By Roman Torgovitsky, Ph.D. in Massage Magazine


Back when I was working on my doctoral degree at the Harvard Medical School Division of Sleep Medicine, in 2006, I was investigating the effects of sleep deprivation on neurocognitive performance. At the same time, I was also actively involved in anti-war activism, as well as caring for my father, who was suffering from an untreatable illness. I had been receiving aggressive phone calls and even some threats on my life due to my anti-war activism.
I was getting more and more emotionally drained, and then I lost any ability to fall asleep. I would lie awake in bed feeling frustrated, and then developed a phobia of going to bed even slightly hungry. Even if I would manage to fall asleep, the slightest noise would wake me. (And no, I was not using myself as a subject for my research.)
Over the next two years, I tried everything—healthy and unhealthy—to be able to sleep. I asked my thesis advisors for advice; I tried Tylenol PM, warm baths, yoga, walking and running. I went to psychotherapy sessions; drank wine; and basically tried to exhaust myself physically and mentally—and still nothing helped.
Finally, I discovered a soft-tissue manipulation method derived from Chinese tui na massage therapy. Each session was an amazing journey, as I literally discovered more of my own body. It was like watching a movie—but instead of looking outside myself, I was looking inside.
While I had been practicing various forms of movement arts for years, I realized I had very little familiarity with my own body. Through massage, I discovered my body was full of wondrous spots of which I had been absolutely ignorant. As the tui na therapist pressed on those spots and gently released their tightness, I experienced a multitude of wonderful sensations, calmness and a deep sense of relaxation.
After suffering from insomnia for more than two years, three weeks of massage sessions stabilized my sleep, reduced my anxiety and resolved my sleep-related hunger phobia. My massage therapist helped me understand that hunger was really expression of my anxiety, which I could resolve by massaging a particular spot under my ribs.
My story of insomnia is not unique. According to the National Sleep Foundation’s 2015 Sleep and Painreport, 36 percent of Americans report just fair sleep quality on a regular basis, while 13 percent report poor or very poor sleep quality. Thirteen percent of Americans also say they “rarely or never” get a good night’s sleep, according to the report.




Why Are We Awake?Recent studies reviewed in the article, “Hyperarousal and insomnia: state of the science,” published in 2014 in Sleep Medicine Reviews, suggest that insomnia could occur due to physiological hyperarousal, whereby a person’s sympathetic system works in overdrive, raising body temperature and heart rate during waking and sleeping; increasing metabolic rate; making the brain work harder even while the person is asleep; and increasing levels of stress hormones such as adrenocorticotropic hormone, cortisol and norepinephrine.
The brain goes into hyperdrive, leading to a nonstop dialogue with oneself, excessive worrying and feeling anxious.
Myofascial tightness may contribute to and sustain this state of hyperarousal. We know that fascia is our largest sensory organ, and that it contains an abundance of receptors that act like sensors to detect the local environment. Thermoreceptors may respond to temperature changes, chemoreceptors to local chemical changes, nociceptors to tissue injury or trauma, and mechanoreceptors to mechanical forces such as compression during massage.
Once activated, the receptors send afferent signals toward the brain that pass through the dorsal horn of the spinal cord, brain stem and hypothalamus, which are the homeostatic centers of the body. These centers process information and send efferent—back to the body—nerve signals as instructions for how to respond to or correct an issue.
We can illustrate this by looking at what happens after you have worked on five clients consecutively. You might start feeling discomfort in your shoulders due to localized chemical changes or repetitive strain that activates the chemoreceptors and nociceptors, respectively. This sense of discomfort is a report generated by your brain that an action needs to be taken to correct the discomfort before injury occurs.
There could be multiple solutions—some are subconscious, including self-massaging the painful areas or adjusting your shoulder and arm positioning. Other solutions may require analytical processing, such as asking yourself to determine the causal factors with questions such as, “Am I simply overworking myself, or is this pain due to my chronic postural imbalances?”
Such processing facilitates the analytical part of the brain to extrapolate and interpret information from other sources in order to determine the underlying problem and find appropriate solutions. This information-gathering is necessary for maintaining health and wellness, and in this case, may prolong your career as a massage therapist.
However, we tend to use the analytical part of our brain differently from how we use the nonanalytical part. Instead of finding solutions, our analytical thinking can motivate us to choose to implement strategies that suppress the sensory, feeling part of the brain. Thus, we ignore the sensations as long as the signals are not too painful or intense. This is a useful strategy for survival in extreme situations or athletic competitions, but in the long term this represents a maladaptive strategy that diminishes our brain’s ability to self-regulate.
Moreover, the underlying afferent signals of discomfort are still being sent to the brain, causing overstimulation to the nervous system and maintaining hyperarousal, which may decrease sleep efficiency and potentially lead to a wide range of effects, including low-grade inflammation and increased risk of accidents.
Hyperarousal may also contribute to myofascial tightness by increasing tonus of the intrafascial smooth muscles. This sets off a cycle of injury, imbalanced posture and emotional stressors that adds to the physiological stress load on the body. Such cycles are often perceived by health care providers and the general public as aspects of normal aging, although I believe many of these factors are preventable.





