If you’re reading this, you likely already know massage isn’t a luxury—it’s a wellness necessity. While the occasional massage is better than nothing, it can’t undo a lifetime of tension and stress. You’ll get exponentially greater benefits from a regular massage. Here are just a few ways:
Stress Management is Easier with Regular Massage
There are few stress-reducers more effective than a massage. Not only does it create a safe space to escape your stress triggers during the massage itself, but it fosters physiological conditions that can help reduce stress and anxiety long after the treatment is over.
And implications of stress for mind and body can be devastating, and it can undo many of your efforts to exercise and eat right. Massage has been shown to reduce levels of the stress hormone cortisol (up to 30% in some studies) by way of shifting the body’s “fight or flight” state into its “rest and digest” counterpart. By calming tension, lowering blood pressure, and de-spiking cortisol, massage mitigates many of the physiological stress conditions that lead to illness.
Regular massage not only curbs the cycle of constantly elevated stress levels, but it can clear the runway for restorative functions (like inflammation healing and sleep) and retrain the body to better manage these cycles moving forward. That means you’ll get more out of all your other wellness practices, too!
Athletes Perform Better with Routine Massage
No matter how fit you are, exercise is hard on your body. Massage helps make it easier. If you subject your body to consistent feats of endurance, biweekly or monthly massage will support its ability to perform and recover and help prevent future injury.
Sports massage in particular helps people with active lifestyles in multiple ways. It can help prepare the body for activity, reduce the risk of injury during it, decrease post-event muscle soreness, all the while improving flexibility and range-of-motion. Through a combination of deep tissue work, stretching, and inflammation-calming techniques, sports massage helps foster the body’s performance conditions, for amateurs and elite athletes alike.
Regular Massage Helps Ward Off “Sitting Disease”
If you sit at a desk all day, your body is already crying out for help. The curved and bent positions of desk work, commuting, and even relaxing on the couch can eventually cause muscles and joints to become “adaptively shortened”—meaning their resting state becomes compressed, keeping the body in a permanently poor posture that becomes increasingly difficult to correct.
Massage lengthens and conditions the tissue and joints that become shortened by a constant seated posture. It can also revitalize circulation that gets cut off as a result of frequent sitting. This in turn can keep your body limber and pain-free – and out of the chiropractor’s office.
So unless you foresee a switch to a perpetually standing state in your immediate future, keeping a regular massage on the calendar can help mitigate your sitting woes in the meantime.
Sleep Better with Massage Supporting Your Circadian Rhythms
Because massage activates the parasympathetic nervous system (the body’s mechanism for resting and healing), it is a powerful natural means for improving sleep. Routine massage will go even further toward resetting an out-of-whack circadian rhythm—a common source of chronic insomnia. Additionally, the autonomic nervous response to massage signals the body to slow production of stress-induced cortisol and, over time, break the cycle of permanently elevated levels. Lower cortisol clears the way for calming, feel-good hormones like serotonin and melatonin, which are essential for lulling the body into a restful state.
Regular massage will gradually work out long-standing tension and retrain your body to recover from life’s many stresses. Zeel makes it easy with our monthly massage membership. With a membership, you’ll get up to 25% off regular rates, rollover massage credits, and many more benefits. It’s the easiest way to make this essential routine part of your routine.
