| Dancing til Dusk, Hing Hay Park (Constance Brinkley photo) |
| What we need to do is convince people that every single body is a dancing body. —Peter Lovatt, dance psychologist and former professional dancer |
Back in 2025, my post — Warning: Dance may be habit forming — announced my intention to create a 5-minute per day dance habit. Now, Melissa Hogenboom reminds us just how beneficial that habit can be in her excellent article The surprising benefits of a five-minute dance break (19-July-2026, BBC).
First, dancing improves fitness. In contrast to other activities, says Julia F Christensen (Max Planck Institute), dancing unites “three really important aspects for our health and wellbeing.” These include aerobic exercise, benefits derived from socializing, and feel-good endorphins from “the joy of expressing yourself creatively to music”.
Second, dance can help our brain. Besides giving our mood a lift, “studies have shown that dance improves both psychological well-being and cognitive health”. Plus, learning a dance routine may allow us to think and remember more clearly. Dance is helpful across the age spectrum, too, from lowering risk of dementia in adults to improving children’s focus (on a math test, no less!). “One small study,” Hogenboom continues, “found that an 18-month dance intervention resulted in improved balance and a bigger hippocampus, a brain area important for memory, learning and spatial navigation”.
Finally, dancing enhances creativity, increasing our problem-solving ability and promoting outside-the-box thinking. Much like the way we can gain insight on an obstacle by doing some unrelated activity, says Christensen, by dancing “you’re activating parts of your brain needed for solving that problem”. In a shocking recent finding, “sitting for more than 30 minutes at a time is linked to an increased risk of cancer and an early death” and so, researchers report, “Those who break up sedentary time with a short burst of physical activity can improve their health.”
That’s it, I’m back on the Dance-5-minutes-a-day bandwagon. Find ways to get your five minutes with events listed just below, and see even more online at the Dance Calendar.
See you on the dance floor —Sean Donovan