The Joy of Movement

by Kelly McGonigal

  Maybe it is more accurate to think of commitment, not addiction, as the primary function of the reward system. Perhaps it is this capacity that exercise taps into. From this view, our ability to get hooked reflects our tendency to get attached. Physical activity isn’t just another habit-forming drug; instead, it harnesses our capacity to form the kind of bonds that hold together our most important relationships. As we’ve seen, exercise doesn’t impair your reward system the way destructive addictions do. What’s becoming clearer is that physical activity changes your brain in ways that are similar to having a child or falling in love. For example, new mothers and fathers show an increase in gray matter in the reward system during their first few months of caregiving. The more this part of the brain expands, the more the parents describe their babies as beautiful and perfect and themselves as blessed. This neurological change—a boost to the reward system—looks a lot like what happens when people develop an exercise habit. And the ultimate result is not so different from what humans experience when they form close attachments. By harnessing the brain’s capacity to fall in love, regular exercise helps us joyfully commit to a relationship that enriches our lives and augments our happiness.

  Chapter 3

  COLLECTIVE JOY

  At the oldest rowing club in Canada, the masters women’s crew meets after work to train. Their teamwork starts on land, as the women carry an eight-seat racing shell on their shoulders to the Ottawa River on the edge of the Canadian Shield. As they move from the boathouse to the water, the odors of rotting wood, epoxy, and old sports equipment are replaced by fresh air and the fragrance of forest trees.

  The rowers face backward in the water, and as they head upstream, they can’t see where they are going. They depend on the coxswain, who sits at the stern, to steer and call directions. The women also rely on their ability to sense the winds, the boat, the water, and one another. No one except the coxswain speaks. Every rower has her own blade, which they move in and out of the water in unison. With each synchronized stroke, the boat is lifted up by all eight blades and vaulted over the surface of the river. In that moment of gliding, there’s a swooshing sound of water rushing under the boat—a sound so satisfying, the women on the crew call it “rowing cocaine.” To accomplish this move, the rowers must be completely in sync. Any subtle resistance to the rhythm and swing of the stroke interrupts the flow of the racing shell over the water.

  “It’s total attunement,” says Kimberly Sogge, one of the women on the crew of over-fifty athletes. “We’re all feeling each other and the movement of the water, and it becomes not clear who is feeling what, because we’re one living entity. Not just with one another, but also the river.” Sometimes the crew stops on the water in the middle of a training session to look around, breathe, and listen. Sogge savors these moments. “When the light is in such a way that the boundaries between the water and sky have dissolved, and we have been in this rhythm where the boundaries between us as humans have dissolved—that is ultimate bliss. I can’t imagine heaven is some other place.”

  The feeling Sogge describes is not reserved for rowing. It can be experienced anytime and anywhere people gather to move in unison: in marches or parades, at dance classes and nightclubs, while jumping rope on the sidewalk or practicing tai chi in the park, or when swaying and singing at church. In 1912, French sociologist Émile Durkheim coined the term collective effervescence to describe the euphoric self-transcendence individuals feel when they move together in ritual, prayer, or work. Durkheim believed that these activities help individuals feel connected to one another and to something bigger than themselves. We crave this feeling of connection, and synchronized movement is one of the most powerful ways to experience it.

  The joy of collective effervescence helps explain why fitness friendships and sports teams feel like family; why social movements that include physical movement inspire greater solidarity and hope; and why individuals feel empowered when they join others to walk, run, or ride for a cure. As with the runner’s high, our capacity for collective effervescence is rooted in our need to cooperate to survive. The neurochemistry that makes moving in unison euphoric also bonds strangers and builds trust. This is why moving together is one of the ways humans come together. Collective action reminds us what we are part of, and moving in community reminds us where we belong.

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  The Brazilian island of Marajó lies at the mouth of the Amazon River. On that island, in a village called Soure, psychology graduate student Bronwyn Tarr lay awake in a bed-and-breakfast, sweating under a mosquito net in the dark. She was exhausted but too jet-lagged to sleep. Through the thin walls, she heard her research assistant next door zapping mosquitoes. Tarr could also make out the sound of drumbeats somewhere in the distance. Intrigued, she got out of bed, tied a sarong around her waist, and grabbed a flashlight. She followed the sound along dusty roads pocked with potholes. She could smell meat cooking and the scent of mangoes hanging from trees, but no one else seemed to be out. The only creatures she encountered were wandering buffaloes attracted to the ripe fruit.

  After walking a while, she came to a building with the lights on. The windows and doors were flung open and music spilled out. Tarr, who didn’t know how to say anything other than olá in Portuguese, hesitated near the door. A young man spotted her, smiled, and gestured for her to come in. The room was packed with teenagers and adults dancing the carimbó, a folkloric dance of the island. Live musicians played the drums, flute, and guitar, and women danced in pairs, holding their skirts and turning in circles. One woman, seeing Tarr on the sidelines, grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her in. Tarr did her best to follow along, mimicking the woman’s moves. At the end of the song, her partner bowed to thank her. It didn’t matter that Tarr was an outsider or that she didn’t speak the language. She felt like she belonged, and she stayed to dance for hours.

