The Joy of Movement: How Exercise Helps Us Find Happiness, Hope, Connection, and Courage

by Kelly McGonigal

As we are pushed in every aspect of our lives toward technological connectivity as opposed to shared space and direct contact, activities that put us in the physical presence of others may become increasingly rare and especially important. Even people who enjoy bonding over technology need close-to-home connection. I couldn’t help but smile when Peloton enthusiast

HUMAN BEINGS SYNCHRONIZE NATURALLY. Not just our movements, but every aspect of our physiology. When we feel connected to another person, our heartbeats, breathing, and even brain activity fall into step. Groups will often synchronize their movements and breathing even without explicit instructions to do so. People also synchronize with greater accuracy to another person’s slightly irregular beat than to a perfect rhythm generated by a computer. It is as if our biology is tuned to recognize and respond to common humanity. For some people, reducing self-transcendence to a neurological quirk can be deflating. Yet I find myself captivated by the brain’s eagerness to become part of something bigger.

Group exercise has managed to capitalize on many of the conditions that intensify the benefits of synchronized movement. For example, the more you get your heart rate up, the closer you feel to the people you move in unison with. Adding music has the same enhancing effect. Whether by design or accident, many exercise classes also take advantage of the “close clustering” phenomenon. Maintaining less personal space amplifies the social cohesion felt while moving in synchrony, perhaps because physical closeness further blurs the boundary between self and other. When we’re close enough to smell one another, emotions become more contagious. Did you know that happy sweat has a different odor than ordinary sweat, and that when you smell someone else’s happy sweat, it can elevate your mood, too? The scent of joy released through our pores appears to be culturally universal.

The uniformity and simplicity of movement ensured that the dancers experienced “a pleasure of self-surrender.” Modern aerobics adopts the same strategy to produce a similarly ecstatic experience. When group exercise goes wrong, it’s almost always because the movements are so complicated that the synchrony collapses and the individual falls out of step with the group.

Whenever a new group exercise program takes off, it’s often because it added synchrony to a typically unsynchronized physical activity, like boxing (Tae Bo), weight lifting (BodyPump), or cycling (SoulCycle). Remove the trappings of any fitness program at its cultural apex, and you’ll find the same ingredients, the same collective joy. As long as our DNA compels us to connect with others, we will continue to seek out places where we can move and sweat together.

While most people find pleasure in synchronized movement, some people seem especially drawn to move in unison with others. One possible reason has to do with the link between collective joy and cooperation. It turns out that people who have a prosocial orientation to life—that is, they enjoy witnessing other people’s happiness and are motivated to help others who are struggling—synchronize more easily with others. Something in their mindset or biology makes it easier to merge in collective action and lose themselves in the movement. Perhaps this is the final instinct group exercise harnesses: the desire to step outside oneself and to be of some use in the world. That this desire should express itself through synchronized step-touches, squats, and tap-backs may seem strange.

As historian William H. McNeill writes, “Euphoric response to keeping together in time is too deeply implanted in our genes to be exorcized for long. It remains the most powerful way to create and sustain a community that we have at our command.”

neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote, “When listening to music, we listen with our muscles.” One of the greatest pleasures in life is to give in to this impulse: to sing, to dance, to clap and stomp; to celebrate how notes and chords and lyrics reach inside you; and to surrender to their one command, Let yourself be moved.

Many endurance athletes have a similar story of being brought back to life by a well-timed song.

The brain responds to music it enjoys with a powerful adrenaline, dopamine, and endorphin rush, all of which energize effort and alleviate pain. For this reason, musicologists describe music as ergogenic, or work-enhancing. Throughout history and across cultures, music has been used to make labor less difficult and more rewarding. The endorphins released by music not only make tasks easier but can also bond a group that works together.

“It’s not like The Sound of Music,” he told me. “You wait for your brain and body to need it.” When Konesni launches into a work song, “Something changes pretty quick. I don’t feel my muscles in the same way. The pain disappears, like I’ve taken Advil. I start to sweat more because I’m working harder, but I also find I’m working faster.” As the physical discomfort recedes, pleasure takes over. “I start to feel this euphoria and timelessness, and I can’t tell you how many minutes have gone by.”

music can help people transcend their own apparent physical limitations. In one experiment, middle-aged patients with diabetes and high blood pressure listened to upbeat music as they completed a cardiovascular stress test.

Most people get winded by minute six and give up within eight. When accompanied by music, however, patients soldiered on for an average of fifty-one seconds longer.

