473. The psychology of clubbing

Hello everybody, I'm Gemma Speck and welcome back to The Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, welcome back to the show, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you for joining me for another episode. I feel embarrassed to say this in the five years of making this podcast, which is literally called the psychology of your twenties. It is centered on the experiences of this decade. I haven't even thought once to make an episode like this. People always like, um, will ask me, you know, how do you keep coming up with topics? And every now and again, just like this one, something slips up or slips into

my mind where I'm like, how have I not done an episode about this today? we are breaking down the research and the psychology of clubbing. This episode was inspired by a festival I went to over the summer and I was bopping away and I was in a crowd of probably like 10,000 people. And I just remember having this experience where everybody is moving like all in sync.

And I thought there has to be a psychological explanation for why we do that, why we move in sync with people, why this feels so good, And why it feels so good beyond whatever substances people were taking, which for me was just a few beers. Like there has to be something going on neurologically here that makes this so enchanting. So I went searching and I found some of the most fascinating research to appear on the podcast.

Turns out dancing, raves, clubs, festivals, all activate a very specific psychological state, a psychological state that is near impossible to achieve on our own. that plus the obvious dopamine, the oxytocin, which is the bonding hormone, which just like further connects us to the people that we're there with, is why clubbing has a magical feeling for some people. However, there does seem to be a certain kind of person who enjoys it more. And I want to dissect what kind of person that is, the important role that clubbing may play in our development as adults. And Oh, I don't want to give anything else away. It's a big episode.

Let me just say that we cover all bases, including people who don't like clubbing and whether they are missing out. So I don't want to spoil anything else. Remember, you can watch this episode on Netflix. If you haven't done so already, go and check it out. I'm wearing a really cool bandana in the Netflix episode. So I want your opinion on it. But without further ado, let's get into the psychology of clubbing. So what is the psychological appeal of this experience? I think before we get into, you know, the nitty gritty of why some people like it more or less than others, let's just start at the beginning, which is what does clubbing do to our brain?

So what you may not know is that clubbing, whatever form it's in, combines four things that our human mind loves more than anything, which is ritual, other people, music, and movement. All of these things have something called a universal property, meaning that every single culture has shown evidence of doing these exact rituals or things. Every single culture, even those that have remained completely isolated from the rest of the world for their entire existence, have danced, have made music, have had rituals, especially rituals involving other people.

Some of the most, like the earliest archaeological findings of things that we find from Human beings 40 to 60,000 years before us are instruments. As much as we need to eat and we need to feel safe, we also seemingly need to sing and we need to dance. It's part of our human DNA. Clubbing is just the latest iteration in this long line of basically collective movement rituals that we perform. And our brain is really receptive to that for a few reasons. Number one, it feels nice.

Number two, it is an outlet for feelings that don't feel nice. And that's before we even get into the social element of it. Our brain is just having a great time. There was a study published in Scientific America from researchers at Columbia, which found that synchronizing music and movement, dancing essentially, constitutes what they call double pleasure. Music stimulates the brain's reward centers, whilst dance activates its sensory and motor circuits. meaning that it has both an input that makes us feel pleasurable and an output that makes us feel pleasurable, which is the dance. Input music, output dance, working in harmony. Music in particular seems to really resonate with our brain. It seems to tickle our brain, have

fun with our brain, as one neuroscientist put it. Music and our brain have such a core relationship that Even in the last stages of dementia, one of the final things to go is being able to remember and respond to our favorite songs. It is part of who we are. However, there is a particular kind of music we encounter when clubbing that seems to be some of our favorite, neurologically speaking. Specifically, the music they play at clubs often has, firstly, a strong beat, and secondly, something we call emotional tension. Any human can understand a beat. Any human, even if they don't know the words to a song, even if they've never heard the instruments, never heard the style, a beat is a universal language that we can keep time with,

that we can understand, that impacts our emotions. Beat-based dancing is the oldest form of dancing. Beat-based music also seems to promote greater brainwave synchronization. So that's where our brainwaves fall and rise in in alignment with what we're listening to. And that has been shown to deepen our enjoyment. That's part one. Club music often has this strong bass beat element.