  Tarr could hardly have scripted a more fitting welcome to the village. She and her research assistant had traveled to Marajó Island to study how dance brings people together. She was particularly interested in the sense of unity and self-transcendence people often report when dancing in groups. When I asked Tarr how she would describe the feeling to someone who had never experienced it, she struggled for words. Instead, she made a gesture, turning her palms to the sky and looking up. “It centers from here,” she said, touching her chest over her heart. “It feels expansive, even though it’s internal. The boundary of who you are dissolves.”

  This feeling—what modern researchers refer to as collective joy—is the main reason I love group exercise. I experience it both when I teach and when I take class as a student. But Tarr is right; it’s a tricky thing to explain. The best description I’ve found comes not from a psychologist or a dancer, but from British anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, who spent time in the early twentieth century observing the indigenous people of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, east of India. The islanders engaged in frequent dance rituals, and Radcliffe-Brown was particularly impressed by the rituals’ psychological effects:

  As the dancer loses himself in the dance, as he becomes absorbed in the unified community, he reaches a state of elation in which he finds himself filled with energy or force immensely beyond his ordinary state, and so finds himself able to perform prodigies of exertion. This state of intoxication, as it might almost be called, is accompanied by a pleasant stimulation of the self-regarding sentiment, so that the dancer comes to feel a great increase in his personal force and value. And at the same time, finding himself in complete and ecstatic harmony with all the fellow-members of his community, experiences a great increase in his feelings of amity and attachment towards them.

  Radcliffe-Brown also noted one aspect of the ritual that psychologists like Bronwyn Tarr suspect is the key to producing collective joy: synchrony. The Andamans all performed the same simple dance step at the same time to one beat, generated by a man stomping his foot on
a wooden sounding board. Even when a dancer needed to rest, he would continue to lift and lower one heel at a time to keep the beat.

  While on Marajó Island, Tarr ran an experiment with local high school students to help tease apart the psychological effects of music, dancing with others, and moving in synchrony. The students danced in groups to music. Some of the groups were given steps to perform in unison, while others did not coordinate their moves. Afterward, the students who had danced in unison felt more bonded to their fellow group members than the students who had danced together, but not in synchrony. When Tarr returned to the UK, she repeated this experiment in a series of silent discos, where participants danced to music delivered through headphones. Once again, those who moved in unison felt more strongly connected to the strangers they had danced with. Music and physical exertion can play a role in collective joy, but synchrony is the most crucial component.

  Tarr knew that endorphins, the brain’s natural pain relievers, can produce both euphoria and social bonds among strangers, so she also measured dancers’ ability to tolerate pain. (She did this by strapping a blood pressure cuff on each participant’s upper arm and inflating it until they could no longer stand the discomfort. I was skeptical that this method could generate significant pain, so I ordered a blood pressure cuff online and tried it. I am no longer skeptical.) Once again, it was the dancers who moved in synchrony who showed the strongest increase in pain tolerance. When Tarr gave dancers a 100-milligram dose of naltrexone, a drug that blocks the effects of endorphins, synchronized movement did not increase their ability to withstand pain. This finding confirmed that collective joy is driven in part by endorphins.

  We usually associate an endorphin rush with high-intensity exercise, but Tarr has found that calm synchronized movement, even small gestures done while sitting, will also increase pain tolerance and social closeness among strangers. One place you can experience this is in a flow yoga class, when practitioners synchronize both their movements and their breathing. The breath becomes the beat that drives the flow of poses, and the sound of the group inhaling and exhaling in unison provides a satisfying sensory feedback. Studies show that yoga, like dancing, can create social bonds. In one experiment, strangers who practiced yoga together reported a sense of connection and trust with the other members of the group. Afterward, when that group played an economic game, they cooperated more than groups who had engaged in a less synchronized activity.

  I taught group yoga classes for years, and I remember well the sense of togetherness it can produce. Walking to my regularly scheduled yoga class on September 12, 2001, I wondered if anyone would show up, or if everyone had been so traumatized and disoriented by the previous day’s events that the room would be empty. But students arrived on time and unrolled their mats. Many were quieter than usual. One woman lay down in relaxation pose and didn’t get up until the end of class. I led the group through a familiar flow, the sequence we had practiced every week for months. I used as few words as possible and relied on our collective muscle memory to carry us through. We moved and breathed together, first through sun salutations, then standing poses. As we held each posture, I heard myself say over and over, “Inhale. Exhale.” The synchronized poses and breathing worked their magic, but the flood of endorphins that day served a different role. Not euphoric bliss, but relief. For ninety minutes, we didn’t fall apart, and for ninety minutes, no one was alone. It was another kind of collective joy. A salve. Whatever fear, confusion, or sadness we felt as individuals was held by something bigger, and in that space, we found room to breathe.

