Enjoy Your Holiday! You probably have plenty to do in the coming weeks. The end-of-year holiday season can be one of the busiest times of the year. Hopefully, much of what you have to do involves sharing time with all the special people in your life, and as the year winds down, you’ll have time to relax and reflect on the truly important things in your life.

When you do find time to catch your breath, be sure to take a moment to consider what improvements you can make in your day-to-day life that add to your health and happiness. It’s funny how easy it is to take for granted the truly important things like your health until you wear yourself out or push yourself to the point of illness.

Whenever you need to recharge, give your health a boost, get away from it all for an hour, or unburden yourself from accumulated stress, remember that your next massage awaits!

Enjoy the rest of this issue; see you soon!

Still doing some holiday shopping? Bring a smile to your special ones
with gift certificates for a relaxing massage!  Call to order ...

What Could Be Better Than a Massage?

Can you think of anything that can match massage for making you feel your best while giving you overall health support? Of course, all your lifestyle choices can make a difference in your health and how you feel, but massage is in a class by itself in helping you maintain your health.

If you do a little research, you’ll find many studies that verify massage can help you in so many ways. From anxiety and arthritis to sports injuries and stress, massage helps your body’s many complex systems to work more efficiently together.

Many health problems can develop from having your body get out of balance. One reason massage is so effective at helping you stay healthier is that it contributes to homeostasis—your body’s efforts to keep all its systems operating in harmony at the optimum levels.

So, keep in mind one reason getting regular massage makes you feel so good is that it’s helping your body to stay in a healthier balance. And when your body is doing better, it follows that your mental outlook is likely to improve.

Remember that regular massage is one of the best ways you can help yourself stay on the road to a healthier and happier life!

Now, Some Good Health News  . . .

Massage therapy has health benefits — In the past, relaxation was cited as the leading motivator for getting a massage, but increasingly Americans are looking to massage therapy for medical reasons and pain relief.

Statistics from a 2006 report ... showed that 1 in 4 adults in this country say they have experienced a daylong bout of pain in the past month, and one in 10 say the pain lasted a full year or more ... Luckily, massage therapy has been shown to give considerable relief from many types of pain, and is well known for relieving stress and promoting relaxation.
— The Olympian, Olympia, Washington, Sept. 2008

Knead for speed: Study shows key role of massage — Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps got a massage twice a day in Beijing. His teammate, Dara Torres, had two massage therapists on stand-by.

And a bunch of sedated rabbits in Ohio recently had massage performed on their legs after bouts of intense exercise.

Phelps, 23, made history by winning eight gold medals. Torres, 41, became the oldest swimmer to compete in an Olympic event and win a silver medal.

As for the rabbits? They might have proved scientifically what athletes and trainers have long believed: Massage really does help with muscle recovery.
— St. Louis Post-Dispatch, St. Louis, Missouri, Sept. 2008

Short-Term Stress Affects Memory

Employers thinking of bringing massage therapy into the workplace should consider this: New research shows that short-term stress can affect learning and memory—and the beneficial effects of massage on stress are already well documented.

Short-term stress lasting as little as a few hours can impair brain-cell communication in areas associated with learning and memory, University of California, Irvine researchers have found. Severe stress lasting weeks or months has already been shown to impair cell communication in the brain’s learning and memory region, but this new study provides the first evidence that short-term stress has the same effect. The study appears in a spring edition of the Journal of Neuroscience.

The researchers identified a novel process by which stress caused these effects. They found that rather than involving the widely known stress hormone cortisol, which circulates throughout the body, acute stress activated selective molecules called corticotropin releasing hormones, which disrupted the process by which the brain collects and stores memories.
— Source: University of California at Irvine

Multitasking Backlash

You may pride yourself on the ability to juggle multiple tasks, said Jon Hamilton in NPR.com. But MIT researchers say your multitasking is a myth. You might think you’re doing two things at once, but in fact you’re just switching attention from one thing to the next very quickly, says Earl Miller, a professor of neuroscience at MIT. Because similar tasks compete for resources from the same part of the brain, one task always wins. “Think about writing an e-mail and talking on the phone at the same time,” says Miller. It’s nearly impossible.

We’ve all been on the phone with someone who suddenly seems disengaged, said Alina Tugend in The New York Times. That’s the “e-mail voice,” says Edward M. Hallowell, author of CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap! But the real problem with multitasking isn’t its rudeness. Multitasking just isn’t very efficient. In fact, researchers say that we’ve grown so accustomed to multitasking that we can lose our ability to concentrate even on a single task. “We need to re-create boundaries,” says Hallowell. Stop typing and try listening. You’ll be surprised by how much you accomplish when you “single-task.”
— The Week  Vol. 8 Iss. 387

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
— Eleanor Roosevelt

The content of this letter is not intended to replace professional medical advice.
If you’re ill, please consult a physician.
© 2008 Massage Marketing.   Used with permission; all rights reserved.