Leaders' Playground
What if work could feel like play? Join Irene Salter PhD for stories, science and strategies that help leaders thrive, not just survive.
Leaders' Playground
4: Instead of Fight, Flight or Freeze... Dance! The Power of Movement.
As I watched the dancers on stage at a fundraiser supporting victims of sexual assault and domestic violence, a profound sense of joy washed over me, contrasting with the gravity of the cause. This was a powerful reminder of dance's impact on our emotional landscape. Trauma makes us freeze (or take flight or brace for a fight). The opposite is dance.
In this episode we celebrate the mind-body connection via movement and music, sharing stories of my own experience with sexual assault and the collective effervescence of dance. Together, we explore how dance is your brain's "pleasure triple play", share a musical brain break, discuss the benefits of letting loose in professional settings, and provide a multitude of ways to inject play into your work life.
Links:
- One Safe Place website: https://www.ospshasta.org/
- National Domestic Violence Hotline: https://www.thehotline.org/ or (800) 799 - SAFE (7233)
- Harvard study showing that music is a human universal: https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/epl/files/mehr_et_al_2019_science.pdf
- Albert Einstein College of Medicine study showing how dance improves cognition in the elderly: https://www.einsteinmed.edu/research-briefs/8930/social-dancing-to-improve-cognition-reduce-alzheimers-risk
- Scientific American article on dance and the brain: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/experts-dance/
- Collective effervescence article: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/arts-and-health/202108/please-don-t-take-my-collective-effervescence-away
- Shake and dance with the Center for Mind Body Medicine: https://cmbm.org/self-care-resources/resource/shaking-and-dancing/
For complete show notes, transcript, and free downloadable resources go to: https://www.irenesalter.com/podcast
Hi, welcome to another episode of the Leader's Playground. This episode is all about one phrase Instead of freeze dance, there's a ton of research on the benefits of movement, especially movement to music or anything rhythmic, whether it's drums, your breath or walking feet. Might not seem obvious how to use dance in order to make work feel more like play. I'm gonna get into that. All that and more. Keep listening. Trigger Warning In this episode, I describe my experience with sexual assault, so it's best to listen while the little ones are not around, and it could also be re-traumatizing for other survivors, so proceed with caution. Hi, thank you for listening to the Leader's Playground, the podcast for leaders who wish their work to feel more like play. Leadership can be lonely, overwhelming and just plain crazy making. We are here to rekindle your spark. I'm Irene Salter, your host, and a PhD neuroscientist and science educator with a passion for helping people thrive, not just survive. Please click that follow button so you don't miss a single episode.
Speaker 1:Recently, I went to a fundraiser for One Safe Place, a local nonprofit that serves victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and sex trafficking Heavy stuff. In the past year, they have served 8,400 adults and 900 children. That this many people in my community and help is just heartbreaking. The fundraiser itself was called Dancing With the Stars. I really didn't know much of anything about it besides the fact that my very own Tessa Borquez was performing. She has been my right-hand woman at Inquiring Minds for half a year. She's been practicing non-stop for weeks. Very least I could do was go to the event and support her. Now, I've never been to Dancing With the Stars before. I've never even watched the TV show. I truly had no idea what to expect and it was so much fun. When the curtain opened, I loved seeing Tessa come on the stage in this gorgeous classic sky blue gown. She had the crowd roaring after an aerial flip sequence known as the tornado, another couple did a Barbie spin-off to that 1997 Aqua song. I'm a Barbie girl in a Barbie world and it utterly had me in stitches. And the winning couple of the night ended with this flamenco number, which was both dramatic, elegant and a total crowd pleaser. It was just a gorgeous evening where we were cheering and laughing. It really felt like collective ever-vesence. Now I want you to contrast that with a very different story. I want to take you back.
Speaker 1:I was a freshman in college and a male friend of mine and I had become study partners and we stayed up late over textbooks and flashcards. One night I was studying in his room and I fell asleep on top of my notes in his bed. I woke up to find him on top of me, my arms pinned and his hand at my shirt. I froze, I couldn't move, I couldn't speak. It was as if my brain took off to a different plane to watch things unfold like in a movie, a really horrible movie. My body's stress response had taken over. It was fight, flight or freeze. And I froze. My study partner's roommate was in the room right in the upper bunk right above me, and yet I couldn't bring my body to yell for help or scream or even whisper. What are you doing? Get off of me. And maybe in some other context I would have, I don't know.
Speaker 1:There have been other times in my life when I have really frozen with a stress response. At the doors of the middle school dance, I literally jammed up the doorway and nobody else could come in. I couldn't bring myself to walk inside. A friend of mine had to literally pull me aside to let other people through and I froze for the first 30 seconds at my first lecture In my mind I stood at least five minutes completely frozen silence, staring awkwardly and dumbly at the students in the audience. And most recently I was on a ropes course, 60 feet in the air and the next rope was three feet too far from my short little Asian arms to reach and I froze again. And it took the cheering of everybody else down below me to get me to move again. All of these memories were flashing through my mind as I watched Tessa dance, when I think about the people that OneSafe Place serves, all of these amazing humans who have gone through so much trauma. It brought to mind that idea instead of freeze, dance. And it was like this neon sign in my mind. It started off with the word freeze and then suddenly that word vanished and was replaced with the word dance. My body knows what it feels like to dance. It is the opposite of being frozen in terror.
