The Reading Room

A crew was dispatched on a project to harvest trees from a local forest. One day, a young lumberjack challenged an elder to a contest. Who could cut more wood in a day? The rules were simple. They would work through the day. They were allowed a short break every hour. Both agreed.

They began in different areas of the forest. Around the end of the first hour, the young man heard the elder rest his axe. He worked through the break with ease. Every hour, the young man heard the elder rest his axe. He used his limitless stamina to gain the lead every time. The young man worked straight through the workday without rest.

When the contest was over, the crew saw that the old man clearly won. In disbelief, the youth asked, "How could you have won? I worked faster and longer than you did!" The old man laughed. "While you worked the whole day through, every hour that I rested I was sharpening my axe."

It doesn't do anybody any good for you to try and chop down a tree with a dull axe.

Many of us are responsible in giving ourselves the green light to get stuff done. However, many of us are not as aware that it can be difficult, if not impossible, to come to a complete stop on our own.

Regular bodywork therapy is a great way to train yourself to rest and relax. It forces our nervous system to adapt to lower and lower levels of tension. Decades of research shows we're more clear and efficient with regular rest and recuperation.

Eventually, the body releases its way back to your baseline level of stress. This is known as treatment.

What is stress and how does massage help with that?

Our nervous system is the same way. Stress looms larger in our mind than we know it should, and unresolved loose ends take up our mental bandwidth like the loose parcels out of place on a hard drive. Massage helps ground us and defragment our nervous system so we can operate at full capacity.