Top 10 Health Benefits of Massage Therapy for Seniors
If you’ve been keeping up with Judson’s health and wellness articles, you’ll be familiar with this quote from the American Medical Association:
“It has been verified through scientific exploration that more than 80 percent of all diseases are due to stress and strain that originate in the mind and reflect on the body.”
We are experiencing more physical, chemical and emotional stress in our lives than ever before. But the good news is that even if you’re not aware of these stressors on your mind and body, there are numerous ways to mitigate their effects. But first, let’s take a second to define stress to learn how we can get rid of it.
What is Stress?
“Everybody experiences stress,” says Sara Peckham, former long-time director of wellness at Judson and member of Judson’s board of directors. “It’s the body’s natural reaction to a stimulus or stressor that disturbs our physical or mental equilibrium. It’s also commonly known as our ‘fight or flight’ response.”
This response to life or death situations served us well in the evolutionary process, allowing us to adapt and survive in dangerous situations.
Here is your body’s physiological response to this type of stress:
- Increased heart rate and pulse
- Heightened muscle preparedness/tension
- Increased blood pressure
- Rapid breathing
- Digestive system slowdown
- Immune system suppression
- Heightened alertness/lack of sleep
- Increased in cortisol production (stress hormone)
You can see how these reactions can be beneficial in dangerous situations. Our body, in remarkable fashion, responds so that the necessary functions for immediate survival are enhanced. Pretty impressive, really. But once the dangerous situation subsided, our body was meant to return to homeostasis.
The problem we’re finding in today’s culture is that many of us have this “fight or flight” mechanism turned on continually throughout our lives, and in everyday situations that don’t warrant this level of response. Refer once again to the list above, and imagine those reactions being someone’s state of being.
Exposed to this type of stress continually over the course of our lives has a chronic effect and can lead to the sub-par performance and breakdown of various internal organs, all the way down to a cellular level.
Researchers have identified common health problems associated with chronic stress:
- Headaches and Migraines
- Increased Muscle Tension
- Depression
- Anxiety
- Gastrointestinal Problems
- Hypertension
- Arthritis
- Diabetes
As you can see, these are issues that don’t affect only older adults, but the members of every generation.
And while we’ve previously offered a variety of avenues to stress prevention, what do we do if we’ve already experienced the negative effects of stress? How do we undo the damage stress has wreaked on our body?
A great place to start is massage therapy.
How Massage Therapy Benefits Seniors
Beyond the obvious aesthetic benefits like relaxation, therapeutic massage has been shown to decrease stress in the body and lessen the negative effects of anxiety, depression and even digestive disorders.
The Mayo Clinic agrees: “Studies of the benefits of massage demonstrate that it is an effective treatment …