Part two, music played at clubs also contains a lot of tension. It contains a lot of buildup and it contains a lot of release which feels very emotional in nature. Basically, there is a real sense of anticipation. There's a pattern you can follow. And then as everything drops, You've risen and risen with this music and then you're released with it and you achieve a sense of catharsis. Something interesting is that this is very similar to orchestral music. There's often a real swell. There's a dramatic rise. Same with EDM.

Then there's a peak and then there's a drop. The dopamine released from that, what is essentially emotional feeling, is quite sensational. So our brain is getting two things it really, really loves at once. But like I mentioned, it's also... getting rid of things that we don't love, which is primarily negative feelings and negative stress. There was a massive study published in the psychology of sport and exercise journal in 2025. And it found that dance is not just a leisure activity. It's what they call an embodied nervous system practice, which maybe you've heard this theory of dance before.

Dance is exercise, right? It's that alone. does something to our cardiovascular system, helps us release cortisol, adrenaline. But then you combine all these other elements. You combine self-expression and synchronization and music and other people. And it becomes this avenue to emotional regulation because you can take these really heavy feelings that life gives us and make them tangible through this activation and movement of your body. There's been too many studies. There's too many to count. on the effects of dance therapy on the mind. But one of the best is from 2018. And it was a randomized control trial that was done on 121 women who had breast cancer. And it found that those who danced, those

who moved, maybe not in a club, but somewhere, showed lower cortisol, greater resilience, greater coping. All of which was happening during what was probably one of the most stressful times of their life. Dance is this vessel, it's this outlet Now, obviously, I want to say they're not taking these women to clubs and being like, dance for an hour whilst you're doing chemo, and then we're going to measure your cortisol levels. So we can't say that all clubbing will help with resilience from a life-threatening illness, but we do see some pretty insane results from this. So that's the first dimension of the psychology of clubbing, which is that our brains have an ancient, almost survival drive or desire to express and feel But we seem to

be better able to access that state of enjoyment when we are doing all of this with other people. Going clubbing with your friends, being around a big movement of bodies, you know, getting drunk together before you go out. That's a massive component of this. Dancing, clubbing, signals social belonging.

It's a form of social connection. And it is what we call behaviorally contagious. So behavioral contagion is a term in psychology that basically describes our tendency to unconsciously copy or repeat what other people are doing. So if you've ever seen somebody like bopping their head up and down and you've started doing it as well and you haven't even thought about it, that's behavioral contagion. If you've ever seen somebody like look over their shoulder and then you've suddenly been like, oh, I need to do that as well, that's behavioral contagion. Clubbing and that example I gave of me at that festival and everybody is literally doing the same movement at the same time, that is behavioral contagion.

In a very, very famous 1999 study, the psychologist Gartrand and Bong called this the chameleon effect. Without realizing it, If we are in a group, we begin mimicking the posture, the movement, the facial expressions, the mannerisms of those around us. On the dance floor, that just all gets like heightened.

We're matching somebody's rhythm. We're copying the way that they're moving with their friends. And we are suddenly not just us. We're feeling like we are all connected. That pattern of seeing, internalizing, copying without realizing puts us in sync and puts us into the same kind of wavelength as these people. Research has found that it actually goes both ways. We mimic those we feel connected to, but mimicking somebody can also increase connection, increase affiliation, increase rapport. So when an entire dance floor begins moving together, that synchronization actually reinforces this very rare sensation that For a few hours, you completely belong.

You belong to this group that you're in. If you've ever done the Macarena with people, strange example, but that's what it is. It feels really, really fun. And then it feels like you're almost a little bit high off the excitement of it. In Australia, we have this thing called the Nutbush Dance. If you're Australian, you know what this is. It's taught to us with just as much importance as they teach you how to read. And I think the reason they do it is because they want kids to experience the social harmony of this and the behavioral contagion. So behavioral contagion is one component. The second part, though, of what I mentioned, which is social harmony, is another part.

The buzz, the excitement, the almost religious experience of this has a name. It's called collective effervescence. This is the feeling of like, almost floating, feeling high, feeling completely connected to everyone around you. Collective effervescence is an idea first coined by the French sociologist. His name is Emile Durkheim.