Many athletes have learned to exploit this benefit. In carefully controlled experiments, adding a soundtrack helps rowers, sprinters, and swimmers shave seconds off their times. Runners can tolerate extreme heat and humidity longer, and triathletes can push themselves farther before reaching exhaustion. Moving to music even leads athletes to consume less oxygen as they exert themselves, as if the song itself supplies some of the energy they need. Findings like this led the authors of a scientific review in the Annals of Sports Medicine and Research to conclude that music is a legal performance-enhancing drug.

In 1998, Ethiopian athlete Haile Gebrselassie managed to convince event organizers to play the pop song “Scatman” over the sound system during the indoor 2,000-meter race. He had practiced to that song and knew it was the perfect track to synchronize his stride to. He ended up breaking the world record.

Karageorghis is looking for a power song—one that resonates so strongly that it alters the athlete’s mood and physiology. He can often tell right away when he’s hit on an effective track. “You immediately observe a rhythm response,” he says. The athlete starts bobbing his head or tapping her toes. There are also the telltale signs of physiological arousal, such as dilated pupils and piloerection, when the hair on your skin stands on end. This is how Karageorghis knows the song is triggering an adrenaline rush.

Power songs tend to share certain qualities that make them stimulating: a strong beat, an energetic feel, and a tempo of around 120 to 140 beats per minute, which seems to be a universally preferred cadence for human movement.

Power songs also have strong “extramusical” associations: the positive emotions, images, and meaning the song triggers in the listener. These associations can be based on the lyrics, the performers, one’s own personal memories, or pop culture—for example, if a song was in the soundtra...

Of all a song’s qualities, lyrics are the most important for pushing us to work harder and for reducing fatigue, pain, and perceived effort. If you look at popular workout playlists, you’ll see song after song with lyrics that emphasize qualities like perseverance and determination. This is one reason Eminem’s “Till I Collapse” remains the most popular workout song of all time. Effective po...

Many athletes respond to music that inspires heroic imagery. One of Karageorghis’s studies found that listening to “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor (the theme song to Rocky III) helped participants work harder and enjoy themselves more during a strength challenge performed to exhaustion. No doubt part of the song’s power lies in its association with a fighter who won’t quit and its lyrics about rising to a challenge. Recordings of brain activity revealed that the song distracted participants from their effort, allowing them to push past the first signs of discomfort that typically make us quit before we reach our actual physical limits.

I can still remember the first time I heard what would become one of my go-to power songs. I was in an indoor cycling class when “Warrior” by Australian pop singer Havana Brown came on.

the song set my brain on fire. It kindled all the right neurons, triggering a primal response that tapped into my very identity; it wasn’t lost on me that the Gaelic meaning of my name, Kelly, is “warrior.”

Karageorghis’s research shows that at moderate levels of intensity, music reduces perceived effort, making the work feel easier and more enjoyable. But at higher intensities, when you’re struggling to continue, it no longer reduces that perceived effort. Instead, it colors your interpretation of what you’re feeling, adding a positive meaning to the physical discomfort.

When you hear Eminem rap about finding your inner strength or Beyoncé tell you that a winner don’t quit on themselves, the sweat, the fatigue, the burning in your lungs—they all become evid...

Music is one way to shape the meaning of what you feel when you work hard.

When you choose songs that inspire you, every burst of effort can also empower the story you want to tell about who you are and who you are becoming.

This truly is one of the greatest thrills of movement: When a piece of music that sounds happy makes us feel happy, so much so that we must move in ways that express happiness—a positive feedback loop that accelerates and amplifies the joyous feelings induced by the song. The similarities between happy music and joyful movement are striking.

Songs that people describe as sounding happy tend to be up-tempo, higher-pitched, relatively loud, in a major key, and with a strong beat. Movements that people describe as looking happy share these qualities. Joyful movements are fast, big, and vertical. Happiness bounces, leaps, and jumps. It is upward-facing and expansive. A joyful body reaches out, looks to the sky, and takes up space.

One movement pattern was more effective than any other at invoking a strong emotion. It was the signature expression of joy: a full-body jumping gesture, arms stretched overhead, chest open, and gaze lifted, as if you had just thrown confetti into the air.

When you watch such a moment, you can’t help but think, This is what joy looks like.

That afternoon, the ability to not just feel joy but show joy and share it with others was music’s most profound gift. Music was the energizing force that allowed us to feel, express, and connect. The piano chords ignited neurons that greased the nervous system and allowed dormant muscle fibers to fire. Physical stuckness softened, then stretched into the embodiment of joy—sometimes in sweeping gestures, face lifting, arms raised to the sky, and sometimes in more subtle movements, the corners of the lips reaching upward.

think the music snapped something in him,” she decides. “For that one moment, he wasn’t afraid.” The power of music to move us can seem like magic.

Music can reach inside you, tap into your most primal self. As a young Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal in 1903, “It stirs some barbaric instinct—lulled asleep in our sober lives—you forget centuries of civilization in a second, and yield to that strange passion which sends you madly whirling round the room.”