Interrupt the CycleIn my experience, massage therapy is an excellent way to interrupt the vicious, self-perpetuating cycle of sleep deprivation–inflammation–discomfort–hyperarousal–intrafascial muscle activation–myofascial tightness that I identified in myself and that I believe many people suffer from.
Massage seems to interrupt the cycle of hyperarousal affecting the nervous system via mechanoreceptors, while at the same time normalizing the local environment around peripheral receptors, thereby reducing hyperarousal signals and promoting relaxation and parasympathetic activity.
Recently, International Rolfing Instructor and International Fascial Anatomy Teacher Robert Schleip, Ph.D., posited that upon stimulation of fascial receptors with mechanical pressure, the afferent signals travel to the major homeostatic areas of the brain—brain stem, thalamus and hypothalamus. The resulting efferent signals from the brain to the body may cause dilation of arterioles and capillaries as well as minimize contraction of the intrafascial smooth muscles, which are activated by the sympathetic nervous system during times of stress and may contribute to sustaining the state of hyperarousal.
The increase in blood circulation and reduction in general muscle tone may explain the potentially quick and palpable changes in tissue pliability you can feel during a massage therapy treatment.
Research indicates massage is effective for improving sleep; however, massage-sleep studies have been conducted primarily on specific populations—infants, menopausal women, migraine sufferers, fibromyalgia patients, and children with autism among them—rather than the general population.
Still, research does show that chronic or acute pain contributes greatly to insomnia. The National Sleep Foundation’s 2015 Sleep in America Poll found that “[65] percent of [respondents] with no pain reported good or very good sleep quality, while only 45 percent of those with acute pain and 37 percent of those with chronic pain did the same.” The poll results also noted, “People with pain are also far more apt than others to report that lack of sleep interferes with their mood, activities, relationships and enjoyment of life overall.”
I think we can agree there may be an important role for massage therapy to play in addressing sleep concerns in the general and pain-challenged populations.




Massage’s Role in a Good Night’s SleepMany of the relaxation effects of massage therapy are likely to be mediated by the vagus nerve, according to Tiffany Field, Ph.D., director of the Touch Research Institute, at the University of Miami School of Medicine in Miami, Florida. Field told me, “The vagus nerve is a major parasympathetic nerve that sends efferent signals of relaxation to most vital organs.
“Stimulating pressure receptors in various parts of the body sends signals to the vagus nerve in the brain,” Field continued, “[and] activation of the vagus nerve lowers heart rate, reduces blood pressure, increases gastric motility and relaxes muscles of the face and voice.”
Numerous studies conducted by Field and colleagues show that massage reduces levels of stress hormones such as cortisol. TRI has not conducted research specifically on massage and sleep; however, cortisol can increase arousal and wakefulness, and interfere with deep sleep.
TRI has conducted research indicating that massage therapy has a positive effect on brain activity. “Experiments at my lab showed that moderate pressure massage decreases alpha and beta wave activity and increases theta wave activity, suggesting a relaxation response,” Field said. “Another experiment we conducted showed that one month of moderate-pressure massage therapy delivered to fibromyalgia patients increased deep sleep and reduced substance P. This is relevant to clinical practice, as substance P causes pain and less substance P is produced during deep sleep.”
Massage provides a unique entry point for breaking the slow-developing cycles we discussed earlier that many in our society call normal aging, but are actually abnormal and preventable.
The first major step to restoring our body’s ability to self-regulate is recognizing and acknowledging its decline in function. Massage therapists can facilitate this by simply asking clients to compare how good they feel in their bodies before and after sessions. This may launch clients onto a path of restoring self-regulation by guiding them on a journey through the various sensations elicited through their bodies. This occurs as issues, like insomnia, are helped by therapeutic massage.
On the other hand, massage therapy can also be used as a passive tool, like a painkiller that can remove clients’ discomfort or pain, but does not increase body awareness or restore their capacity for self-regulation. In this case, this continued lack of self-regulation can resurface and present, oftentimes, with more serious consequences.


