Comfort Is Therapeutic

That’s right, it’s not a “luxury” to luxuriate in comfort.

It’s essential to your health and well-being to sometimes stop the signals telling your central nervous system that you need protection, and reassure your brain it’s safe to relax.

After years of feeding the nervous system a diet of rushing, pushing, and exhaustion, a person might need help reminding the body-mind what it’s like to relax. It’s time to visit someone who creates the conditions that foster relaxation.

When relaxation happens, the all-too-familiar fight-or-flight process (your sympathetic nervous system) ramps down. The soothing process of rest-and-digest (your parasympathetic nervous system) commences.

Massage therapy and bodywork offers the nervous system what it needs. As massage therapist, personal trainer, and corrective exercise specialist Jason Erickson wrote in an article for Massage and Bodywork magazine, “If the brain is a computer, then the skin is a keyboard.”

Your skin, which protects everything on the inside from everything on the outside, is the largest organ of your body. It’s the organ most available to touch, and one of the most accessible way to offer relaxing input to the nervous system.

In future blog posts, we’ll talk about other ways to send relaxing messages to the nervous system and why it’s so important. We’ll also discuss why bodywork should not hurt, but rather should feel delicious to your (and your nervous system).