A Transformative Rx for Burnout, Grief, and Illness: Dance

In 2012, Tara Rynders’ sister was diagnosed with acute disseminated encephalomyelitis. For Rynders, a registered nurse in Denver, Colorado, the news was devastating.

“She was this beautiful 26-year-old woman, strong and healthy, and within 12 hours, she went into a coma and couldn’t move or speak,” Rynders remembered. She flew to her sister in Reno, Nevada, and moved into her intensive care unit room. The helplessness she felt wasn’t just as a sister, but as a healthcare provider.

“As a nurse, we love to fix things,” Rynders said. “But when my sister was sick, I couldn’t do anything to fix her. The doctors didn’t even know what was going on.”

When Rynders’ sister woke from the coma, she couldn’t speak. The only comfort Rynders could provide was her presence and the ability to put a smile on her sister’s face. So, Rynders did what came naturally…

She danced.

In that tiny hospital room, she blasted her sister’s favorite song — “Party in the U.S.A.” by Miley Cyrus — and danced around the room, doing anything she could to make her sister laugh.

And this patient who could not form words found her voice.

“She’d holler so deeply, it almost sounded like she was crying,” Rynders remembered. “The depths of her grief and the depths of her joy coming out simultaneously. It was really amazing and so healing for both of us.”

Do You Know How Powerful Dancing Really Is?

Rynders is far from the only healthcare professional who’s discovered the healing power of dance. In recent years, doctors and nurses across the country, from Los Angeles, California, to Atlanta, Georgia; from TikTok’s “Dancing Nurse,” Cindy Jones, to Max Chiu, Nebraska’s breakdancing oncologist, have demonstrated that finding new ways to move your body isn’t just good advice for patients but could be exactly what healthcare providers need to stay mentally and physically healthy.

It comes at a time when the field faces a “mental health crisis,” according to a 2023 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Medscape Physician Burnout & Depression Report 2024 found current rates of 49% for burnout and 20% for depression.

And medical professionals are often hesitant about seeking help. Nearly 40% of physicians reported reluctance to seek out mental health treatment over fears of professional repercussions, according to 2024 recommendations by the Mayo Clinic.

The solution? It just might be dancing.

There’s ample evidence. A 2024 study from the University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia, found that dancing offers more psychological and cognitive benefits — helping with everything from depression to motivation to emotional well-being — than any other type of exercise.

Another study, published in February by The BMJ medical journal, compared the mental health benefits of everything from aerobic exercise to cognitive behavioral therapy with antidepressants and found that dance consistently offered the largest reductions in depression.

Structured dance, where you learn specific movements, can offer a huge boost to mental health, according to a 2024 University of Sydney study. But so does unchoreographed dancing, where you’re basically just letting your limbs do their own thing. A 2021 study, published in Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice, found that 95% of dancers who just moved their bodies, regardless of how it looked to the outside world, still had huge benefits with depression, anxiety, and trauma.

How to Turn a Mastectomy Into a Dance Party

Deborah Cohan, 55, an obstetrician at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, San Francisco, California, discovered firsthand the power of dance back in 2013. After finding a lump in her breast during a self-exam, Cohan feared the worst. Days later, her radiologist confirmed she had invasive ductal carcinoma.

“It was a complete shock,” Cohan remembered. “I took care of myself. I ate right. I had no obvious risk factors. I did work the night shift, and there’s actually an increased risk for breast cancer among OB/GYN workers who do night shift work. But still, it took me completely by surprise. My kids were 5 and 8 at the time, and I was terrified that they’d grow up without a mom.”

So, Cohan turned to the only thing that gave her comfort — dance class. Dancing had been an escape for Cohan since she took her first ballet class at 3 years old. So, she skipped work and went to her weekly Soul Motion dance class, where she found herself doing the exact opposite of escaping. She embraced her fears.

“I visualized death as a dance partner,” Cohan said. “I felt a freedom come over my body. It didn’t make sense to me at the time, but it was almost joyful. Not that I was accepting death or anticipating death, but just that I acknowledged its presence. There’s so much pressure among people with cancer to be positive. [But] that’s something that needs to come from within a person, not from outside. Nobody can dictate how someone should be feeling. And as I danced, I was genuinely feeling joy even as I recognized my own fears and didn’t turn away from them. I was experiencing all the emotions at once. It was such a relief to realize this wasn’t all going to be about sadness.”

The experience was so healing for Cohan that she decided to see if she could bring those same feelings into her bilateral mastectomy. When meeting with her surgical team, Cohan made an unorthodox request: Could her pre-op include a dance party?

“I asked the anesthesiologist in the pre-op appointment if I could dance, and he said yes,” she remembered, laughing. “And then I checked with the surgeon, and he said yes. And then I asked the perioperative nurse, and he said yes, ‘but only if you don’t make me dance, too’. So somehow it all came together.”