A Growing NeedI am now grateful for the traumatic experiences that destroyed my sleep. Thanks to them, I discovered a form of massage therapy that healed my insomnia.
Since then, I have created a system of deep tissue self-bodywork that allowed me to derive similar benefits on my own, at home. I ended up quitting my job as a mathematical epidemiologist to dedicate myself to teaching this system to a wide range of health-and-fitness professionals.
More recently, I founded a nonprofit that creates and delivers trainings to war veterans on somatic methods for working through war shock trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder. All of this is thanks to the massage therapy I received.
Massage therapy has a tremendous potential to positively affect human health and well-being. There is a great need to disseminate knowledge about the efficacy of massage among the general public and health providers alike.
More research is also necessary to determine the exact mechanisms of action in order to optimize massage therapy treatments and offer a better understanding of how myofascial manipulation affects the brain, emotional processing and trauma healing.


About the AuthorRoman Torgovitsky, Ph.D., is the founder of Soma System and Wounded Warrior Ukraine. He is a Harvard-trained biomedical scientist, structural bodyworker and practitioner of internal martial arts. He has taught Soma System internationally at a variety of venues, including the IDEA Fit World Convention, Perform Better Functional Training Summits and yoga conferences.

By Brandi Schlossberg December 27, 2016


Vitamin D is crucial for muscle strength and bone health.It also helps the body maintain bone density, which reduces the risk of fracture, osteoarthritis and osteoporosis. Research also indicates vitamin D helps the immune system fight the flu and infections, and reduces the risk of many common diseases, including cancer, cardiovascular disease, depression and diabetes.
The recommended daily intake of vitamin D seems to be up for debate within the medical community, and the recommended methods for getting that daily dose of vitamin D are full of confusion as well. Here, we dive into the details of vitamin D, exploring its role in the body, how much we may need and the best ways to go about getting it.


Strong BonesOne of the main reasons to aim for adequate vitamin D levels is because this vitamin is essential to building and maintaining strong bones. For massage therapists, whose success rests on being able to perform on their feet day after day, this is not a minor concern.
“Being a massage therapist is a very physically demanding job,” said Laura Lacey, a New Jersey-based massage therapist who holds a degree in nutritional counseling. “It puts a lot of strain on the body, especially the joints and bones.
“Having good body mechanics helps, of course, but even with that, if the massage therapist has low levels of vitamin D, she could suffer from joint pain, [and] her bones could become porous and brittle, which would lead to an increased risk of broken bones and fractures,” Lacey continued.
When it comes to having strong bones, vitamin D is vital, and many years of scientific research have proven the importance of this vitamin for the prevention of serious bone problems, such as rickets and osteoporosis.
“Without sufficient vitamin D, bones can become thin and brittle,” said Harry F. Hester, D.C., president and CEO of Dee Cee Laboratories, a company that manufactures dietary supplements. “Vitamin D sufficiency prevents rickets in children and osteomalacia in adults. Together with calcium, vitamin D also helps protect older adults from osteoporosis.”





Beyond BonesIn addition to the connection between vitamin D and bone health, scientists are finding links between vitamin D and a host of other health issues, spanning the spectrum from mood to metabolism. This new insight is changing our understanding of vitamin D and how much we may need it for optimal health.
“Research has found that vitamin D is used by almost all of the body processes,” Lacey said. “It is needed for calcium metabolism, maintains normal blood levels of calcium and phosphorous, [and] it provides cardio function and blood pressure control.
“Vitamin D is also used by the immune system and helps with the prevention of cancers such as breast cancer, prostate cancer and colon cancer,” she continued. “With type 1 diabetes, it helps inhibit insulin secretion from the pancreas.”
According to the Vitamin D Council, a nonprofit organization that aims to keep up with the latest research on vitamin D and make recommendations based on this research, vitamin D plays a key role in the gene expression that dictates development, growth and maintenance of the body.
“Vitamin D’s metabolic product (calcitrol) is actually a secosteroid hormone that is the key that unlocks binding sites on the human genome,” states a report by the Vitamin D Council. “The human genome contains more than 2,700 binding sites for calcitrol, [and] those binding sites are near genes involved in virtually every known major disease of humans.
“Acting through the vitamin D receptors (VDR), calcitrol controls the expression of genes,” the report continues, “activating about two-thirds of the ones it controls, suppressing the rest.”


