The surprising benefits of a five-minute dance break

From improved concentration to higher creativity, dancing offers a range of brain-boosting benefits. And you don't need to spend hours on the dance floor to feel the effects.

I'm in my office, standing in front of my laptop and moving awkwardly to a summer hits playlist. It's 13:00, and I am at work – but this is not just my latest procrastination technique. I am dancing for the benefit of my brain.

There's endless advice about how much and when to exercise – often it's a serious business. But following specific techniques or worrying about form can take the joy out of exercising, or worse, lead us to put it off. It's too easy to barely move all day.

So when my colleague told me that dancing could have numerous positive effects on my mood and brain, I had to see if I could experience these benefits myself more regularly.

To do so I set myself the challenge of taking a five-minute dance break every day over a week, to see if I noticed any benefits to my mood and productivity.

On day one it felt a little strange to dance alone, in the middle of the day. When I sat back down though, I did feel more energised at a time I otherwise tend to feel a bit lethargic. Surprisingly, I found it such a joyful experience I would happily have carried on for longer. 

What I experienced is backed by evidence. Dance offers a unique combination of physical, cognitive and social benefits that set it apart from other forms of exercise. And doing so, even for as little as five minutes, as I found out, has numerous positive benefits to our health, particularly that of our brains. 

Dancing improves fitness

When we age, we tend to "learn our way out of dance", but we are born to do it, says Peter Lovatt, a dance psychologist and former professional dancer.

One key reason it's so beneficial is the combination of movement and rhythm. We are biologically predisposed to movement and rhythm even in the womb. Recent research found that newborn babies can already anticipate patterns in rhythm. 

"Dancing somehow manages to unite three really important aspects for our health and wellbeing that other activities don't bring all at once," says neuroscientist and former professional ballet dancer Julia Christensen from the Max Planck Institute for empirical aesthetics in Germany.

These benefits, Christensen tells me, are aerobic exercise, social connection and the joy of expressing yourself creatively to music. Dancing can improve your fitness, and if we dance with others, we experience the added health benefits from socialising. When we synchronise our movements with those of others, our bodies release feel-good endorphins and hormones important for bonding.

Dancing is so good for us because it involves so many parts of our body as well as our brain. If you are learning a routine, rather than moving freestyle, you will be learning a complex movement pattern and remembering a choreographed sequence to music. There's even evidence that learning a dance routine can help us to think and remember better.

In my case, I decided to........

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