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[forwarded to us by Julie Strain - Dec 2023]

 

Marc Dufresne

If you have caroling on your holiday activities list, you should know that you’ll be doing more than just spreading cheer — you’ll be improving your overall mental and physical health. A growing body of research shows that singing together at any occasion, holiday or not, boosts well-being. One of the reasons for that is endorphins, those happy hormones runners are always going on about.

“Singing is one of the mega-mechanisms we use for bonding,” Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford, told The Guardian. “Singing in the shower gives you a bit of an uplift, but when doing it communally, there’s something about the synchrony of singing that creates this massive endorphin uplift.”

Dunbar set out to prove singing’s bonding power in a 2015 study, in which strangers sang together for an hour and left as, well, not strangers. “It was as if they’d known each other since primary school,” he recalled. “And that doesn’t normally happen if you spend an hour in the company of strangers.”

He noted that the prolonged exhalation and breath work required while singing likely contributes to its health benefits. Going forward, this research could help inform therapies for dementia, Parkinson’s, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, long COVID, and more.