And he basically used this term to describe how people get really swept up in like the collective or in the excitement of like religious ceremonies. There is a specific feeling of joy that he noticed, not just joy, but unity that only comes when people congregate together under a shared experience or belief. And he basically said this is a stimulant. This feeling is a stimulant for our brain.

In one study, these researchers compared the biometric measurements of people watching a musical in a lab by themselves and watching a musical in a crowd. They found that during the performance, people's heart rates went up and down a lot more and often were actually in sync with when they were watching it with other people compared to by themselves. Realistically, there could be a point where everyone's heart rate is almost on the same level. People also feel this way at concerts. It's the collective nature of the experience that appears to increase emotional activation and heighten sensory activation as well, because you're having a reaction and then somebody else right next to you is having that reaction. It validates your

reaction and everything just feels even more exceptional. The mirrored joy of the experience triggers something within us. It triggers something that also has a name, which is known as self-transcendence. Collective effervescence becomes self-transcendence because we are able to step beyond ourselves, beyond our concerns, beyond our worries, and connect with others on this incredibly high plane of human consciousness.

It's the same way that we develop an appreciation for nature, for the universe, for other people, when we are able to step outside of ourselves because we feel so emotionally and physically held and excited and alive, there is very few ways that we can activate that feeling of self-transcendence without going through a pathway like this. There is this amazing article titled Transcending the Self to Transcend Suffering. And it basically claims of all the ways that we try and respond to our own pain and sorrow, the best, the very best is to focus on others, is to be around others, is to connect with them, find a way to feel like you are part of something bigger.

This helps us in three ways. One, it just makes us feel good. And that may wash out the bad feelings, overwhelm the bad feelings. Two, it allows us to contextualize our own suffering. And it allows us to see that others have had similar experiences, therefore lessening our self-pity. And three, it draws us into community. It creates a social network that feels like it puts a blanket on suffering. It puts a blanket on our grief and warms it up.

I definitely didn't think we would talk about the state of suffering when we were talking about clubbing. I didn't think those two things were going to go together or that it would evolve into this and talking about grief. But they are connected. Movement and human feeling are two things that have gone together for centuries. People enter these spaces, they enter clubs to enjoy themselves, and ultimately they want to transcend beyond who they are into something that everybody else is. You know, escapism is probably one of the biggest psychological drivers towards these kinds of scenes. Like, I don't want to feel like myself for a little while.

When you are surrounded by hundreds of moving bodies, moving in synchrony, sometimes like That is the only time you experience the dissolution of the individual self. And through doing that, you can release your attachment to like your own suffering and your own problems and whatever you are going through at the moment. And that sensation is euphoric. When else are we able to really fully not think about the thing we want to think about? It's also one of the only times that people feel like they have permission to be who they are. maybe because of the scene and the community in itself, but also because of the anonymity.

I listened to this podcast episode from the show Search Engine, one of my favorite podcasts, and they have this episode about Bergheim. Bergheim is a very famous Berlin club, infamously hard to get into. And they talk about, the whole episode is like, how are we going to get into Bergheim? It's a very good episode. And in it, the narrator talks about how he goes to clubs by himself. He lives in New York, He will literally go to a club, there'll be like five people and he'll just go to dance and he'll stay there for hours. And he says like, that's the only time, the only thing that's been able to stop me overthinking and overanalyzing. I'm in this dark room and the music is loud and most people aren't

paying attention to me. And sometimes it feels nice to just not be who I really am for a little bit. That is the feeling. That is the feeling that clubbing is trying to capture in a bottle. Let's just say this, not everybody feels that way. There are a lot of people who have the complete opposite effect or who grow out of this stage in their life. I want to talk about these people and I want to talk about whether if you don't club in your 20s, are you missing out? Let's talk about it after this short break.

So why does this exact same environment make some people feel completely alive, completely amazing, and other people want to leave within 20 minutes or actually just like never enter at all? It's not exactly a choice and it's not because some people are cool and some people are lame or like some people are interesting and some people are boring.