Vitamin D DosageAs research continues to pour in on the potential benefits of vitamin D and how it plays into our overall wellness, the hard science on how much we may need and how it might benefit our health is still not clearly known.
In 2010, amid the confusion about vitamin D, the U.S. and Canada asked the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to weigh in on the issue. The health branch of the National Academy of Sciences, the IOM reviewed more than 1,000 published studies and heard testimony from scientists and stakeholders on the topic of vitamin D.
The review confirmed vitamin D and calcium are crucial for bone health, and the IOM’s comprehensive report was used to update the 1997 dietary reference intake for both vitamin D and calcium. According to the IOM, most adults need no more than 600 international units (IU) of vitamin D per day to maintain bone health, along with 700 to 1,300 milligrams of calcium. A fact sheet on the website of the National Institutes of Health also indicates 600 IU, with different recommended amounts for children under 1 year of age and adults older than 71.
The IOM review was unable to find the consistent results necessary for reaching conclusions about the role vitamin D plays in other health issues, such as protection against cancer, heart disease, autoimmune diseases and diabetes. According to the report, studies on vitamin D as it relates to these other health issues “point to possibilities that warrant further investigation.”
“Past cases, such as hormone replacement therapy and high doses of beta carotene, remind us that some therapies that seemed to show promise for treating and preventing health problems ultimately did not work out and even caused harm,” said Catharine Ross, chair of the IOM Food and Nutrition Board committee that was assigned to review the dietary reference intake for vitamin D. “This is why it is appropriate to approach emerging evidence about an intervention cautiously, but with an open mind.”
Other experts, however, suggest the government recommendation of 600 IU of vitamin D per day for most adults may be too low. For example, Lacey and Hester recommend 2,000 IU of vitamin D per day, and the Vitamin D Council advocates at least 5,000 IU of vitamin D each day.
“Recent studies have shown that [600 IU of vitamin D per day] may be too low—government levels usually indicate the very smallest amount needed,” Lacey said. “Because of environmental factors and the new evidence about the role vitamin D plays in various body processes, not just bone health, a larger amount of vitamin D is needed.”
According to the IOM, the upper intake level of vitamin D per day among most adults is 4,000 IU. This represents the amount of vitamin D the IOM reports is safe for daily consumption.




The Sunshine VitaminFor millions of years, humans have derived their daily intake of vitamin D from the sun’s rays—ultraviolet B (UVB) rays, to be specific. When the right amount of skin is exposed to the right amount of sun for the right amount of time, this triggers the natural production of vitamin D within the skin.
However, several issues can make this method of deriving vitamin D confusing and problematic. For starters, the medical community has made it clear that at least 40 percent of your skin, especially your torso, should be exposed for the optimal production of vitamin D.
If you choose this approach for getting your daily dose of vitamin D, be sure to look into your exact latitude, altitude, skin type and other factors that may influence just how much time you should spend in the sun, and use caution to prevent skin cancer.


More SourcesFor those who would rather avoid the potential health issues associated with sun exposure, as well as people who live in regions where natural vitamin D production is not possible during winter, other options are needed in order to obtain a healthy dose of vitamin D.
To begin with, some foods contain vitamin D. Among the best of these is the flesh of fatty fish, such as salmon, tuna and mackerel. Smaller amounts of vitamin D are also found in beef liver, cheese, egg yolks and some mushrooms.
Some foods have been fortified with vitamin D, such as milk, which usually has around 100 IU per cup, along with various brands of orange juice, yogurt, cereal and other products.
Given the limited number of foods that contain vitamin D, experts suggest some combination of sunshine, food and supplements may be necessary to get an adequate amount of vitamin D each day.
“People should not rely on food sources alone for the body’s need for vitamin D,” Hester said. “Since the diet does not always provide enough vitamin D and the sun can damage the skin, it’s best to take a vitamin D supplement.”


Get ItHowever you get your vitamin D, doing so could benefit your health on myriad levels. As Lacey noted, “Our bodies are our tools, and we need to keep them in optimum condition.”


About the AuthorBrandi Schlossberg is an avid bodywork client and full-time journalist based in Reno, Nevada. She has written many articles for MASSAGE Magazine, including “These Credentials Can Help Grow Your Practice” and “Bring Benefits of Sea Kelp to Clients.”

Courtesy of The Guardian


New research shows that the rhythm of breathing directly impacts neural activity in a network of brain areas involved in smell, memory and emotions

 Breathing in through the nose synchronises electrical activity across a network of brain regions involved in smell, memory, and emotions.

