Dance your blues away. That’s the key message of a new study by Anna Duberg, a physical therapist at Örebro University Hospital and a doctoral candidate at Örebro University in Sweden. She studied 112 Swedish girls 13 to 19 years of age. 59 girls were chosen as a group that regularly danced together two days a week and 53 girls were selected as a control group where the girls did not change their living habits.
The study results indicated that the girls in the dance group, despite all the challenges of a teenage girl life, had better self-esteem compared to the control group. The positive effect continued even four to eight months after the dance training ended. Symptoms like depression, stress, fatigue, and headaches were alleviated with regular dancing. 91 percent of the girls in the dance group believed that dance had been a positive influence in their life.