How to Use Massage to Balance Your Routine
We can often create stress around wellness activities that are intended to relieve stress, simply by not integrating them into our schedule or budgeting for them. Creating a routine around wellness can reenergize our work life and our home life. Here’s how!
As you may know, creating and following a routine can relieve stress and anxiety and even build confidence around the self. Routine has been implemented as a powerful tool both in business, and in wellness. When the routine becomes heavy on either end of the spectrum, the body can burnout. The special sauce is almost always in balance and we look to achieve that with Massage Therapy, beginning with a routine.
How have you scheduled your daily, weekly, monthly routine?
When you are planning your time, how are you consciously balancing your work and your health with leisure, community, and spirituality?
Have you allowed time in your schedule and budgeted for wellness services?
Stress is often developed around a healthcare routine. I notice chaos with scheduling wellness services due to finances, work demands, and family obligations. We have to show up for our responsibilities, but how do we show up for our health when we are the only ones holding us accountable? Complementary care is different than scheduling your flu shot. Involving a complementary care in your routine, like Massage Therapy, requires commitment to notice therapeutic and preventative results. This commitment is not just financial, it is also equally energetic, physical, and emotional. Beginning a healthcare routine on this level can feel unrealistic when the schedule is already a demanding one and the budget is getting tight. Like anything else, know that adding something like this to your life needs to first work for you before it overwhelms you. And don’t forget that when you commit to this type of work, you do not commit alone, your therapist is on this journey with you and committed to your wellness alongside you.
So, here’s how to balance your routine, using Massage:
Set Intention
Begin by setting intention for the wellness practices that you would like to commit to. Your intentions can change and you may have more than one. Maybe you are interested in maintaining balance, improving your posture, preventing muscular injuries from your active (or inactive) lifestyle, soothing your nervous system, grounding yourself, supporting your immune system, or maybe you just want more touch in your life. It’s helpful to be clear about what you would like to achieve from this work when you begin.
Create Space
Allow space in your budget and in your schedule for self-care. If self-care is not a line item on your personal budget sheet, it should be. And if you haven’t yet marked off your free time on your schedule and labeled it as “self-care,” then I encourage you to experiment with you and see how you feel. This looks different for all of us and being realistic about how we practice self-care is an important first step. Taking care of yourself is a unique and personal experience and it is ever changing. If you have determined that Massage Therapy is important to your routine, then it must have the space to truly serve you. Creating this space in the schedule and budget, no matter how big or small, creates value around your health. When you budget for wellness and integrate your health into your lifestyle, you make time for the body that works hard for you and opportunity for your intention to manifest.
Begin With You
After exerting so much of your energy and your time outwardly, it is important to reenergize by returning to your body. Touch is a powerful therapy for bodies that are under pressure, in positions of high stress. Massage Therapy has been proven to be a impactful and gentle way of improving the body’s stress response, which can impact our relationships with others, the way that we treat ourselves, and how we organize our time when we are under pressure or stressed. This means that when we invest our time and money in Massage Therapy, it reflects back into our interactions in business and our relationships. We may increase our performance at work and express a more kind and patient side of ourselves with family because we chose to begin with us.
So, I encourage you to take a deep breath, check in with your body, and allow healing space in your schedule for you. Be clear on your intentions for this medicine and how you would like to see it evolve in your life. After all, it is your body and your routine!
Design your therapeutic massage routine that is unique to your work schedule by beginning with one of our Wellness Packages. Included, are 3 discounted 90 minute-2 hour sessions at Iris Integrative. You may purchase yours by following one of the links below!
Design a Massage Routine that Works for You!
Uniquely designed and timed Massage Therapy sessions are wonderful for high stress individuals and people with active lifestyles.
Our practice together will always return to balance. Balancing the the pull of the tissues on the joints, the stress of the emotions on the tissues, and the pressure of the outside environment on the body. Our longer and routinely scheduled sessions at Iris allow the time necessary for the nervous system to be soothed, and for each muscle group to be addressed with depth.
Integrate this work into your wellness routine as preventative care and/or rehabilitative care!