Beyond Massage: Stress and Survival
According to the American Psychological Association, 54 percent of Americans say they are concerned about the levels of stress in their lives, and the same percentage say they are concerned about the effects stress has on their health.
Massage is One Way
Swedish massage is an excellent way to cope with stress. By the nature of what it is – a quiet time during which nurturing touch is administered by a professional massage therapist – it reduces anxiety and promotes calmness. People who receive regular massage sleep better and are able to handle stress more readily.
But massage is external resource, something to seek outside ones self.
Digging Deep is Another
However, there are many survival stories – people who go down with a torpedoed ship, break their leg alone on a mountain in the middle of nowhere, and so on – that indicate humans have an internal resource. In Deep Survival accident journalist Laurence Gonzales writes about the “thought behavior” that allows certain people to pull through some of the most stressful situations possible.
An LMT’s Top Three Thoughts
Gonzales provides twelve steps to surviving stressful situations. Many times, massage clients who are going through stressful situations of any degree are at their lowest when they make it to the table. Massage therapists can provide relief through touch, and though it is out of the scope of practice of a licensed massage therapist, LMT, to counsel, the client can certainly participate in the process of relief. Clients: consider the following three steps.
- Think, Analyze and Plan: Survivors organize. They assess the situation and formulate a plan to handle it. Emotion only plays a role in this set insofar as it might be helpful to the overall plan. (Another of the steps is using your anger). By devoting their energy to problem solving, survivors are able to keep motivated and stay focused on surviving.
- Enjoy the Survival Journey: Approach the stressful situation as you would a challenge or a competitive sport. In other words, make surviving, dealing with your stress, a game, not a chore. A deadline, a divorce, an accident, an illness – whatever it is – it is still part of your life. You might as well enjoy it.
- Do Whatever Necessary: Here is a good analogy for “doing what’s necessary”: Through chemotherapy cancer patients nearly kill themselves to live. They value life enough to risk it. Whether or not you are dealing with stress on that scale, the principle still applies. Do what it takes to get through.
Check out The Twelve Rules of Survival that Gonzales says each survivor uses to get through the most horrible accidents life. Apply them to your stressful situation. Then, book a massage.
