Massage Therapy for Anxiety

If you are one among the 40 million adults with anxiety disorders in the US, life was stressful enough before the changes COVID-19 brought with it. Now, it’s been a year since everything began. That’s a long time to regularly face and deal with the unique challenges it has brought our way.

We have good news!

Massage therapy can help. It’s safe. We work hard to make it available to you in a COVID-safe manner. Research shows that it can work to treat anxiety.

Why does massage therapy work?

Massage therapy works to treat anxiety naturally through the mind-body connection to help relieve your symptoms. Let’s break that down a little bit.

When you are anxious, your body goes into the flight-or-flight response and can get stuck there. As a matter of fact, the fight-or-flight response tends to be overactive for people who regularly experience anxiety. If you, or a loved one, has anxiety you’ll recognize the physical symptoms the fight-or-flight response creates:

• shortness of breath 
• accelerated heart rate
• chest pain
• excessive sweating

Massage helps your body to relax. A massage therapist is trained to help a person to let go of muscle tension. Not only is this done through the massage techniques, but also by creating a relaxing atmosphere. The lights are dim, there is calm and quiet or relaxing music, and occasionally relaxing aromas with aromatherapy. All of these sensory experiences can help the body and mind relax and break that fight-or-flight response where you get stuck. When you are relaxed notice the signs: 

• deep breathing 
• a stable/lower heart rate 
• less muscle tension
• fewer anxious thoughts
• sense of calm
• physiological equilibrium

It can be hard to take that first step towards treatment when you are dealing with anxiety. When you get to a massage therapy session, though, the hard part is over. You can leave all the work to us.