What does massage actually do?
What does massage actually do?
It’s not so much about literally stretching tissues and breaking up knots as we used to think. Science shows that deep, predicable pressure activates your parasympathetic nervous system, Oxytocin is produced, the ‘connection or cuddle’ hormone. Heart rate can lower when safety is established, sleep can improve, and healing can happen. When you feel safe you can stop bracing and your brain lets your muscles relax. Production of the stress hormone Cortisol is reduced and Seratonine and Dopamine, responsible for mood regulation, focus and emotional stability, are increased.
If massage is therefore dealing with safety, then the therapist has to be mindful and sensitive with their hands, their words, and their whole presence. Environment is also important. I put mindfulness at the centre of my practise and my continued professional development- finding better ways of practising and teaching mindfulness skills and somatic awareness skills to clients.
From my experience another major benefit of massage is agency. Clients taking their health and well-being and their value of deep safety in their bodies seriously. I offer tools to help with this- breathing, meditation, and Pilates based exercises to help improve mobility, strength and stability, proprioception (your body’s ability to sense it’s own position), spatial awareness and balance. In a massage treatment, I check in with you and gently encourage you to follow my hands and sense what’s going on for you through the treatment.
Sometimes we want that quick fix that deep pressure on one sore point brings for a short while. The theory behind why this feels like relief is that touch receptors reach the brain faster than pain receptors, so they block the pain when activated. The way we instinctively rub a sore knee or press a sore arm. This is all very good within a treatment but so long as it’s held in the wider holistic context and not generating more tension and inflammation to a sore muscle and less safety to you.
