Stress is a sickness. You can’t catch it from a sneeze or a handshake, but it can still make you sick. Too much stress from your job, your relationships or even the evening news can have dire consequences on your health that manifest in physical ways too.

In 2020, for example, researchers at The Ohio State University discovered a link between stress and high blood sugar in people with type 2 diabetes.1 And in 2021, researchers at Emory University found that mental stress “significantly” increased the risk of cardiovascular events—including death, nonfatal heart attacks and heart failure—in patients with stable coronary heart disease. There have even been studies in mice that suggest stress can contribute to the growth and spread of cancer.

Can Massage Help?

Although you can’t stop your body’s reaction to stress, you can manage and mediate it.
Fortunately, there are lots of tools that we can put in the toolbox to help us deal with stress.
Massage therapy is among them because of its positive impact on both body and mind.
Its effect on the body is evident in measures like heart rate variability. When the sympathetic nervous system is active, which it is during stress, heart rate variability is low. When the parasympathetic nervous system is active, which it is during rest and relaxation, heart rate variability is high. Although the sample size was small, a 2020 study by German researchers found that just 10 minutes of massage created “significant increases” in heart rate variability.