Takeaway

The ever-present neural background noise most of us experience but are unaware of can contribute to a continual “threat-like” effect; massage can create a relaxing experience that dials down this noise.

It has long been my experience that profound insights can be gained from a client’s passing thought. A few days ago, one of my clients posed just such an idea. 

“Hey, that’s surprisingly tender,” he said. “I wasn’t aware of a problem there.” 

And then, he couldn’t resist adding, in a teasing tone, “You know, I was fine before you started poking around!” (I bet many of you have heard clients say something similar!) Behind that experience lay some powerful principles. 

Before I could answer, he continued with a question. “This is probably a stupid question, but I’m going to ask anyway: Why do I feel so relaxed after I leave here? I get the muscle tension thing, but I mean the mental part. Colors are brighter, sounds are more distinct, and emotionally I’m much more chill. It’s a Zen experience I enjoy, but really, why would that be?” 

I shook my head and smiled. “Your simple question is deeply profound. As with so many seemingly simple experiences, the answer is rich and complex. I’m happy to share a possible mechanism with you, and the unexpected tenderness we just discovered and that question might be interrelated.”

“How so?” he asked. 

“First, let me back up a bit and explore the primacy of touch and our sensory experience. Did you ever think about the fact that while vision is super important and takes up a good portion of the brain, we can turn it off by closing our eyes? You can’t close your ears, so somehow our brains are wired to make sure our sense of hearing stays active at all times.”

“But you can put in earplugs,” he said. 

“Absolutely correct,” I said. “We can override and shut down any auditory information coming from the world
around us.”

“I think I see where this is going,” he said. “I’m trying to think of a way we can shut down the sense of touch, but I can’t think of one.”

“Me either,” I said. “You can imagine lying in bed with your eyes closed and earplugs in, but if you feel something crawling up your leg, you are likely to jump out of bed in a heartbeat. So, when you think about it, between vision, hearing, and touch, the brain may regard touch as primary. It is probably due to threat detection. You can see something out there, hear something out there, but if it touches you, the threat is immediate.”

“Gosh, I never thought of that before. What’s the connection between that and the Zen experience after a session?”

“Remember the spot I found that was sensitive to my pressure, but it was a place you were unaware of?”

“Yep. And you know, at some level it was new, and at another level I had the feeling that it was vaguely familiar, like I had felt that discomfort before, but a long time ago,” he said. “It’s hard to describe, but it felt old.”

“Exactly,” I said. “It isn’t like that muscular area is only sensitive when I press on it; it is always there on some level. It would be like me saying I only look older when there is a mirror involved! Alas, it is the reality that the mirror reflects back to me. In the same way, your hands are like mirrors, reflecting your nervous system to itself.”

“That makes sense,” he said. “But how come I am not aware of it?” 

“Have you ever been in an environment where there is a constant low-level background noise, like a generator or air conditioner? When it shuts off, there is a sense of genuine relief at the quietness, even though you weren’t aware of the noise. Your brain assigned the sound to the background because it didn’t change and was therefore not a threat—not worth the bandwidth it takes to pay attention to the sound. What if the same is true for all those places in our muscular system that are low-level disturbances? Since they don’t really change, the brain quite possibly assigns them to the background because they don’t pose an immediate threat.”

“Yes, but it’s not like they are silent,” he said. “As you said, they are still actively sending a message, albeit at a low level.”

“I think that’s probably the case. Here’s the thing: How many places like that do you think exist in your body? Probably a lot of them. Each one of them is sending a low-level input into your nervous system, and the aggregate total of all those low-level inputs is potentially a very big number. Just like a computer, it must be taking up a significant amount of bandwidth to run that many programs in the background.”

“I get it,” he said. “When each of those muscular inputs is lessened one by one through the work you are doing, the brain has more bandwidth for other things.”

“Exactly. Little things like thinking, emotional regulation, sensory input from the outside world, connections to other people—you know, stuff like that.”

“The stuff that really matters,” he said. 

Amen to that.