When you let yourself be moved by music, you lay down tracks in your nervous system, pathways for joy to traverse when you hear that song again. I know that when I choose to dance today, I am building muscle memories of joy, giving my future self more songs to be moved by.

So much of the language we use to describe courage relies on metaphors of the body. We overcome obstacles, break through barriers, and walk through fire. We carry burdens, reach out for help, and lift one another up. This is how we as humans talk about bravery and resilience.

When we are faced with adversity or doubting our own strength, it can help to feel these actions in our bodies. Sometimes we need to climb an actual hill, pull ourselves up, or work together to shoulder a heavy load to know that these traits are a part of us. The mind instinctively makes sense out of physical actions.

Human beings are also storytellers, and the stories we choose to tell shape how we think about ourselves and the world. One of the most powerful ways that movement can affect us is through its ability to change our most deeply held stories. Whether it’s by plunging into a pool of muddy water, learning how to hold a headstand, or lifting more weight than you ever thought possible, physical accomplishments can change how you think about yourself and what you are capable of. Do not underestimate how significant such a breakthrough can be.

If you shock rats in an unpredictable and unavoidable manner, you can trigger behaviors that look like depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder. The rats become less interested in eating or socializing with other rats. They freeze at any unknown noise or sign of threat.

And having learned that there is nothing they can do to prevent the shocks, they stop trying to improve their situation in other stressful contexts—a phenomenon known as learned helplessness. Throw the rats in a bucket of water and they won’t even try to swim, sinking to the bottom in what psychologists call a defeat response.

But sometimes shocking rats doesn’t make them helpless; instead, it makes them confident, even courageous. The key to reversing the psychological effect of shocks is to give the rats some element of control. Any element of control. For example, in one setup, a rat is placed in a running wheel with an electrode attached to its tail. The experimenter delivers shocks until the rat turns the wheel. The rat can’t prevent new shocks, but it can shorten their duration. Th...

Some researchers believe that what gets learned through controllable shocks is a different relationship to fear. What the rat learns isn’t “Shocks are okay.” It’s not even “Wheels are good.” What the rat lea...

“Any kind of physical practice where you push yourself, when you make it past that, you build a confidence in yourself. If you allow it, it lasts, and you can call on that in the next difficult situation in your life. How much can you push yourself? Where’s the end? You realize, I don’t know that there is.”

Humans are not the only species to help one another. Bottlenose dolphins will swim underneath a sick dolphin and push its head above water to help it breathe. When a Seychelles warbler becomes entangled in a seed cluster, fellow birds pick the sticky seeds out of its wings until it is able to fly free. An ant attacked by termite soldiers, limbs torn off in the struggle, will be carried back to its nest by other ants in its colony. In the wild, such aid is always preceded by a call for help. Sick dolphins emit two short whistles. Stuck warblers trill an alarm call. Injured ants release distress pheromones.

We humans—so used to hiding our weaknesses or minding our own business—sometimes need to practice this call and response: “I’m here, and I need help.” “I’m here, let me help you.”

When such heroic helping occurs in nature, the individual being rescued tends to be one of high value to the group or to the one doing the helping. Whether you are an ant, a bird...

There’s the story we tell on social media, exuberant and boastful—“I ran through electrified wires!” And there’s the story we remember later, with gratitude. When I reached out a hand for help, someone grabbed it.

When you move with grace, your brain perceives the elongation of your limbs and the fluidity of your steps, and realizes, “I am graceful.” When you move with power, your brain encodes the explosive contraction of muscles, senses the speed of the action, and understands, “I am powerful.” When you move in a way that requires strength, your brain senses the resistance in your muscles and the force on your tendons, and concludes, “I am strong.” These sensations offer convincing data about who you are and what you are capable of. My twin sister once told me that her favorite part of a run is “the part when it’s horrible.” When I laughed, she explained, “It’s a primal feeling. I’m doing this thing that is really tough, and I’m still doing it. I’m tough.”

Often we are drawn to physical activities that reveal a new side of ourselves.

once you’ve sensed yourself as powerful, it changes the way you look at an obstacle in your way. Would Johnson have thought of herself as someone who could move a tree without the experience of kettlebell training? I sent her a message asking if she thought there was a connection. “When the tree presented itself, I felt invincible,” she wrote back. It was as if her nervous system took stock of the fallen tree, recalled the euphoric feeling of swinging a forty-four-pound bell, and remembered that she is someone who can take on a giant.

“It’s weird, because I literally carried someone, but it felt instead like a weight was lifted off,” she told me. “All the bad stuff I had assumed would happen, the stuff I thought I couldn’t do, that was gone. There was a sense of relief. And I was just proud.”