Massage therapy provides holistic support for the mind and body. But what are the specific benefits you can expect to derive from massage therapy?
Many folks come in for a massage for either a luxury relaxation experience or help relieve physical pain. While both of these reasons are valid and massage is widely known to provide relaxation and pain relief, what may not be as widely known are the ongoing preventative, regulatory, and mind-body benefits that massage therapy can provide. Similar to other holistic lifestyle factors such as diet, exercise, and quality sleep, receiving healthy safe social touch in the form of massage therapy may play a wider role in overall health maintenance. Below I’ve compiled just a short list of some of the benefits of massage therapy, as we currently understand them through some of the research literature that is available.
Massage supports mental health.
Massage therapy has been shown to decrease stress, anxiety, and depression. Massage therapy can also help improve the quality of sleep, and create dedicated time in your schedule for deep relaxation.
Massage supports the body’s self-regulatory processes.
Mechanical pressure stimulates the release of chemical signalers and nervous system state changes which support overall physical health via the body’s natural self-regulatory processes.
Massage supports a healthy immune system.
By helping to manage physiological stress responses and promoting the body’s natural immunoregulatory processes, massage supports a healthy immune system.
Massage promotes prosocial behavior.
Repeated massage therapy sessions have been shown to increase oxytocin levels, which is a ‘feel-good’ hormone associated with prosocial behavior such as parent-infant bonding.
Massage improves proprioception & interoception.
Proprioception, the ability to know where your body is in space, and interoception, the ability to sense internal body sensation (including emotions) help us to be aware of and respond to our bodies needs and avoid injury. Both can be challenging for some individuals, including neurodivergent populations. Massage can help improve both by offering gentle sensory and kinesthetic feedback in a safe environment.
Massage supports healthy skin.
Massage stimulates the lymphatic system, circulatory system, cell regulation and regeneration processes, and can help reduce the appearance of scar tissue over time. The application of lotion and oil can help the skin maintain moisture.
Massage reduces pain.
Chemical signaler IL-6 increases after massage, which helps regulate inflammation and may result in anti-inflammatory effects similar to NSAIDS. Massage promotes changes in levels of neurotransmitter hormones that influence pain perception including dopamine, endorphins, serotonin, and endogenous cannabinoids.
Massage improves muscle tone.
By promoting circulation, proprioception, nervous system changes, and myokine & cytokine stimulation, massage can help promote optimal balanced muscle tone.
Massage therapy research is really just beginning to understand the mechanisms through which the application of massage impacts the body systems. This dearth of research is one of the reasons my business is named ‘lacuna’. For the sake of embracing nuance, I want to add that I don’t believe we always require research to understand if something is generally safe and beneficial. For example, massage, palpation, and other forms of manual and/or touch therapy have been a form of traditional medicinal practices world-wide for thousands of years and are generally considered safe. However, seeking a more granular understanding of the mechanisms of massage and its effectiveness may allow us to be more precise in the future with both techniques and dosage. In the case of massage therapy, dose refers to how many sessions, and of what duration, are sufficient for various issues that the client would like to address. While the picture of the benefits of massage therapy is certainly becoming clearer, there is still a lacuna in the literature regarding dose. This is one of the reasons it is difficult in our current healthcare system for doctors to recommend massage therapy and therefore to have massage therapy covered by insurance.
There are many tangents I could spin off on here, but I’ll save those for future writing and leave you with a parting thought:
It seems to me that one of the more miraculous and cool parts of being alive, and embodied, is that we are designed to interact with each other and our environment. We are not meant to just interact socially through language, or to simply procure foods and materials to survive. Certainly we are not designed for interactions primarily with and through screens. We are designed to literally feel our environment and each other. Our regulatory systems appear to have evolved to receive sensory input, which is beneficial to our overall health. We are meant to feel the earth underfoot, the wind in our hair, the sunshine on our skin, and the kind caring touch of our fellow humans. This is not simply mechanistic, it is chemical and energetic in the endocrine and nervous systems. How cool is that?
References
Bialosky, J. E., Beneciuk, J. M., Bishop, M. D., Coronado, R. A., Penza, C. W., Simon, C. B., & George, S. Z. (2018). Unraveling the mechanisms of manual therapy: Modeling an approach. Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy, 48(1), 8–18. https://doi.org/10.2519/jospt.2018.7476
Chen, Y., Li, Q., Zhang, Q., Kou, J., Zhang, Y., Cui, H., Wernicke, J., Montag, C., Becker, B., Kendrick, K. M., & Yao, S. (2020). The effects of intranasal oxytocin on neural and behavioral responses to social touch in the form of massage. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 14. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2020.589878
Field, T., Diego, M., Hernandez-Reif, M., Medina, L., Delgado, J., & Hernandez, A. (2012). Yoga and massage therapy reduce prenatal depression and prematurity. Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies, 16(2), 204–209. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbmt.2011.08.002
Levin, J., & Bradshaw, M. (2024). Prevalence and determinants of massage therapy use in the U.S.: Findings from the 2022 national health interview survey. EXPLORE, 20(6), 103015. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2024.05.013
Rapaport, M. H., Schettler, P. J., Larson, E. R., Carroll, D., Sharenko, M., Nettles, J., & Kinkead, B. (2018). Massage therapy for psychiatric disorders. Focus, 16(1), 24–31. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.focus.20170043
Schleip, R. (2003a). Fascial plasticity – a new neurobiological explanation: Part 1. Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies, 7(1), 11–19. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1360-8592(02)00067-0
Schleip, R. (2003b). Fascial plasticity – a new neurobiological explanation part 2. Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies, 7(2), 104–116. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1360-8592(02)00076-1
Severinsen, M. C. K., & Pedersen, B. K. (2020). Corrigendum to: “muscle-organ crosstalk: The emerging roles of myokines.” Endocrine Reviews, 42(1), 97–99. https://doi.org/10.1210/endrev/bnaa024
Stenbäck, V., Lehtonen, I., Mäkelä, K. A., Raza, G. S., Ylinen, V., Valtonen, R., Hamari, T., Walkowiak, J., Tulppo, M., & Herzig, K.-H. (2024). Effect of single session of Swedish massage on circulating levels of interleukin-6 and insulin-like growth factor 1. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 25(17), 9135. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms25179135