Massage Therapy Reduces Anxiety and Enhances EEG Patterns of Alertness and Math Computations

So many people in the world talk about how beneficial massage can be and that it makes you feel more relaxed. They say that if you receive massage, even just once a month, that it could help you in many different aspects of your life, such as helping depression, lessening anxiety, becoming more relaxed more often, and that it can help you become less stressed in your day to day life. In this research study, the researchers hypothesize that massage would have an effect on anxiety, depression, and alertness. The objective was to show that massage can reduce anxiety, depression, and stress by testing cortisol level and increase alertness by comparing EEG patterns by math computations.

This research study is a quantitative research. Most massage therapy studies are a qualitative research instead of a quantitative. In a qualitative research, the results are based on what people felt and their personal experiences. The people in the study record how or what they felt, and then the researchers compare and analyze pre-massage, post-massage, and with other subjects’ information. Since massage therapists effect how people feel, qualitative is normally the best type of research for the massage therapy field. In a quantitative research, the variables can be measured and analyzed, like people’s cortisol levels and EEG patterns. In this study, there is some qualitative research, because they do ask questions like how stressed you felt and how depressed you felt. You can’t truly compare someone’s stress level with a simple questionnaire sheet. Everyone can tolerate different levels of stress and different types of stress.

The researchers observed and compared anxiety, depression, stress, and alertness. They used 5 different variables to tes...

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... a chair is not going to help too much with their whiplash. Of course, many people don’t know all the benefits of the different types of massage, but that is why we educate our clients and the people around us, or at least the ones who will listen to us.

Massage therapists should constantly read up on new studies and educate their clients with information like this. It really helps massage therapy become a more respectable reputation. Research studies back up and help prove theories of massage. This study shows that even a short session of massage therapy can really have an impact on your moods and lifestyle. So why not try a massage?

Works Cited

Tiffany Field, Gail Robinson, Frank Scafidi, Tom Nawrocki, and Alex Goncalves (1996) Massage Therapy Reduces Anxiety and Enhances EEG Pattern of Alertness and Math Computations, International Journal of Neuroscience