Things Clients Worry About…and Why They Shouldn’t

Things Clients Worry About…and Why They Shouldn’t

It Don’t Mean a Thing!

Things Clients Worry About and Why They Really Shouldn’t

By Cindy Williams

First things first. The last thing a client should be doing during a massage session is worrying. Worry is a stressor that causes the same physical symptoms that massage therapists are attempting to relieve. Clients often worry about, and even become downright embarrassed by, natural physiological processes that don’t make one iota of difference to the massage therapist. If anything, the physiological occurrences show us that your body is responding well to the work being done. If you have found yourself having embarrassing body responses during a massage and have worried about what your massage therapist is thinking, please read on and allow me to put your mind at ease.

OOPS, I TOOTED

Let’s get right to the point … farting, burping, and drooling, which might normally be embarrassing occurrences, are all acceptable and even sometimes expected during a massage therapy session. Here’s why.

The pace of modern life causes people to regularly be in a state of doing. Running errands, taking kids to and from school and activities, making dinner, cleaning house, doing laundry, going to work, meeting friends, taking care of parents, responding to emails and texts—the list goes on and on. Put very simply, the stress of constant action causes the sympathetic side of the nervous system, the side that drives the body in motion, to dominate over the parasympathetic side, the side that places the body at rest. Massage therapy reverses that.

I REALLY HAVE TO PEE!

Another side effect of the body being in parasympathic mode is (To read the rest of this article and view this entire issue, please click here BS Winter 2019)