Dancing Can Improve Your Self-Confidence

Dancing Can Improve Your Self-Confidence

Dancing can improve your self-confidence. It’s a bold statement, but one that I truly believe. Dancing can improve your self-confidence; if you allow it to. Not only that but it can help to improve your self-esteem, your self-belief, your physical fitness, and your mental health, plus a whole heap of other things.

How Dance Supports Your Mental Health

I’m not a medical boffin so don’t worry; I’m not going to get all technical and I’m not going to use lots of jargon. But there is plenty of very valid and very scientific research that supports claims that exercise, and dance specifically, are great for your mental health.

Some benefits in brief:

• Help to reduce feelings of anxiety and depression.

• Instantly boost your mood.

• Enhance your self-confidence.

• Grow your self-awareness.

• Form social bonds.

• Express your feelings and emotions through movement.

There are many other benefits too, but I’m going to focus on just a couple of these and how dance can really support you.

Mood

Dancing is one of the quickest ways to give your mood a super positive boost, pop on your favourite tunes, crank up the volume and dance around your kitchen/living room/garden or anywhere else that you have space. Grab your kids, grab your partner, or just dance on your own. The key is to let yourself feel the music and then just start dancing, don’t worry about what you look like or trying to choreograph a beautiful routine. As you move, your body will start to release hormones including endorphins and they will help to life your mood.

Self-Awareness

The art of dance and the act of moving your body allows you to reconnect with yourself on a physical level. You can focus on how each part of your body moves, how it feels to stretch out, how twisting and turning feels, how jumping and leaping can be exhilarating and how refreshing it can be to move freely and with no purpose other than enjoyment. As you dance and focus on your own body and the actions and movements it creates you can start to reconnect the mental and the physical elements allowing you a deeper connection and understanding of yourself.

Anxiety and Depression

Those magical hormones such as endorphins have a significant role to play in the reduction of anxiety and depression and although there are a number of ways to encourage the body to produce and release more of them dancing is a great facilitator. The combination of music and movement hits the brains receptors in multiple ways and leads to enhanced positive results.

Express Feelings and Emotions

It is so easy to bottle up all of your emotions and feelings and so many of us end up doing exactly that for a variety of different reasons. Maybe we were taught as youngsters to keep our feelings to ourselves, or maybe we have been through some kind of trauma, either as a child or adult, and no struggle to express ourselves. Either way dance is a great way to reconnect and start to express yourself again.

Building YOUR Confidence

This is the big one, the one we started talking about in the first place. So how is it exactly

that dance can help you to build your confidence? It’s a combination of multiple things,

including everything that we have already looked at in this blog.

As you dance and move more you experience the positive effect of the release of

endorphins that helps to lift your mood and lower anxiety and stress. This can mean that by the end of a session of dancing you are feeling happier and lighter in mood which makes you more open to seeing things, including yourself, in a more positive light.

An increase in your own self-awareness and a deeper connection with your physical self

helps you to see that you are capable of much more than you may have previously believed. The act of learning a new style of dance or a new dance routine can leave you with a sense of accomplishment and in turn can make you more likely to try other new things and experiences.

Your success in the world of dance, even just dance in your own living room, can boost your self-esteem and the positive impact of that can last for days. Each time you complete a dance session you are left with a feeling of accomplishment, even if it was hard, or you didn’t manage to learn every single step, there is still the overall feeling of doing something good for yourself, something fun, something that you enjoy. This sense of accomplishment carries you forward on a wave of positivity and ensure that you want to try again.

Over time each new positive experience, each new connection that you make, each new

victory no matter how small, will add up and lead to a change in your confidence levels and your outlook.

Which Type of Dance is best?

There are so many different kinds of dance from ballet, to hip hop, to ballroom, to jazz, to tap, to modern and so many others. You can dance fast or slow, choreographed or freestyle, alone, or with a partner, or in a group. No single form of dance is better than another when it comes to supporting your mental health and boosting your confidence, it merely depends on what you enjoy the most.

So, what is holding you back? Crank that music up and get dancing and whilst you’re at it

why not check out our upcoming workshops and see if there is one that piques your

interest.