It really comes down to what feels exciting and versus fearful for your nervous system. And also essentially the line between an experience feeling freeing and feeling completely claustrophobic. It is a very thin line. Part of the reason some people just like can't stand these environments, can't stand the busyness is that clubbing requires you to surrender a certain amount of yourself, and of your self-control, and of your self-consciousness.

That's the appeal. For others, it's the downside. When you enter a space like this, you're not going to know everyone. You probably aren't going to be able to tell what they think about you. You're not going to be able to have a conversation with everybody. The busyness creates, for these people, an excessive feeling of being watched. For other people, all those people feel like anonymity. For others, it's like, no, everyone, there is a million eyes on me. There's a million judgments.

People who love clubbing, people who hate clubbing could be standing in the exact same crowd experiencing two completely different things psychologically based on their internal perception of the threat of the experience. One person is experiencing that self-transcendence we spoke about where they are able to step outside themselves.

The other is experiencing hyper self-consciousness. What's going through their mind is like, this is so crowded, so busy. Everybody can see me. I cannot disappear enough. Everybody's having a judgment of me. I think we still don't psychologically know what splits people. I think maybe the distinction is between having an overactive and underactive nervous system. Maybe it comes down to how people perceive social threats. I also just think that some people don't like losing control and don't like that de-individualized state we were speaking about. That's just not something that they enjoy. There's obviously another pretty prominent explanation, which is that clubs are just like objectively a lot

for the human nervous system. That is not a natural experience or a natural environment you're ever going to encounter. You have hundreds of people packed into a confined space. It's incredibly loud. There's music, there's flashing lights. There's heat, there's physical contact, there's smells, there's alcohol. For some people that is exhilarating and you can really be absorbed into it.

For others, like that's just complete overstimulation. Again, what allows people to access one state over the other, it's really hard to say because there can be some people who, like some people who can be incredibly overstimulated by like a city or by a normal crowd, but they really, really feel like they find a level above overstimulated when they're clubbing. One account for this is that part of the issue is when you feel overstimulated, the difference between being overstimulated in real life and being overstimulated when you're in a club is that in a club, you don't need to do anything other than just like be there.

But when you feel overstimulated in real life, there's often requirements on you. So that's kind of one explanation. But again, I think it's the accessibility of a flow state and what constitutes a flow state for you. Is it a rave? Is it like partying or is it something a bit more peaceful? What I'm really trying to communicate with all these many, many words is that when someone says they don't like clubbing and they don't like going out, it's not about their character. It doesn't say anything about whether they're fun or social or extroverted or the opposite. It's really coming down to where your brain draws the line between three things. So where your brain draws the line between stimulation and overload, anonymity and overexposure, stimulation and discomfort,

you know, it's not going to create the same psychological experience. It kind of amplifies whichever side of that threshold you're already standing on, whichever side you're already kind of leaning towards. There's one final element of this that we just have to mention, which just which I think kind of splits people on do they like this environment or do they not?

And it's alcohol. Alcohol, substances, clubbing, they go in unison, especially in our, I would say, early 20s. Like binge drinking and drinking a lot is a massive part of this. And alcohol alone creates its own psychological experience and creates its own physical experience. When we drink, especially excessively, that alcohol acts on two specific pathways in the brain. The first is that it boosts GABA, which is an inhibitory neurotransmitter that tells our nervous system to calm down. It also tells our neurons to stop firing so intensely. So this is why drinking might make clubbing more enjoyable because you're able to really sink below the level of all the immediate stimulation. Your brain is able to just like float,

process things slower. The flip side of this though is that when you stop drinking, your brain and your body wants to recalibrate and re-regulate itself and get back on a steady level. For all that GABA, it's going to counteract the effects of that with another neurotransmitter called glutamate. Glutamate is one of the brain's excitatory neurotransmitters, and it's gonna act against the excessive levels of GABA to bring us back down to a middle point. This is the biological basis of anxiety. When you feel really anxious, a night after you've been drinking, it's because your brain has pumped you full of GABA, the alcohol has activated GABA and now glutamate is being applied and perhaps they're not

