Calm Your Anxiety, Massage Therapy Session for Relaxation & Stress Relief, Scalp & Neck Massage

this video is made possible by our loyal patreon supporters visit patreon.com psychetruth hi welcome today we're going to be doing a shorter massage for anxiety and just helping your client with that um I'm going to go ahead and Dive Right [Music] In so I'm going to start without oil and um I'm actually going to start with a little bit of hair pulling so this is something I really like to do um for a few different reasons so before I go in I like to just offer some sort of touch that is more calming and especially if I'm working on someone new I want them to I move very slowly and I also like to give my client kind of a blueprint of what I'm going to be doing especially if they're feeling more anxious I don't want them to feel surprised so I'm starting very slowly and softly so anxiety is a really interesting thing because um the body affects the mind and the mind affects the body so much so sometimes when when you're feeling anxious it can be um more physiological so like what I mean is so I would actually approach this kind of massage really similar to the way I would approach massage for headaches my focus would be on the same muscles um so the frontalis muscle and the occipitalis muscle when you um kind of furrow your brow a lot if you're a student and you study a lot or if you're in a place where you're worrying about something when you tense up this muscle this muscle back here gets really tight as well and that can trigger an anxiety response and it's can be hard to just shift out of it so it's not always about like positive thinking it's really like about learning those skills how to just like truly relax your body and knowing what you need to relax so right now this is a really nice way to stimulate the frontalis muscle and this is the opposite of furrowing your brow so I'm really encouraging this muscle just soften and you don't want to pull too hard [Music] um and I'm going to go in with some more direct contact and just making sure that my wrists are supported so that if they're floating it's just a lot harder so making it as easy on myself as possible so really just encouraging this muscle to soften and relax people don't realize how much tension I carry in this muscle sometimes especially students and I tell my clients one of the quickest ways that you can physically feel less anxious is to just relax your jaw so what this does is it softens both the frontalis and Oxalis so when you're able to really keep that jaw nice and soft be mindful of that and feel that space in your mouth those two muscles just soften and you can immediately feel a lot better there's certainly other muscles involved that can be um that can affect an anxious you know an anxiety response the the upper traps can be very protective muscles and when they're in a habit of um protecting the body it can be hard to like physically [Music] relax and I like to work on this Temple area especially as I'm kind of communicating to my client about the whole softening the [Music] jaw together this can be really helpful you can do little circles you can do more static holds I like to do like barely visible circles on the temples and if you're watching this and you're new to massage and you are just kind of learning the way of things honestly anything you do along this hairline is going to feel really nice it's really hard to to do it wrong and I'm going to start just working my way around into the occipitalis [Music] and nice firm [Music] touch I feel like people sometimes when their um anxiety is triggered it's really easy to be hard on yourself [Music] and you know life isn't always easy and sometimes the body in an effort to protect itself can just get into bad habits without even realizing it and feeling anxious it's not always about you know what you're thinking about it's more like what your body is [Music] doing and I do like to include the sub ocials because that creates a nice deep release in this area it's the goal anyways and this whole time I like to encourage my client to just um really let there be space in their mouth and keep keeping the jaw nice and relaxed if I were doing a longer session I would certainly want to work on the upper trap um if my focus is on helping my client feel less anxious but if I only have 10 minutes these are this is usually my [Music] routine and also I feel like therapists can put a lot of pressure on themselves when um clients come in with you know mental health issues I feel like massage therapists just want to fix it and like it's never about fixing anything it's just about being a positive influence and helping people feel better not perfect I'm also mindful in my transitions if someone's in a more anxious place I transition slowly mindfully and I'm not trying to I never really try to do super deep tissue on the occipitalis just nice firm pressure just stimulating that muscle fiber getting fresh blood there I might go a little bit deeper in like sub the suboccipitals just depending on how things are feeling and before I forget I'd like to thank a few of our patrons I want to thank Lorie K RS and Emily you know who you are and we appreciate you guys so [Music] much and whenever I include more detailed work like I'm doing in these suboccipitals I just don't really like ending a session that way I like to end with just thinking a little more broadly and doing something that is a little less [Music] focused this is a really lovely stretch for the neck just grabbing and pulling a little bit and I'm going to go ahead and end how I started in this frontalis [Music] muscle focusing a lot more on that stroke back just encouraging that brow to [Music] unfurrow and just uh releasing My Touch nice and slow no rushing and that is all for today guys thank you for joining us today guys we enjoyed spending this time with you if you enjoyed today's video you should check out our patreon page where we'll find some exclusive content I look forward to seeing you there [Music] [Music]