Speaker 1:There's a ton of science about how the impact of music and movement affects the body and mind. Music and movement is a human universal. In indigenous cultures there's dance and drum circles. In Asian cultures it has become a form of meditation in yoga, tai chi and qigong All of the ways that we have evolved as a human species have included music and movement as part of them. Human research conducted a survey of every known society that had detailed ethnographic data 315 societies and all Music and movement to music is founded in every single one of them, no exceptions. In our society, somehow, that human universal has been co-opted by self-consciousness. It's self-talk like I'm not a musician or I can't dance, or what will people think? We have outsourced the thing that is, this human universal, this ability to move with music. We've outsourced it to musicians or dancers. All we do is watch. But what if we could reclaim dance and just let our bodies move as they were meant to?
Speaker 1:In the brain, dance has been called a pleasure double play. If you want to see the article, go to the show notes for a fantastic scientific American article about how dance impacts the brain. You see, it activates sensory motor pathways, those pathways that allow us to sense what things are happening from our body and then also move our body in response. It also activates our brain's reward systems. It is quite literally mind body medicine moving our mind in conjunction with our body and having them go together and that feels pleasurable, it feels rewarding, it reduces stress, it increases levels of that feel good hormone, serotonin. You develop new neural connections in brain areas that are involved in things like problem solving, memory, movement and spatial recognition. See, I personally love the feeling of swing, dancing. There's a flow and a freedom to just letting music move you. My brain gets quiet and I feel so much joy with endogenous opioids and cannabinoids, serotonin, dopamine and other really wonderful neurochemicals all flowing through me. And it's not just good for the body. Dance is good for the mind.
Speaker 1:Researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine have been looking at what kinds of activities best prevent dementia in the elderly. They surveyed many different kinds of physical activity. They looked at cycling, golf, swimming, tennis, a whole bunch more. They found that the only one thing that reduced people's risk of dementia was dance. According to the researchers, dancing involves both a mental effort and the social interaction, and that combination, that stimulation of both the mind, the social interaction and the body, helped reduce the risk of dementia. The social aspect is yet another benefit. You might call it a pleasure triple play when you watch others dance.
Speaker 1:There's neurons in your brain that are called mirror neurons. They light up. Your brain, quite literally mirrors theirs and dances along, which is what was happening in my brain when I watched Tessa on the stage as she moved and spun and twirled, and the music was moving her. That's what was happening in my brain too. The ways that my neurons fired were in a matched set to what Tessa was experiencing, and that's part of why watching her made me feel so good. It's why we love to watch dance performances. So when we get out of our chairs it gets even better, and when we get out of our chairs with others, it's even better than that.
Speaker 1:When we move together as one, that's called collective effervescence. That term was coined by Emily Durkheim, who originally proposed that moving as one was the soul of religion, and today sociologists study collective effervescence in many aspects across society. You can see it in thousands of fans singing and dancing together at a music festival or at a concert. You can see it at ceremonies that celebrate birth, graduation, marriage or death. Even exercising along strangers at the gym, like Zumba class or spin class, or even just walking on the treadmill those kinds of things, when you're moving together, stimulates this collective effervescence. I often feel it hiking when I'm walking in nature with my footsteps aligned to the people that are walking with me. Most recently, I was at a dinner party and the song Sweet Caroline came on. You know that Neil Diamond number that my parents loves. Well, everyone started singing together, everyone started waving an arm in time to that refrain Ba ba ba, and it was as simple as that. Suddenly, I had a smile on my face and it was joyful and so pleasurable. The more collective effervescence people feel in their day-to-day lives, the more they can find joy, meaning in life, belonging, wellness and life satisfaction. But how then, do you build music, movement and dance into the workplace? I mean, irene, come on, how does this help me make work feel more like play? Well, here's some examples from myself, my friends and my clients.
Speaker 1:When I was a school principal, I started this tradition of magic music Mondays at school. At the curbside drop-off Monday mornings, I pulled a speaker system out to the curb, I popped on a playlist and then I just let the kids come in while I would sing and dance like an utter goofball. Pretty soon there was a mini dance party at the curb. The kids stuck around instead of running to the playgrounds, and I even had parents doing YMCA moves in the car as they stopped and dropped off the kids.
Speaker 1:One of my VP clients. She instituted Friday lunchtime music sessions In the hallway. She would blast a song out of her office and everyone would just come out into the hallway and just shake it off to Taylor Swift. Another example when you're in a meeting and the mood is getting tense and sour, just call a break. I suggested this to one client. I had her say hey, we're not getting anywhere right now. The tone is all wrong. Could anyone suggest a song that would put us in the right frame of mind? We are the champions, stand by me, shake it off, happy. What song would put us in the right frame of mind? And then she played it and, lo and behold, the entire meeting shifted. I actually now play music as people enter a meeting room for the workshops that I put on. I also put them on during every break and it really does set people's frame of mind in the right place and it's also wonderful how many people are willing to be goofballs and dance with me. There's also an ER doc friend of mine who keeps a guitar in his office. He says it's the one guaranteed way he has to reset his mood between patients, especially on those super intense hard days at the hospital. But really most of all in the workplace.