leveling out as we would want. This can be another reason why, you know, some people love clubbing and they love all the substances that may or may not go along with that and others don't. Their sensitivity to the chemical reactions happening in their body don't actually help them enjoy the physical sensations happening outside of their body. It's like losing control, but you're losing control twice over. You're losing control by drinking and you're losing control by entering this environment. And I think also not wanting to participate in that element of clubbing, like not being able to drink and club might make it less enjoyable. One element being FOMO, there's less of that participation in the social

ritual that happens before going out. But I also think when you drink, you have more fun because you don't see things as clearly. These rose-tinted glasses fall over the entire evening. If you've ever gone out sober, which I do this heaps, I love it. Going out sober, fantastic. But when you do, you do notice things that other people don't. You notice more of the intoxicated behavior. You notice more of the subtext of things. you notice more of the danger sometimes. And something I don't see people talk about is when you go out sober, time doesn't go by as fast as when you go out drunk.

When you're drunk, waiting in the bathroom line, waiting in the line, waiting for a drink, those things don't detract from the experience. When you are dead sober, it's harder to tolerate that. What people say, what researchers do point to is this other final kind of part of clubbing that's fun, which is the liminality. Like when you're drinking and you are in all these bodies and you're in this dark space, time stands still. It feels like you were in this like medium space, like this waiting space of life. And when you're drinking, I don't think you can access that liminal space as much because your senses and because your psychological state isn't as affected. Listen, I'm not saying... clubbing is worthless. Like it's no point doing

it if you're not drunk. I, that would be a hypocrite. I actually would say I prefer it more when I'm sober because there's a bit more of like an anthropological part of it. Like you can see more of people's behavior and it's quite interesting, but drinking substances, clubbing, dancing, there are layers and missing out on one part of, of that experience is, might make it feel like, is this even worth it because everybody else is doing this and I'm missing out. So this whole thing, this can be tricky. If you don't like clubbing, for whatever reason, you don't like losing control, you don't like the overstimulation, you just don't like the ritual of it. I do feel like there is a thought in the back of

your mind, maybe at times of like, am I doing my 20s right by not doing this? I'm going to set the record straight and say there's a ton of worthwhile experiences that you can and will have in this decade that mean a lot more than going out clubbing with your friends but there is such a coming of age narrative around it's like let's let loose and like party hard moments like there is an expectation for them in a certain period of your life I read a really fascinating paper published by this Australian researcher in 2006 and it was titled night clubbing and the search for identity and this researcher essentially says in western societies we don't have any cultural rites of passage other than like

your birthday. And so night clubbing acts as this informal ceremony that basically communicates, look, like I'm an adult now, I have freedom now, I'm doing this adult thing. And so when you're 18 and 19, 21 and other places, like we want to go out all the time because it's this way of performing what we think adulthood is, which is staying out late, drinking, making our own choices.

Clubbing includes a lot of these things that we are expected to start performing or start experiencing in our 20s. Clubbing provides a lot of gateways to what we think the adult experience is, which is self-governance, hedonism maybe, bad choices, temporary relationships. It's like its own microcosm of early adulthood.

So it's rather... symbolic like this symbolic element of clubbing as I said it's anthropological it's sociological I will say when I feel like my youth is kind of slipping away I will often find myself craving a night out and trying to get all my friends to join to prove that we're like not too old or whatever because there's something symbolic about stepping into this scene and like going out or going for a night out and entering these communities like all these people are so young and carefree and cool and if I'm doing that. I must still be these things as well. So back to that core question, are you missing out if you don't participate?

I want to talk about this a little bit more. I feel like this deserves its whole own segment. So stay with us. We'll get to it after this short break. So if clubbing isn't your cup of tea or isn't your thing anymore, how much emotional FOMO or social FOMO should you really be feeling? Like, are you missing out on much? The answer is simply, you only tend to miss out if there feels like there is something contained in the experience. that you cannot get elsewhere. If you feel like there is some kind of scarcity. So for example, if you associate your friends going out together as an important way of forming and strengthening social ties, and because you are not going out with them, you have weaker

social bonds and weaker social ties, you will miss out because you feel like you are and because you feel like there is no way to make up for this. Does that make sense? If you feel like clubbing is the only avenue for a certain kind of uninhibited fun, then you will feel like you are missing out. The question, am I missing out? I think it's framed as this objective one of once you've gone out 10 times, you can say that you've had this experience or you have to do it once, but it is really quite subjective.

