How Massage Therapy Helps with Depression, Anxiety and Stress Management

Massage is widely used to evoke feelings of deep relaxation, and did you know those feelings can help manage depression, anxiety, and stress? The CDC in the U.S. recommends "collaborative care, an approach that involves the collaboration of primary care providers, mental health specialists and other providers to improve disease management for adults with major depression on the basis of strong evidence of effectiveness in improving short-term depression outcomes."

Our clinic focuses on offering complementary and alternative medical therapies, of which massage is the fourth most popular for depression and anxiety.

How Massage Therapy Works

While many of us use massage therapy to aid in physical symptom relief and prevention, how often do you leave a session feeling relaxed and restored? That’s because, during a massage, your parasympathetic activity increases, while your cortisol levels decrease, leaving you feeling slightly euphoric. An hour-long massage is capable of lowering cortisol by about 30 percent, allowing your serotonin levels to increase and give your body a natural pain reliever that can fight pain, sadness, anxiety, and fear.

These relaxation-oriented therapies are becoming increasingly popular as an assist to other medical therapies.

Tying the Physical to the Mental

In relieving the physical symptoms of depression through massage, like sluggishness, back pain, joint pain, muscle aches, fatigue and sleeping problems, patients are often better able to handle their mental health and life stressors. In order to decrease physical and emotional stress, massage therapists use different techniques to stimulate blood flow and manipulate the tissues.

Massage therapy decreases the amount of stress in the body by relaxing muscles, flushing out the waste products from the muscles, and increasing the ‘feel-good’ hormones. When all these facets work in tandem, massage therapists are doing their part to relieve you of the symptoms and feelings associated with depression.

Regular massage therapy reduces the severity of chronic moderate anxiety in general, and specifically when anxiety is related to test-taking or problem-solving, work stress or the anticipation of invasive medical procedures. If you’re looking for help in managing your mental health, book with us today.

If you’re interested in booking a chiropractic session, or any other therapy, book an appointment today!