Get In Touch

Whether you enjoy a monthly massage or a daily hug, physical contact can keep you well.

Do you practice yoga, take daily multi-vitamins, work out, take dance lessons and even manage eight hours of sleep at night, but do you hug?

If no, your health routine may be missing an element that’s crucial for keeping stress and sickness at bay. Touch is just as important to our health as diet and exercise. Physical contact helps control levels of hormones that, when left unregulated, can destroy our natural killer cells, the front line of our immune systems and leaves us vulnerable to illness.

Touch suppresses stress hormones by rousing the body’s pressure receptors and thus stimulating the brain’s vagus nerve. Activity in the vagus nerve slows heart rate, lowers blood pressure and leads to improved health overall.

Simply rubbing lotion onto your skin may prompt vague nerve activity, but massage provides one of the most powerful forms of stimulation and can even promote total body rejuventation. It is known that an average of 30 minute of massage can lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol by almost a third. Apart from being a great stress reliever, massage helps boost circulation, cleanse the body of toxins, and ease pain and can also help you recover faster from injury.

Getting a tension melting rubdown massage once a month should help shield you from the fallout of day-to-day stress. When you are not having a massage to knead away your knots, seek ouy the healing touch of those around you. Hugging someone or even just giving a firm handshake can be enough to stimulate your presssure receptors. That kind of everyday touch is critical to keeping healthy. So get a touch daily.