Cohan decided on the Beyoncé song “Get Me Bodied,” which she says resonated with her because “it’s all about being in your body and being your full self. I was like, that is exactly how I want to show up in the operating room.” The moment the music kicked in and Cohan broke into dance, all of her stress melted away.

“Even though I’d been given permission to dance, I never expected anybody else to join in,” Cohan said. But that’s exactly what they did. A friend took a video, which shows Cohan in a hospital gown and bouffant cap, dancing alongside her surgical and anesthesia teams, all of whom are dressed in scrubs, at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco, California.

“It’s weird to say, especially about a mastectomy,” Cohan said, “but it was one of the most joyful moments of my life.”

The video’s been viewed 8.4 million times and is so inspirational — we dare you to watch it and not want to jump out of your chair to dance — that soon others were following Cohan’s lead.

• Sixteen-year-old Amari Hall danced to celebrate her successful heart transplant.
• Ana-Alecia Ayala, a 32-year-old uterine cancer survivor, danced along to “Juju on That Beat” to make chemotherapy more tolerable.
• Doreta Noris, a patient with breast cancer, chose “Gangnam Style” to serenade her into surgery.

Bringing Dance to Other Medical Pros

Rynders realized the true power of dance years before her sister’s illness, when her mother passed away from cancer. “I’ve always considered myself to be very resilient as a human, but I couldn’t bounce back after my mom died,” she said. “I was nursing full time in the emergency room, and I was sad all the time. And then 1 day I realized, you know what brings me joy? It’s always been dance.”

She went back to school to get her Master of Fine Arts in Dance from the University of Colorado at Boulder, Colorado, which she believes helped her heal. “I was actually able to grieve instead of just pretending I was okay,” she said.

Inspired by these experiences, Rynders founded The Clinic in 2017, a company that provides dance workshops for healthcare professionals struggling with burnout and secondary traumatic stress.

“I see these nurses running down hospital hallways, covered in blood from patients whose lives are literally hanging on a thread,” she said. “They’re dealing with so much stress and grief and hardship. And then to see them with us, playing and laughing — those deep belly laughs that you haven’t done since you were a kid, the deep laughing that comes from deep in your soul. It can be transformational, for them and for you.”

Rynders remembers one especially healing workshop in which the participants pretended to be astronauts in deep space, using zero gravity to inform their movements. After the exercise, a veteran hospital nurse took Rynders aside to thank her, mentioning that she was still dealing with grief for her late son, who’d died from suicide years earlier.

“She had a lot of guilt around it,” Rynders remembered. “And she said to me, ‘When I went to space, I felt closer to him’. It was just this silly little game, but it gave her this lightness that she hadn’t felt in years. She was able to be free and laugh and play and feel close to her son again.”

Good Medicine

Cohan, who today is cancer-free, says her experience made her completely rethink her relationship with patients. She has danced with more than a few of them, though she’s careful never to force it on them. “I never want to project my idea of joy onto others,” she said. “But more than anything, it’s changed my thinking on what it means to take ownership as a patient.”

The one thing Cohan never wanted as a patient, and the thing she never wants for her own patients, is the loss of agency. “When I danced, I didn’t feel like I was just handing over my body and begrudgingly accepting what was about to happen to me,” she said. “I was taking ownership around my decision, and I felt connected, really connected, to my surgical team.”

As a patient, Cohan experienced what she calls the “regimented” atmosphere of medicine. “You’re told where to go, what to do, and you have no control over any of it,” recalls Cohan, who’s now semiretired and runs retreats for women with breast cancer. “But by bringing in dance, it felt really radical that my healthcare team was doing my thing, not the other way around.”

(Re)Learning to Move More Consciously

Healthcare providers need these moments of escape just as much as patients living with disease. The difference is, as Rynders points out, those in the medical field aren’t always as aware of their emotional distress. “I think if you ask a nurse, ‘How can I help you? What do you need?’ They’re usually like, ‘I don’t know. I don’t even know what I need’,” Rynders said. “Even if they did know what they needed, I think it’s hard to ask for it and even harder to receive it.”

At Rynders’ workshops, not everybody is comfortable dancing, of course. So, new participants are always given the option just to witness, to be in the room and watch what happens. “But I also really encourage people to take advantage of this opportunity to do something different and disrupt the way we live on a daily basis,” Rynders said. “Let your brain try something new and be courageous. We’ve only had a few people who sat on the sidelines the whole time.”

It’s not always just about feelings, Cohan adds, but physical relaxation. “Sometimes it’s just about remembering how to move consciously. When I was having surgery, I didn’t just dance to relax myself. I wanted my entire surgical team to be relaxed.”

For Rynders, every time she dances with her patients, or with fellow healthcare workers, she’s reminded of her sister and the comfort she was able to give her when no amount of medicine would make things better.

“We don’t always need to be fixed by things,” she said. “Sometimes we just need to be present with one another and be with each other. And sometimes, the best way to do that is by dancing till the tears roll down your cheeks.”