What exactly is going on inside our bodies when we’re stressed? Any amount of stress kicks our sympathetic nervous system into gear and initiates our fight or flight response. The body is flooded with cortisol (the literal stress hormone) and adrenaline; your heart rate increases, your breathing quickens, your blood pressure rises, your muscles tighten. This hard-wired and ancient survival response has saved our species from extinction through the millennia. While, in the past, our sympathetic nervous system responded to actual physical danger and enabled us to fight for or run for our lives, that the same system responds in the exact same way to perceived stress – running late, bickering kids, unhappy bosses, deadlines, finances, loss, anger, depression, anxiety, major life changes, you name it. None of these things will actually kill us, but our bodies don’t know that. To our brains, stress is stress, be it actual danger or perceived danger.

The main difference now vs. eons ago is that today’s stressors don’t stop “chasing” us like predators did long ago. You can’t outrun modern society and all the responsibilities that come with it. Short of renouncing the world and entering a Tibetan monastery, how can we effectively manage our current stressors and mitigate their toxic effects on our bodies? One way to handle our ancient survival response is to look to another ancient practice: massage. 

Massage therapy is older than our recorded history, and, until the pharmaceutical revolution of the 1940s, was the main form of human medicine for thousands of years. Only now do we understand a bit more about why massage has stood the test of time and about what it does to our body’s internal chemistry.

Being stressed out for 20 minutes is not a big deal; being stressed out for 20 years puts a tremendous strain on your body. Chronic stress overworks the organs responsible for producing the chemicals that make up the sympathetic nervous system’s stress response. The effects of these chemicals produce downstream damage to other organs (high blood pressure alone negatively affects not only the heart muscle and the arteries but also your kidneys, your eyes and even your brain). 

Thankfully, modern science has shown time and time again that massage therapy does indeed help reduce not just the feeling of stress but the actual stress chemicals and subsequent reactions in our bodies. Studies have measured the effects on the body pre- and post-massage and found that after a massage, cortisol levels are significantly lower, blood pressure is lower, heart rate is lower, catecholamines (adrenaline, norepinephrine, etc.) are lower. But the measurable effects don’t stop there. Endorphins are higher (these neurotransmitters allow us to feel fewer negative side effects of stress so that the fight or flight response is not triggered as readily), blood circulation is increased, and any swelling is reduced.

The benefits of massage therapy go beyond what can be specifically quantified. Decades of studies have shown massage to improve relaxation, anxiety, depression, general health, immune function, vitality, sleep, focus, mood, pain reduction, alertness, overall energy, flexibility and more. Basically, our ancestors were onto something. Massage therapy works.

You’ll likely feel noticeably more relaxed after a massage, sometimes for days after, but eventually your boss calls. You pick the kids up and they’re whining. Traffic is terrible. You didn’t close that big deal you’ve been working on. You’re looking for the 487th way to cook the same boring chicken. You feel the stress creeping back in; day-to-day life invades your peace and raises your cortisol. How do you continue to tamp down the sympathetic response (responsible for, essentially, mild panic) in favor the the parasympathetic response (responsible for calmness)? You guessed it. Get another massage. 

Massages are your on-demand stress relief solution. Whether you choose to go weekly, monthly or simple as needed, there’s no wrong time to get a massage. No matter what aspects of life are causing you stress, you are just an hour-long massage away from feeling more calm, from being more relaxed and from giving your body a respite from all those overworked stress hormones. Get in the habit of regular massages, and you’ll be well on your way to a more peaceful life (even if you can’t find another way to cook that chicken).