Introduction
There are several ways in which regular massage therapy can heal the body. Whether you need massage therapy to relax your body, reduce your muscle tension or reduce pain from chronic illness, massage will help boost your body’s overall sense of physical and emotional well-being. Massage can be a significant part of your health plan by:
Improving Sleep
About half of the world population says that insufficient or poor sleep has negatively affected their everyday activities in the past one week. Massage therapy is the perfect remedy for a bad night’s sleep. This is according to the National Institute of Health. Many recent studies found out that having regular massage improved sleep and reduced fatigue in adults, children, and infants as well as the elderly, including patients suffering from cancer, psychiatric disorders and heart diseases among others. Several studies have credited it to massage therapies increasing brain waves, delta waves connected to deep sleep, which explains why it is easier to drift off on the massage table.
Reducing fatigue, stress, anxiety and depression
There are several causes of pain in the human body. Some of these causes are psychological stresses that create tensions in the muscles and joints, zap your energy leaving you fatigued, and may restrict breathing in turn instigating anxiety.
Massage therapy may be tailored to suit your needs, targeting and eliminating pain and tightness to help in getting rid of unsavory side effects. Massage is normally attributed to high levels of serotonin and oxytocin, which results to reduced body stress minimizing possibilities or side effects like anxiety, fatigue and depression.
Massage counteracts all the sitting you do
Many people deal with postural stress. Many a times, stress tends to manifest in your neck and shoulders. Desk workers, beware. The advanced forms of postural stress tend to show up as stress or weakness in your low back and gluteals brought about as a result of long period of sitting.
Fortunately, massage therapy may counteract imbalance caused as a result of prolonged sitting, meaning you are able to keep your desk job- provided you schedule regular massage.
Massage can also boost your immune system
A recent study in women suffering from breast cancer found out that when the levels of cortisol are up, the natural killer cells are down. NK killer cells are the immune system frontline cells. They get rid of viral cells, cancer cells and bacterial cells, you most certainly need them. In a separate research study, for example, women with stage one and stage two breast cancer were given a half-hour massage therapy three times per week for 5 weeks. The result was low hostility and depression levels and increased urinary levels of dopamine, serotonin, lymphocytes and natural killer cells- all of which showed that their immune system was very strong.
Conclusion
There are several techniques that can be used to detoxify the body that include exercise, herbal, tea, reading, yoga, personal hobby enjoyment and ensuring you get sufficient sleep. Yet other massage techniques have been proven to help the body heal naturally. Massage does not just allow your body to release stress physically; it also helps the body work out kinks and knots which in the long run, may lead to medical ailments. It is also a way of mentally detoxifying and releasing psychological stress.