Thursday, February 12, 2009

Massage can really alleviate Stress

By Amy Nutt

Whoever you are and whatever you do, its likely that at least some stress affects you in your day to day life. You may not be crippled by its effects and it may not consume your thoughts during every waking moment, but if you leave the house for any reason at all during the day its very likely that you experience some form of stress. It may come from getting stuck in a traffic jam, from dealing with unruly customers at work or from tension in personal or workplace relationships, if you are living life at all ; stress is there.

The effects of stress can start out just lasting the duration of the stressful situation that you are in ; a traffic jam causing you to run late for work may make you a bit jittery and on edge, but once you are at work and realize that everything is okay, the feelings will begin to subside. The more exposed you are to stressful situations, the longer your body may react to the stress ; it can manifest into headaches, nausea, depression or any other number of things for hours after you've exited whatever situation was causing you stress. If you are put into stressful situations often enough without the appropriate relief, your body will constantly show and feel the effects of the stress.

Many people today don't know how to properly deal with the stress that they face on a day to day basis ; they let it fester inside until it manifests into headaches, hypertension, high blood pressure, or something worse or they deal with it in some of the unhealthiest ways, like through violent outbursts, binge eating or binge drinking.

Not dealing with stress at all or not dealing with it in an appropriate fashion can lead to more and greater problems. Stress is a serious problem and you cant expect a problem to heal by not addressing it or by trying to treat it through unhealthy consumption.

Get rid of your Stress in a Healthy Manner

One of the best and healthiest ways to deal with and remedy all of your stress and its associated problems is through massage. There are dozens of different massage styles and each can do wonders for melting away the aches and pains associated with stress. Shiatsu, therapeutic, hot stone and acupressure will all help to work out the kinks so commonly associated with high levels of stress ; some people respond better to one type or another and some just favor the techniques used in certain types of massage. The best way to figure out which type of massage will work best for you is to try them out ; you should be able to tell shortly into your appointment how well the massage is working to relieve your stress and tension.

Licensed massage practitioners are highly trained and spend sometimes upwards of two hundreds hours or more training to perfect their craft before the can actually obtain their license. They are required to put in both a predetermined number of hours for book learning in which they study the body and its mechanics, and a predetermined number of contact hours in which they are actually performing massage under the watchful eye of an experienced instructor, in order to truly perfect the craft.

This intense training gives the massage therapist the ability to identify and treat individual problem areas all over the body. You don't even necessarily need to be on a regular schedule of receiving professional massages to yield the benefits, but going once every six weeks or two months can do wonders to your overall health. Whatever knots and kinks may have built up due to the stress you've been experiencing since your last visit will be able to be identified and worked out by a properly trained massage therapist.

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