⚡⚡Shifting energy through dance💃🕺

One of my favourite ways to release stress, tension or anxiety in my body is through movement. These types of emotions can come on as a result of our survival response being activated, namely 'flight, flight or freeze' which seems to be more common than not in our current world.

Here we have a build up of excess energy which the body produces to help us run from or fight a threat. The threats we face in our modern day society look much different to the ones we would have faced back in cave times yet still illicit the same survival response in our bodies who are doing their best to keep us safe. Think, being chased by a lion vs. dealing with a colleague making a passive aggressive comment about you in earshot of your boss.

The word emotion can also be taken to mean 'energy in motion'. Generally speaking, in the modern world, the emotions that are pulsing through our body after our survival response has been activated have no were to go. We aren't likely to tackle our coworker to the floor and start a fight (that won't look good on your annual review) in order to diffuse the charge of energy that was released in our bodies. So we sit and we stew and we allow them to build up, getting stored in our body.

Emotions are said to have a lifespan of around 90 seconds if allowed to be released when they occur. Repressing emotions can have a flow on effect on our ability to feel other emotions. We can't simply repress anger and feel bountiful levels of joy, we cap our ability to feel all emotions to their full extent by repressing the ones we don't want to deal with.

This is where movement comes in, if we notice we've got a build up of emotion in our body, one way to release this is through moving our body. Dance is an easily accessible and free way to do this. We can easily match our expression of the emotion through dance and move the excess energy out of the body.

Now I'm not suggesting to break out into dance at your desk, unless you're into that kinda thing, but finding a way to move the excess energy through your body will help regulate your emotions and bring you back into a resourceful state. This could look like going for a brisk walk around the block for example.

Or if you are in a place you feel safe and comfortable to feel into the emotion and express and release it through dance, go for it! Put on some music or do it free flow. You will feel so much better for it.

Here's to a future of dance breaks at work for releasing stress! 🙌