Ask anyone these days if they're suffering from stress and you may well get a very short and to-the-point answer! But it's not just that, stress is the root cause of much physical illness as well as so many other problems both physical and mental. These problems make us feel ill, blight our lives causing time off work and problems at home. Fortunately, reflexology is here to provide some welcome help and assistance.
But it's important to realise that reflexology does not reduce stress in the sense that you will have less of it after a course of treatment; rather it approaches the problem from two quite different, but complementary, directions.
For most of us, the lives we lead today are full of the little things that wind us up and build inside to create the stress and anxiety. Indeed, the thing to understand about stress is that you can't 'turn it off' or walk away from it; it's there all the time, every minute of every day.
But what happens when you go on holiday? For two weeks (or however long you go) the world can seem a very different place as you relax and begin to enjoy yourself again. In fact, we all know that the good effect of a holiday can last for a few weeks after returning until submerged beneath a deluge of reality!
The relaxation of a holiday both helps mask the effects of stress and allows this feeling to continue for a short time after you get back. In other words, the stress is still there; it's the way that it is perceived that has changed.
Reflexology is like a holiday in that it induces relaxation and by so doing helps to mask the effects of stress. And, like a holiday, this relaxed attitude to stress will last a short time after treatment.
The big problem with holidays is that they only come once a year! The big advantage of reflexology is that it is possible, even desirable, to have a treatment session at much more regular intervals. Thus, with a little careful planning, the good effect can be made to last right throughout the year.
Looked at like this, reflexology sessions can be seen as path stretching through the year that can soak up, session by session, the effects of stress.
Good though that is, the benefits of reflexology do not end there. A skilled reflexologist, by manipulating the reflex points on the feet (or hands), will encourage the body to step up its own self-healing and self-repair.
The effect of this is to enhance the maintenance and the restorative functions of the body and so help to remove, and often eradicate, the niggling little illnesses that stress seems to produce.
This results in you feeling better, functioning better and not needing to have time off work. In addition, you won't have so many days when you feel the world is against you and trying to grind you into the pavement.
This is important because as you find, week after week, that you can deal with stress, so your body and mind will begin to feel the benefit and your life will improve. It will feel as if a burden has been lifted from you.
Stress is everywhere around us these days and life, if anything, seems to be getting more complex with ever increasing demands. Fortunately reflexology is there to act as a bridge from one treatment to another to help you shrug off the trauma of life and really begin to live again.