What is your perception of the benefits compared to the cost of this activity? For you, that is really like the question you need to ask. Let's be honest, there is something, yeah, there's something very unique and very specifically freeing about these environments and letting yourself become just kind of like part of the mess of bodies and musics and minds. But it would be entirely silly to say that you can't find that feeling elsewhere. For example, and maybe this is an intense question, or far-fetched example, but a lot of our research on the psychology of clubbing and the psychology of dance floors shares a lot of concepts with the psychology of religious congregations and religious experiences. Far-fetched,

but it's true. Take, for example, the idea of collective effervescence or self-transcendence or flow states or the feeling that you are awakened or the feeling of epiphanies that you have on a dance floor. could apply either way, could also apply to a religious experience. And if you're not a religious person, like the same thing could be said for concerts or even protests. Whenever humans join together under some kind of rhythmic beat or song, be it actual music or a chant or a hymn, and they move together and they share experiences together and they share a sensory experience together, an emotional experience together, the positive effects and the feeling is likely going to be the same.

Think about some of the things that clubbing offers us. A, an outlet can be found elsewhere. Two, a release of inhibitions also can be found elsewhere. Three, connection can be found elsewhere, not just in our twenties, but in our entire lives. So if you don't like it, don't do it. Don't feel like you are missing out on something that you can't find anywhere else. You can. And if you love it, go for it. Put like pedal to the metal.

I will also say, For every fantastic night that I've had out, I have had just as many bad ones. You know, everything that makes clubbing psychologically enjoyable also might make it a little bit of a disaster. You know, losing control, having that anonymity, being surrounded by other people, electric, great, fun, freeing, also can be dangerous if you are like really intoxicated or you are like not paying attention. I will say in thinking about this episode, I was really reflecting on some of the situations that I got myself into when I was 18 or 19. And oh my God, I was so oblivious to how much trouble I could have been and how much danger I was in. There were so many times I walked home drunk when I shouldn't have.

And this feels cringe to acknowledge, but I took drinks from strangers and I trusted certain men to buy me drinks. I shouldn't have done that. Those were stupid choices. And those stupid choices never make it into the fond memories. The other thing that doesn't make it into the fond memories, embarrassment.

I did so many embarrassing things. There are things that I would much rather forget and I would much rather other people forget as well. I think especially when I miss my party days and like miss How much fun I would have when I was like 20 and I was in my college town. I think about this a lot because we know the psychology of memory. We know that how you remember an experience is much more dictated by your feelings now than the feelings that you had at the time. So if you're reminiscing on it with the sense of like, that was so fun, you're only going to remember the fun stuff. This actually relates to a really important piece of psychological research. We remember the peak of an experience, not the entire experience. This is

a finding that comes from a 2011 study at George Mason University. If you are asked to recount an experience in your life, so a night out, a date, a year in your life, chances are your opinion is going to be disproportionately shaped by the most intense moment and what happened at the end. Everything in between, you really don't consider. So we either remember the really good stuff, or the really bad stuff. Nothing that might balance either of those extremes out. When we retrospectively look back at our nights out, maybe a few weeks, a few months, a few years down the line, we have an excessively distorted view. And that is either really helpful or really harmful.

It kind of depends on where you stand now. If you only remember the really good stuff and you are perhaps feeling quite nostalgic and you're not really doing that anymore, you're going to feel like this amazing time in your life has passed you by and that's not going to feel great. But if you remember it by all the bad stuff and you're pretty content with where you are now, that might be helpful. What's critical to remember is that we don't retrieve our memories accurately. This is actually a fantastic piece of research for literally every area of your life, for relationships, for old jobs, for old versions of ourselves.

We remember, as this research says, the peak of these experiences. So not the median, not the average. That person you dated, it probably wasn't as good as you now think it was. You are just remembering the very best parts. The old version of yourself as well that you feel embarrassed by, on the flip side, probably not as cringe as you think they were either. Your memory loves extremes, loves extremes.