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  When psychologist Bronwyn Tarr tried to describe the feeling of collective joy, she emphasized the sense of self and other merging: “The boundary of who you are dissolves.” Kimberly Sogge used the same language to describe the bliss of rowing with her crew on the Ottawa River: “We have been in this rhythm where the boundaries between us as humans have dissolved.” The feeling of boundaries dissolving is one of the most powerful aspects of collective joy. It’s not the idea of being connected; it is a physical sensation of connection. Somehow the brain is tricked into perceiving your body as just one part of a larger whole that it can sense in its entirety.

  To explain how moving in synchrony produces this effect, Tarr likes to demonstrate a psychological trick called the rubber hand illusion. Imagine sitting at a table and resting both of your arms on the tabletop. An experimenter conceals your right arm and replaces it with a rubber arm. When you look down, you see your own left arm and the fake rubber arm where your right arm should be. The experimenter then strokes the rubber arm with a paintbrush, which you can see, while simultaneously stroking your real right arm out of view, which you can feel. Your brain simultaneously receives these two sensations: the feeling of your real arm being touched by the paintbrush and the sight of the paintbrush stroking the rubber arm. When these two streams reach your sensory cortex at the same time, the synchrony of their arrival produces the illusion that the rubber arm is part of you. Even though, intellectually, you know it is fake, you will look at the rubber arm and think, That is a part of me. You won’t just think it. You will sense it. The illusion is so strong that if the experimenter was to pick up a pair of scissors and stab the rubber arm, you would scream and push back from the table.

  This is how synchronized movement works, too, to create the sensation of group unity. As you move, your brain receives feedback from your muscles, joints, and inner ear about what your body is doing. Simultaneously, you see others performing the same movements. When these inputs arrive at once, your brain merges them into one unified perception. The movements you see in others become linked to the movements you feel, and your brain interprets the other bodies as an extension of your own. The more fully the brain integrates these perceptual streams, the more connected you feel to those you are moving with. Neuroscientist and dancer Asaf Bachrach calls this the kinaesthetics of togetherness. This phenomenon may even extend to the objects we move with; one kayaker described to me feeling that her kayak was an extra limb of her body. A sailor who reported a similar sensation with his sailboat concluded that is why people love their boats so much.

  The perception of a collective self also alters your sense of personal space, the area around you that feels like it belongs to you. When a person’s sense of self transfers to some other object (like a rubber hand) or to a bigger group, that individual’s sense of personal space transfers, too. When Bronwyn Tarr says that the essence of collective joy is an expanded sense of self, this is part of what she’s describing. Your understanding of the part of the world that belongs to you expands, too. This feeling can translate into both self-confidence and social ease. You can walk away from a dance party or group exercise class with an expanded sense of belonging and an embodied knowing that you have the right to take up space in the world.

  More than once it has occurred to me how fortunate I am to have become a group exercise instructor when I was only twenty-two years old. Teaching group exercise was the first environment I ever felt so at ease and accepted in. Every day I taught class, I could walk into a room and be greeted by individuals who were genuinely happy to see me. The participants in these classes seemed to like me so much more, in such a reflexive way, than anything I’d ever experienced. They smiled when I ran into them on campus or around town. They gave me rides to the airport and offered to help me move to a new apartment. They told me stories about their lives and let me share in celebrating their milestones. Teaching group exercise, I felt welcomed, over and over and over again. I can’t even begin to explain how extraordinary a gift that was. The sense of belonging carried over into every aspect of my life, undermining my social anxieties and my tendency to isolate myself in times of stress.

  It would be years before I’d learn the neuroscience that explains why my students saw the best in me. When you lead people in movement, a group-level trust is cultivated, but you, the instructor, are th
e one constant beneficiary of any synchrony-based bonding. Every person in the room has the experience of watching and synchronizing with you. The hours my students spent mimicking my movements contributed to a felt sense, in their bodies, that they could trust me. This trust was, in a way, unearned. I had unintentionally exploited a social shortcut. But the trust of my students had a very real impact on me. Scientists who study social relationships have discovered that trust is a self-fulfilling prophecy. People who are viewed as trustworthy act in more generous and dependable ways. This becomes further evidence of their trustworthiness, and people trust them even more.

  At a very formative time in my life, I stumbled into this upward spiral of social trust, based purely on the fact that I led groups moving in unison. I am sure that this shaped who I am today. When someone views you through a positive lens, you tend to rise to those expectations. It’s as if you are being given permission to be your best self. Over the years, I was able to grow into the version of myself that my students perceived: someone who genuinely cares about them and our community, and someone who will happily contribute to the collective good. These traits were already inside me. They are part of what drew me to group exercise. Yet would they have had the same space to develop if I hadn’t stepped into the instructor’s role? Would I have become someone who sees the good in others if I hadn’t first benefited from my students’ positive projections? It’s a remarkable privilege, to be on the receiving end of so much collective joy. I wish that every person could experience it.

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