25/10/2025
There’s this sneaky belief floating around that massage for relaxation is somehow less valuable than massage for pain or injury. That if you're not doing sports massage or fixing something, your work is ‘just’ a treat. That’s simply not true.
Massage that helps someone deeply relax is important. In fact, most of the time, when great results happen in a treatment, it’s because the client has been allowed to stop, breathe, and relax into their body. You must know this: Relaxation is not a luxury. It’s a necessity. And if you don’t believe that yet, your clients won’t either. If you’ve internalised the idea that only sports massage or injury work is “proper massage,” you’ll downplay the real value of what you do.
Stress Accumulates Stress is often caused by something happening in life. That could be work pressure, looking after elderly parents, going through a breakup, money worries, health scares, etc. Just because they’ve had a nice massage doesn’t stop life from happening… so these issues don’t magically disappear after one treatment either. Just as one treatment doesn’t (usually) fix a painful shoulder, one relaxing treatment doesn’t fix months (or years) of accumulated stress. And yet so many therapists only feel comfortable suggesting a treatment plan if someone’s in physical pain. It’s perfectly valid to suggest a treatment plan for stress too.
Relaxation is vital for good health Relaxation is a great way to help the nervous system reset. It calms that constant state of fight-or-flight most people live in, and allows the body to shift into parasympathetic mode – the one where proper rest, repair, and healing can happen. But that reset doesn’t happen in one massage. Just like you don’t go to the gym once and expect to build muscle straight away, it takes time!
The Body Needs To Learn To Relax Most people don’t actually know what real relaxation feels like. They’ve been living in a low-level state of stress for so long, their body doesn’t know how to let go. If the nervous system is always on high alert, it takes time and repetition, to teach it something different.
The more they experience that deep state of calm, the easier it becomes to access it. And the longer they can stay there. That means that regular treatments can help the body learn a new pattern. So that when stress happens, it doesn’t automatically tense up and go into panic mode. And if they can start to experience it regularly, change starts to happen. First inside and then externally. They start sleeping better and feeling clearer. They’re less snappy and irritable, they throw off infections quicker etc.