At work I have a weird ritual before I go on air, whether that’s radio or TV: I listen to Faithless. Any tune; any album. I’m not fussy. I rely heavily on a diet of Maxi Jazz’s dulcet tones and Sister Bliss’s blazing beats to get me into the interviewing zone, to write scripts at pace. And, when those headphones go on, I’m transported to a different place. But I have felt for a very long time that the thing I don’t do enough of is dance – none of us do.

As my dear friend Emma Zangs says, we retire far too early from the dance floor. Emma is a trained dancer and choreographer so you may expect someone with her background to espouse such a view. But in her compelling TEDx talk, ‘We Are All Dancers’, she makes a flawless argument: we are actually born to dance. Our first moves are in the womb; those instinctive somersaults and high kicks, all performed to the first beat we know: our mother’s heartbeat. Then once we’re on our feet – as I’ve seen in my household with my shoulder-rolling son – we move again with abandon and dance as if no one is watching, new sounds enveloping our being.

But then something happens, most likely in our early teens, and we hang up our dancing shoes, shamed into and fearful of looking bad. Of course, many of us will make a triumphant return to the dance floor in our late teens and early 20s, aided, no doubt, by serious quantities of alcohol. I know I did. And my gosh it was glorious (I think).

But I loathe what shame can do. Or the fear of it. I wrote a book this year trying to debunk period shame and change the narrative around menstruation, from one of quiet doom to one of honesty and, at times, hilarity. That fear of looking stupid has stopped too many of us, myself included, in life, and on the dance floor.

Emma Barnett on politics, daily gripes and finding solace in music