January Joy

Dance for your health – a great way to combat negative emotions and protect your Secret Cell

Dancing is a fun way to exercise the body, brain, and soul. January can be a tough time for many – finding the desire to dance may be difficult. How about if you’ve got a health reason? January is perfect timing for any new health approaches you’re considering for 2026!

Start with this good reason: Your Secret Cells don’t work as well when you’re angry. They are affected by stress and anxiety as well. Sadness is still being explored. Either way – our mental health affects our blood vessel health. Over time, continued negative emotions might add up to long term effects on our cardiovascular system, as proposed by a study published in JAHA (see below). The good news in this study is that the Secret Cell (endothelial cell) can recover.

Figure 3.  The effects of the experiencing negative emotions on endothelial cell health, and the potential pathway to cardiovascular disease onset.

The solid black line between anger and impaired EDV indicates an effect. The dotted lines between anxiety and impaired EDV, and sadness and impaired EDV indicate no evidence supporting this link in the current study. EC indicates endothelial cell; and EDV, endothelium-dependent vasodilation. 

J Am Heart Assoc. 2024;13:e032698. DOI: 10.1161/JAHA.123.032698

So what to do?

Dance! Sure, always good to think about running, hiking, and strength training. Nutrition chock full of antioxidants such as broccoli and berries are great too. However, a fun one is dance. Dancing combines novelty and cognitive challenge (good for the brain), mobility and coordination (good for the body), plus music and social interaction (good for mental health). We could get all technical, but let’s just go for some January joy to enhance our Secret Cell resilience!

Challenge:

· Can you make time to dance just once per week? Suggestion: pick a few favourite songs and just dance however you feel comfortable for a while.

· Can you observe how do you feel? Perhaps relaxed? Perhaps some joy?

In case you want to review 2025 – link below to the Secret Cell NewsBites entries all in one place. 

https://newsletter.60khealth.com

Kathryn