So this brings me to the final point of the episode. Why does clubbing for some become less fun as we age? And why do some people have the bug for life? Let's explore. I will say the benefits of clubbing actually seem to only improve the older we get, which is actually quite surprising. In our 20s, it brings belonging and it brings maybe social clout. But it brings something else entirely in your 30s and 40s and 60s. I found this very fascinating piece of research from the University of Leeds and it was published last year. And it showed that 91% of women aged 40 to 65 experience major mental well-being benefits from regular clubbing or attending EDM events.

That is an insane result. 91% of these women And 66% of them also described the experience of going out and being on a dance floor as spiritual, their words. So don't for a second think that going out has a deadline attached. Seems to get better the older you get. The health benefits seem to get unlocked more the older you get. But I will say, I think the older, like as we age, clubbing, like it doesn't become less enjoyable.

That's not what they're saying. I think it just becomes less psychologically like important. or relevant. So when you're 18 or 21, a night out is representative of a lot more. That's what the study is saying. Like it's where it's representative of being able to meet people and flirt and experiment, feel like an adult. Those are some of the biggest psychological tasks of your life in your early twenties. But eventually all those needs you're trying to You don't want to like make out with somebody on the dance floor.

You have close friends. You know, you have a really nice routine. You don't need as much novelty. You'd rather be with your dog. And so you no longer need this thing, the clubbing experience to prove that you are free or to prove that you are somebody who does this stuff because you've done it already. And so you can become more like selective. I have some friends who are in their 30s and 40s and God, they love a rave. They absolutely love it. you know, who also loves a rave? My mom. My like 60-year-old mother loves a night out. But as I said, they're picky. When we're younger, we're very desperate. I think because it's so hard to sit at home when you're 19 and all your friends are going out because you're like, the best

night of my life could be happening right now without me. You have that feeling a few dozen times and you do go out and you realize the best night of my life really wasn't happening and you get a bit more clarity you know there are some people for whom every single day or every single time they go clubbing is really really fun but for others like that feeling that need gets filled by hiking and movies and museums and your creative release and your emotional release is no longer this experience so I really want to finish this episode by saying clubbing may seem frivolous or indulgent from the outside, but it is a really important developmental transition or developmental experience for people who want to participate. It

can be very messy. It can be very destructive at times, very destructive for some people, dangerous even, but there is a psychological reason it draws people in. It's just another form of escapism. And for people who treat it like a spiritual ritual or who really enjoy it and get this outlet from it, there is a release from the music, from the dance that is similar to like a therapeutic release or a therapeutic intervention in some respects. When you look at these like everyday things like clubbing or weddings or like anything really, like underneath it all is just human psychology completely laid bare. Like I said, there's a reason people gravitate towards this, especially during this decade, because

it feels emotionally significant to them. And it feels symbolic of like where we are at in our lives. So if you enjoy it, keep going. Like, honestly, I think that there is like no harm in enjoying it for as long as you wish. And if you don't, like, I know I'm kind of hyping it up. I think just because it was like such a big part of how I maybe found myself in like my early twenties.

I maybe didn't explore other avenues of finding myself for some time, but there are definitely others. So take everything I've said with a grain of salt. I hope you just enjoyed the science lesson or the psychology lesson of it all. That's everything I have. We did some turns and roundabouts, but I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you to our researcher, Erin, for her help gathering some of this research for this episode. If you have not yet, you can watch this episode and many others on Netflix.

You can also follow us on Instagram, follow us on Substack. There's so many other ways to learn about the psychology of your 20s and concepts like the psychology of clubbing and more in the description. If you have made it this far, I appreciate you making it all the way to the end. This is a fun experiment. What was the club that you went to the most in your early clubbing partying days? Mine was Mooseheads. And if you know where that is, if you know, you know. And I want to hear what yours are. So leave a comment if you've made it this far and you were listening on Spotify. But until next time, thank you for listening.

Be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself. Enjoy a little boogie on my behalf. We will talk very, very soon.

473. The psychology of clubbing

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