Allowing yourself a few minutes of downtime significantly boosts psychological and physical comfort. Studies by scientists in the University of Konstanz observed higher levels of physiological and psychological relaxation in people after only ten minutes of receiving a massage. Even ten minutes of easy rest increased comfort, albeit to a lesser degree compared to massage.
Stress is known to have adverse consequences for health and disease. However, our bodies have an inbuilt regenerative program, the PNS, to ward off stress during times of threat. Launching a relaxation response is thus key to protecting our health and restoring equilibrium in our body. Massage has been used to improve comfort, however no systematic approach exists to robustly confirm its effect on the PNS and whether or not this may be utilized as rehabilitation for patients suffering from stress-related disease.
Boosting the body’s motor to get relaxation
Massage is an intervention that could boost the body’s main engine for comfort – the PNS – and – also lead to a reduction in perceived mental stress. The discovery that massage is effective on the level of the psychology and physiology through the PNS will pave the way for future research on understanding the role of comfort on anxiety.
“To get a better handle on the negative effects of stress, we need to understand its opposite – relaxation,” says Jens Pruessner, head of the Neuropsychology lab and Professor at the Cluster of Excellence “Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour” at the University of Konstanz. “Relaxation therapies show great promise as a holistic way to treat stress, but more systematic scientific appraisal of these methods is needed.”
Standardized testing strategy
Researchers from the Department of Psychology in Konstanz developed a standardized approach for testing if tactile stimulation could improve physical and mental comfort. They applied two distinct ten-minute massages on human subjects in the lab to test: A head-and-neck massage has been created to actively stimulate the PNS by applying moderate pressure on the vagal nerve, that is the largest nerve running into the PNS. Afterward a neck-and-shoulder massage using soft stroking movements was designed to analyze whether just touch can also be relaxing. Finally, a control group of participants sitting quietly in a table has been tested for the impact of rest without tactile stimulation. The more higher the heart rate variability, the more relaxed is the body. Emotional comfort was gauged by asking participants to explain how relaxed or stressed they’re feeling.
Ten minutes of resting or receiving either massage led to psychological and physiological decrease in stress. All participants reported they felt more relaxed, and less stressed, compared with prior to the treatments. Further, most participants showed significant gains in heart rate variability, which demonstrates the PNS was activated and the entire body physiologically relaxed just by resting alone. It was, however, not important if the massage was moderate or soft – tactile contact generally appeared to enhance the relaxation of the body.
“We are very encouraged by the findings that short periods of dis-engagement are enough to relax not just the mind but also the body,” says Maria Meier, a doctoral student in the lab of Neuropsychology and first author on the study. “You don’t need a professional treatment in order to relax. Having somebody gently stroke your shoulders, or even just resting your head on the table for ten minutes, is an effective way to boost your body’s physiological engine of relaxation.“
By creating a standardized method for robustly testing and validating relaxation treatments, the study allows further experiments to check the effects of additional relaxation interventions which might be utilized in rehabilitation or prevention programs for people experiencing stress-related diseases like depression.
“Massage, being such a commonly used relaxation therapy, was our first study,” says Meier. “Our next step is to test if other short interventions, like breathing exercises and meditation, show similar psychological and physiological relaxation results.”
Related Journal Article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-71173-w