Massage, rest techniques offer effective stress reduction

Relaxation techniques, such as massage, appeared to effectively reduce stress, according to results of a block randomized controlled trial published in Scientific Reports.

"To get a better handle on the negative effects of stress, we need to understand its opposite — relaxation," Jens C. Pruessner, PhD, of the department of psychology at the University of Constance in Germany, said in a press release. "Relaxation therapies show great promise as a holistic way to treat stress, but more systematic scientific appraisal of these methods is needed."

According to Pruessner and colleagues, current standardized protocols focus largely on psychophysiological stress and tend not to incorporate psychophysiological relaxation, the latter of which comes with the ability to activate regenerative systems. This ability may be as important to maintain health during times of recovery as the activation of stress systems during times of threat, the researchers noted.

In the current study, Pruessner and colleagues sought to determine whether two standardized massage protocols were linked to psychophysiological relaxation via combined psychological and physiological factors. All participants were healthy women, of whom 19 received a vagus nerve massage, 22 received a soft shoulder massage and 19 served as a resting control group who sat quietly at a table. The researchers assessed relaxation according to changes in high frequency heart rate variability (HF-HRV), a vagally mediated component of heart rate variability, as well as with repeated ratings of subjective relaxation and stress levels.

Results showed an increase in HF-HRV and subjective relaxation and a significant decrease in subjective stress among all groups during the intervention. Compared with the control group, bot massage interventions were linked to significantly higher HF-HRV. Moreover, both massage protocols increased psychophysiological relaxation.

“Our standardized relaxation protocols represent a valuable new research tool,” the investigators wrote. “Nonetheless, we want to further emphasize that this study is a first approach in the search of a standardized relaxation protocol. We could show that it is highly feasible to introduce such a protocol, however, future work will have to determine which of several [standardized protocols] might be used as a gold standard to trigger a psychophysiological relaxation response in the laboratory.”