Reflexology for Anxiety and Stress
Anxiety develops when we are first faced with a stressful situation – moving house, a big event, redundancies, bereavement, exams or something as simple as a caffeine overload. These feelings of anxiety are the body’s early warning system. Your body recognises that some form of danger is near, so you are kept alert in order to cope with what your body perceives as a potentially life-threatening event. In healthy individuals, the difficult situation is met, overcome and we move on. For some people, it isn’t so simple and can prevent you from coping with everyday life. Recognising the symptoms early and seeking some help with your own bodies coping mechanism can ensure you face and overcome stressful situations and carrying on with day to day life.
Stress can affect many systems of the body and if the stress becomes long term or chronic then damage may occur. This damage can affect health and well being, which in turn can make life harder in the areas of relationships, work and play.
Reflexology has that track record in anxiety and stress management. A study carried out at the University of Canberra in 2000 indicated that Reflexology was extremely effectiveness in relieving anxiety, nausea and pain in cancer patients. Other studies, carried out in Europe, show reflexology to be very useful in treating stress-related anxiety (and reducing staff sick days by 25% over 3 years), and managing both pain and anxiety during labour and childbirth (and reducing the length of time in all stages of labour in the process).
Reflexology is a great way of relaxing and learning to manage your stress levels and anxiety symptoms. As well as the profoundly relaxing experience of having a treatment from a professional Reflexologist, you can also use Hand Reflexology in between sessions in order to manage your response to your anxiety symptoms yourself. One technique that many find useful is to develop the habit of working the solar plexus point on the hands from the moment you start to feel anxious, excellent for students facing exams. This point is easy to find, your Reflexologist can show you, and subtle to work – someone watching you is unlikely to notice what you are doing; it just looks like you have your hands folded over each other. If you’ve never tried Reflexology before its suitable for young and old and is a wonderfully relaxing way to rebalance all the systems in your body. Give us a call, you dont know what you’re missing!
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