Emotional & Mental Energy for Dancers
You've been working on the fundamentals of sleep, nutrition, and movement, but something still feels off. Maybe you are feeling emotionally flat or unable to focus in class. Maybe you are leaving rehearsal more drained than when you arrived, even though nothing was particularly demanding. You might be experiencing emotional and mental energy depletion, and it limits us just as surely as a physical injury does.
Emotional Energy
For our discussion, we are defining emotional energy as the quality of feeling you bring to dancing, learning, and connecting with others. It shapes your expressiveness, your stage presence, and your capacity to take artistic risks. When your emotional energy is depleted, technique can still get you through a class, but you might find that the spark is missing.
When you are emotionally dysregulated, whether anxious, resentful, grieving, or simply stretched too thin, your brain does not function the same way. Your cognitive flexibility diminishes, you're less creative, and you’re not able to make decisions as effectively. Dysregulated emotional states also deplete your cognitive and physical resources and suppress your immune function. (Davidson and Begley, 2012) That experience of "I just couldn't get it today" is often less about the choreography and more about what your nervous system was dealing with before you walked into the dance studio.
The Contagion Problem
Emotions move between people as quickly as the common cold. Emotional contagion describes our mostly automatic and unconscious tendency to synchronize with the emotional states of those around us. (Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson, 1993) You might have experienced emotional contagion when a teacher who is calm and grounded walks into the room, and something in you settles. Or when a troupe member is really anxious before a performance, and you also start to get anxious even if you were previously calm.
Managing your own emotional state is not just self-care; it helps every person you dance with, teach, or create beside. Learning to protect your emotional state from others' emotions is a legitimate and necessary skill, not an act of selfishness.
Where do Dancers Lose Emotional Energy
You cannot address an energy drain that you have not yet named. Here are some of my ideas.
Comparison with other dancers
Perfectionism around technique
Social tension within your dance company or troupe
Teaching dance
Constantly offering yourself up for assessment… from your teacher, classmates, and audiences
What drains YOUR emotional energy the most?
Mental Energy
Mental energy is your capacity to concentrate, think flexibly, and consciously direct your own thoughts. Mental fatigue does not only come from working hard. It also happens when you are distracted, task-switching, and in “cognitive loops”.
What are Cognitive Loops?
A cognitive loop is an unresolved thought that your brain keeps returning to, even when you are trying to focus on something else. Think of it as an “open file” that your brain cannot close until there is some resolution. Your brain keeps returning to the issue because it remains unresolved.
Common examples in a dancer's life might be: "I still don't understand why my teacher was upset after last week's rehearsal," or "I keep making the same mistake, and I cannot figure out why," or "I said something to my troupe member, and things have been tense ever since." None of these is catastrophic on its own, but your brain does not distinguish between large and small unresolved loops. Everything unresolved feels like a threat to our emotional well-being.
Closing loops requires specificity. Writing something down with a concrete next step closes the loop in a way that vague intention does not. "I'll speak with my teacher on Thursday" is a closed loop, while "I should deal with that at some point" is not. Making a decision, even an imperfect one, is another way to close a loop, because indecision is one of the most depleting cognitive states. Learning to distinguish between loops that require action and loops about things you cannot control takes practice.
The Multitasking Trap
What we experience as multitasking is, neurologically speaking, rapid switching between tasks, which degrades our performance on all of them (Ophir, Nass & Wagner, 2009). Deep, sustained attention generates mental energy over time while fragmented attention reliably depletes it. When I get involved in projects I am really enjoying (like writing this book), I can work for hours and still feel energized when I put it down. Try an experiment. Stop multi-tasking for a day or a week and see how you feel. Are you moving through your tasks faster than you expected? Are you less cognitively tired at the end of the day?
Reframing as a Practical Tool
As a therapist, my primary training and practice is using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). If I had to distill CBT down to a sentence, it would be:
Despite what most people believe, events do not directly cause emotions; our emotions come from our thoughts about the events.
Event → Thought → Emotion
Most people experience this chain so quickly that the middle step becomes invisible and the event seems to produce the feeling directly. When you can slow down enough to see the thought, you have power that you didn’t have before… the ability to choose a different interpretation.
Consider a familiar scenario. Another dancer who began training around the same time you did has moved into the advanced-level class, but you have not. Your first thought might be “the teacher likes her more,” which leaves you feeling discouraged and resentful. That thought is one interpretation of the event that may or may not be accurate, but it came into your thoughts automatically, and you accepted it without examination. I had a great CBT therapist (before I was a therapist) who would always say, “Stop making up stories!”
Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to try to interrupt that process:
"How might the opposite of this also be true?"
This statement disrupts catastrophizing almost immediately and helps you acknowledge that your brain was not offering you different interpretations.
"What would I say to a close friend who came to me with this exact situation?"
This will help you activate self-compassion rather than self-criticism.
"Is this a problem or a challenge?"
You might be “rolling your eyes” like I did the first time I heard this. It sounds straight out of a movie about bad personal coaching. However, it is worth serious consideration because research demonstrates that reframing stress as a challenge rather than a threat results in measurably better physiological and performance outcomes (Jamieson, Mendes, and Nock, 2013).
Reframing is not an exercise in pretending things are fine when they are not. It is the practice of choosing the most accurate and useful interpretation available to you, which is very often not the one your brain produces first.
Bringing It Together
Emotional energy drains can come from unmanaged feelings, comparisons, and openness to feedback about your dance. Mental energy drains from cognitive loops, fragmented attention, and the unexamined thoughts we allow to run on autopilot. The strategies here are not complicated, but they do require intention and practice, so choose one that resonates and bring it into your next class.
References
Beck, A. T. (1979). Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders. Meridian.
Davidson, R. J., & Begley, S. (2012). The Emotional Life of Your Brain. Hudson Street Press.
Ellis, A. (1962). Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy. Lyle Stuart.
Hatfield, E., Cacioppo, J. T., & Rapson, R. L. (1993). Emotional Contagion. Cambridge University Press.
Jamieson, J. P., Mendes, W. B., & Nock, M. K. (2013). Improving acute stress responses: The power of reappraisal. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(1), 51–56.
Loehr, J. & Schwartz, T. (2003). The Power of Full Engagement. Free Press.
Ophir, E., Nass, C., & Wagner, A. D. (2009). Cognitive control in media multitaskers. PNAS, 106(37), 15583–15587.