Mo Costandi is a neurobiologist and freelance science writer. He blogs at Neurophilosophy, on the science blog network

The rhythm of breathing co-ordinates electrical activity across a network of brain regions associated with smell, memory, and emotions, and can enhance their functioning, according to a new study by researchers at Northwestern University. The findings, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, suggest that breathing does not merely supply oxygen to the brain and body, but may also organise the activity of populations of cells within multiple brain regions to help orchestrate complex behaviours.
Your nose knows death is imminent

 
Read moreNearly 75 years ago, the British physiologist Edgar Adrian used electrodes to record brain activity in hedgehogs, and found that brain waves in the olfactory system were closely coupled to breathing, with their size and frequency being directly related to the speed at which air moves through the nose. Since then, this same activity has been observed in the olfactory bulb and other brain regions of rats, mice and other small animals, but until now it has not been investigated in humans.
In this new study, a research team led by Christina Zelano recorded electrical activity directly from the surface of the brain in seven patients being evaluated for surgery to treat drug-resistant temporal lobe epilepsy, focusing on three brain regions: the piriform cortex, which processes smell information from the olfactory bulbs, the hippocampus, which is critical for memory formation, and the amygdala, which plays an important role in emotional processing. At the same time, they monitored the patients’ respiratory rates with either pressure sensors or an abdominal breathing belt. 
The researchers found that slow brain wave oscillations in the piriform cortex, and higher frequency brain waves in the hippocampus and amygdala, were synchronised with the rate of natural, spontaneous breathing. Importantly, though, the brain wave oscillations in all three regions were most highly synchronised immediately after the patients breathed in, but less so while they were breathing out. And when the patients were asked to divert breathing to their mouths, the researchers observed a significant decrease in brain wave coupling.
AdvertisementThus, the air plumes that periodically enter the nose during natural breathing appear to synchronise the activity of neurons in the piriform cortex, and this synchrony is then propagated to the hippocampus and amygdala.
Given the well established respective roles of the hippocampus and amygdala in memory and emotions, the researchers conducted a series of behavioural tests to investigate whether breathing phase might influence thought processes. First, they recruited 21 healthy participants, and asked them to perform an emotion discrimination task. They were shown images of faces expressing either fear or surprise, in quick succession, and asked to identify the emotion in each one as quickly as they could. Another group of 75 healthy participants performed a visual memory task, in which they viewed a series of images and then identify the ones they had seen before from a second series presented to them 20 minutes later.
Participants in the emotion discrimination task identified the fearful faces, but not the surprised ones, more quickly when they saw them while breathing in compared to when breathing out. And those who performed the memory task were far better able to recall images that had been presented to them while breathing than those they saw while breathing out.
A cooler way to evaluate brain surgery patientsBreathing therefore modulates emotional recognition and memory recall, with both processes being more accurate during breathing in compared to breathing out. Once again, the route of breathing was critically important – the effects were seen when the participants were asked to breath in through their noses, but their performance on both tasks declined markedly when they breathed through their mouths.
Breathing is controlled unconsciously by the brainstem, and humans alter their breathing pattern in response to emotional stimuli and mental effort, suggesting that our thought processes affect the rate of breathing. These new findings suggest that breathing can also impact our mental function. For example, breathing rapidly when we are scared or highly aroused may optimise information processing in the brain so that we can think and act appropriately and quickly.
“When you breathe in… you are stimulating neurons in the olfactory cortex, amygdala and hippocampus,” says Zelano. “In a panic state, your breathing rhythm becomes faster [and] as a result you’ll spend proportionally more time inhaling,” [This] could have a positive impact on brain function and result in faster response times to dangerous stimuli in the environment.”
ReferenceZelano, C., et al. (2016). Nasal Respiration Entrains Human Limbic Oscillations and Modulates Cognitive Function. J. Neurosci., 6: 12448 –12467 [Abstract]


Mo Costandi trained as a developmental neurobiologist and now works as a freelance science writer. His work has appeared in Nature, Science, and New Scientist, among other publications. He is also the author of Neuroplasticity (MIT Press, 2016) and 50 Human Brain Ideas You Really Need to Know (Quercus, 2013)

Workplace massage involves the use of a special chair to perform back, neck and shoulder massages on fully clothed employees at either a work station or a designated location. Bringing the massage to you saves you valuable time and allows you or your employees to return to work sooner.
One of the biggest benefits of workplace massage is increased productivity and improved concentration and focus. Studies have shown that even a 15-minute massage can help lower your feelings of stress while improving your job performance by increasing alertness and concentration.
Massage therapy is a well-known way to decrease anxiety and depression, as it increases the levels of both dopamine and serotonin in your brain. These naturally occurring chemicals help you to feel calm and focused.
Massage therapy can also help relieve muscle tension, headaches and the pain associated with carpal tunnel, many of which occur in the workplace from either sitting or using the computer for an extended period of time.
As massage therapy can improve your overall well-being and immune system, workplace massage can benefit employers because they see a reduction in the number of sick days employees take, which helps to increase productivity and improve your team’s overall morale.