Massage & stress

The word “stress” has become a part of our daily vocabulary. As massage therapists, we need to understand the effects of stress on our clients, and how massage helps to alleviate these effects. In this month’s column, we include some vocabulary to describe stress and its potential impact on our health, along with a summary of some key research findings and remaining questions about how massage may help us better cope with stress. In 1915, the Wisconsin physiologist Walter Cannon coined the term “fight or flight,” to describe an animal’s response to an external threat.1 Cannon later developed the concept of homeostasis, or physiological balance which he popularized in his well-known book, The Wisdom of the Body. Human physiology normally functionsto maintain balance among the various body systems. One can think of stress as a process between an individual and the environment in which that person finds environmental demands challenging to his or her actual or perceived capacity to meet them. Such demands potentially threaten the system’s homeostasis. The external sources responsible for those demands—e.g., job pressure, traffic, illness, exams—are termed stressors. The stress response is mediated by the hypothalamuspituitary-adrenal axis, or HPA axis. When a stressor is perceived, the HPA axis is activated. Our sympathetic nervous system (SNS) is what triggers the stress response, while the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) counteracts the stress response and allows the body to come back into balance. The PNS inhibits the adrenal gland and counteracts all the inhibitions and contractions that the SNS initiates.