It was also found that in taking 60-120 minutes a week to dance can drastically improve in the cognitive abilities of adults or elderly who are already dealing with some impairment. Due to dance's positive affects within cognitive functions, it is shown to help improve with memory and language fluency, as also proven by another study done by the Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience showing the dance can help improve the white matter within our brains.
Dancing Can Help Reduce Disability Later In Life
In a study published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science, it was shown that dance can aid in reducing the symptoms of disabilities later in life that may interfere with our daily living. Dancing requires a number of skills that most other exercises don't - balance, strength, endurance, and cognitive abilities such as concentration and adaptability. It was found that dance, compared to other similar activities like yoga, tai chi, and walking, has significantly lowered risk of becoming disabled in women by 73% within the study. This means that this women, as well as others who do so, can live a lot more independently as they aged without needed to rely on others for aid.
Other Health Benefits
If these last two benefits didn't convince you to start dancing, there are many other amazing and incredible benefits that come with dancing. Here a few other surprising benefits of dance:
- Leisurely activities such as dance has shown to significantly increase mental well-being while lowering depression, anxiety, and stress according to a study performed by Lancent Psychiatry
- In the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, it was found that 30-minutes of light activities like dance can lower a person's risk of dying early by 12% compared to others who don't.
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-Patrick
