There is much talk in the news about the mind-body connection, specifically about how our emotions impact our physical health. This mind-body connection can be detrimental when long term stress leads to negative physical symptoms such as heart disease. But the mind-body connection can also be a positive thing \u2013 like when a cancer patient is able to reduce pain significantly through meditation.<\/p>\n
Emotional stress causes physiological responses in the body via the nervous and hormonal systems, kicking off a cascade of reactions that can eventually lead to \u201cdisease\u201d ranging from mild digestive problems to cancer. As massage therapists, it is important to understand that clients undergoing long term, chronic stress or who are going through periods of acute, severe stress may be experiencing physiological symptoms as well as emotional upset.<\/p>\n
In order to fully understand the mind-body connection, the communications between our emotional experiences and our physical bodies, we need to have a basic understanding of the nervous system and how the physical body interacts with our emotions.<\/p>\n
The body\u2019s nervous system is comprised of the brain, the spinal cord and nerves that run throughout the body, branching out from the spinal column, between the vertebrae. Let\u2019s take a minute to review the divisions of the nervous system and how they work together.<\/p>\n
When the person becomes aware of some threat \u2013 real life and death or perceived social threat \u2013 the sympathetic nervous system kicks in, heart rate and breathing increase, adrenaline floods the bloodstream and the body prepares to run for its life. This can impact the emotional state, and the emotional state, in turn, can impact the nervous system. When the emotional status of the person is the stimulus for the fight or flight response, it creates a feedback loop that can result in long term elevated heart rate, elevated breathing rate and exhaustion of the adrenal glands as the body is flooded long term with adrenaline. Not only that, but as the body is unable to return to the rest and digest stage, it does not repair itself on the cellular level and digestive diseases become common.<\/p>\n
Understanding the body\u2019s systems and how the physical body can \u2013 and is \u2013 affected by sensory input, both emotional and physical, we can see how stress in various forms can impact our physical health.<\/p>\n
Stress can be defined in many ways, and depends on how it is perceived by the individual. Stress to one person may be simply getting through their day: getting the kids off to school with their lunches and homework, getting to work on time themselves, arriving home to meet the school bus on time, and getting dinner ready for the family. Or, stress might be financial \u2013 making enough money to support the family.<\/p>\n
Stress can also be more intense, such as dealing with a horrible boss or the looming threat of layoffs at work. Stress can be elevated even more for those who live in areas of the world with unstable political conditions where war may break out any time, or may have already broken out. Most of us in the U.S. all experienced intense stress, often classified as trauma, around the time of September 11th, when the towers fell. Imagine the stress experienced by refugees fleeing extreme poverty, or seeking political asylum from horrendous conditions.<\/p>\n
Stress can be anything that upsets us, makes us feel uneasy, or makes us nervous and afraid. Just because we are not facing what others consider a traumatic event doesn\u2019t mean that we are not experiencing stress in our own lives. Our bodies do not fully understand the difference between a fight or flight response to war and a fight or flight response to racing to catch a cab! To our physical body, both result in the same response \u2013 a flood of adrenaline \u2013 and when these things go on long term, we begin to pay the price with our physical health.<\/p>\n
Massage can be an excellent tool in reducing the physical reactions to stress because it aids in reducing the physiological responses.<\/p>\n
Massage promotes:<\/p>\n
Ayurvedic Massage Fundamentals<\/a> As massage therapists, it is important that we understand how the emotional and physical bodies react to stress \u2013 both chronic and long term stress and acute, severe stress \u2013 and how stress impacts our clients.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":3129,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.integrativehealthcare.org\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.integrativehealthcare.org\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.integrativehealthcare.org\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.integrativehealthcare.org\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.integrativehealthcare.org\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3128"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.integrativehealthcare.org\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3128\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4987,"href":"https:\/\/www.integrativehealthcare.org\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3128\/revisions\/4987"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.integrativehealthcare.org\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.integrativehealthcare.org\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.integrativehealthcare.org\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.integrativehealthcare.org\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nCardiopulmonary Health and Illness<\/a>
\nChronic Pain Management<\/a>
\nHealth Maintenance – Body & Mind<\/a>
\nIntegrative Massage: Spirit<\/a>
\nPsychology of the Body<\/a>
\nThe Mind\/Body Connection<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"