What feel good hormone is boosted by singing?

Happy National Caroling Day!

Go on out there and sing.

Why, you say?

Singing helps maintain the muscles in the back of the throat, which helps maintain the space and shape of the inside of the mouth.

Why is that important?

Cosmetically: It can help your face to not collapse in or get a double chin. It can also help your teeth stay straight and not wreck the braces you had as a kid.

Functionally: You want to maintain a nice big throat opening to avoid your throat closing at night when you sleep, so you don’t get sleep apnea or snore.

The muscles on the inside of the mouth can become lax, and just like any other muscles that don’t get worked they lose their tone and shape.

This is a fun way to work out muscles!

AND check this out from nicenews.com :

“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.”

There you have it:

Singing keeps the shape of your face intact, gives you an endorphin boost, and can combat the national epidemic of loneliness if you happen to sing in a group setting.

WOW!

The video above is my friend Tara’s choir ensemble singing one of the many holiday songs our audience was treated to this last Sunday.

It is a beautiful song and a lovely 5 minute break, even if you just turn it on in the background.

Happy Wednesday!

Here’s to balance, strength, and happiness,

🙂 Laura