Speaker 1:What I recommend is that you find an opportunity to shake, move, dance or even just play music. When you're stuck or low on energy. It's what I call a brain break. Your brain gets into a mode of focus and you stop being able to think clearly after a time, literally your neurochemicals exhaust themselves and it takes time for your cells to build up those reserves again so they can release those neurochemicals. The next time, what you can do is just take a brain break, do something completely different with your mind and body, and that will reset your brain. It really is literally like pushing a reset button.
Speaker 1:At the very, very end of this podcast, I offer a short strategy. I lead you through a chance to dance and I might encourage you to try it. Just fun, just for kicks. The next time you're stuck, frustrated and not making progress, when you feel low on energy, just go to the end of this podcast, rewind to that spot. I'll mark it and play it and just see if things shift. So we're reaching kind of the end of the show and just like we also reached the end of Dancing with the Stars show in the theater, all the dancers took a bow, we all clapped, everyone rose and they turned up the music. As we made our way out of the auditorium and I was just bopping along on this high and that phrase ever since that show, kept ringing in my head Instead of freeze dance, instead of freeze dance. It made me deeply appreciate just how beautiful it was that this nonprofit that served victims of sexual assault, that served people like me, found a way to transform trauma into dance.
Speaker 1:And the interesting thing is that I think using dance more regularly has not only increased the amount of play I feel in my work, but also it has reconnected my mind and body. What I mean is that I usually live in my head, overthinking and overanalyzing everything. I am a scientist after all. I think that's part of the reason I froze back in college when I was assaulted, my mind disconnected from my body, but since I've been dancing more, my mind and body are more connected with one another. I've only had one full body panic moment since I went to Dancing with the Stars.
Speaker 1:My husband was driving down I-5 to San Francisco. It was wet and rainy. Suddenly I felt the car lurch as Jason swerve to avoid another car suddenly breaking right ahead of us. I instantly felt my body tense and go rigid. I've been in a car accident before and the car, in just these kinds of conditions, had tumbled end over end over end and one of my friends ended up in the hospital and we all ended up going to the ER. And in that moment, in that moment when I felt my body freeze, that phrase came back into my head. Instead of freeze, dance. And I started to move again, to flow with the motion of the cars that settled into the new lane and I could breathe and I could check on the kids and I could check on Jason and ultimately I put on some music and we continued down the road.
Speaker 1:I will leave you with a quote from the 13th century poet and Islamic scholar Rumi. He said Dance when you're broken open. Dance if you torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you're perfectly free. I didn't actually leave. Remember how I said we were going to do a strategy Dance.
Speaker 1:Here it is. This is your chance to have a moment to dance with nobody watching, to be able to get out of that part of our brains. It's like, oh my gosh, what will they think? And instead, just let the music move you. So are you in a place where you can have two minutes to yourself, with nobody there the bathroom, your bedroom and office, with the door closed? Remember, this is just for you, a chance for your body to play with music and just see how it feels. It's an experiment. You can sit or you can stand, totally doesn't matter and I just want you to sway and spin, jump, bop your head, tap your foot, wave your arms, shake your booty. There is no rules. No fancy dance moves are necessary. Unless you want to, then by all means go ahead.
Speaker 1:The point is to just let the music move your body in whatever way feels right and good. Stand with your feet apart or sit. I want you to also protect any parts of your body that are sensitive or prone to injury A sore knee or bum shoulder and then we'll begin. Just move, experiment with how it feels to play around with different parts of your body. And time to the music. Just let the music move you. Alright, we're halfway through. See if you can move your body in a new way. Play around with a different part of the music, perhaps. Just let the music move you. 10 seconds left. Great job. Now stand still for a second, just feel how you feel. What do you notice? Looking forward to seeing you next time at the Leader's Playground.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for listening to the Leader's Playground. I would love to thank One Safe Place for their heroic work, protecting and providing support to survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence. If you or someone you know is impacted by domestic violence or a victim of assault, immediately report incidents by calling 911 and you can find support and help, like the kind One Safe Place offers, by calling the National Domestic Violence Hotline. That number is 1-800-799-SAFE 1-800-799-SAFE. I would also love to thank my producer, tyler Lockamy, my graphic designer and web developer, robin Canfield, and 100%. I'd love to thank the Win Beneath my Wings, tessa Borquez.
Speaker 1:In the show notes you'll find a link to all of these folks, as well as resources to go deeper into the science of dance. Finally, would you please do me two favors? Do you know a leader or a friend who would love to make their work feel more like play, who would literally like to dance in their work shoes, but don't quite know how? If so, please share this show with them and, secondly, click that follow button on Spotify, Google, apple or wherever you get your podcasts. In our next episode, I'll be teaching you how to manage your energy, not your time, so I don't want you to miss it. Overwhelmed, exhausted leaders, the next one is for you. See you next time.
