What happens if you massage your scalp every day?
If you are suffering from an irritated scalp or dry scalp or the skin at the top of your head is easily stressed and irritated, you may not have to buy a special product. A lot of men and women automatically think that they have to go through some sort of scalp detox.
There’s a wide range of products that you can use on your skin to cleanse your scalp of any long term residues. This leads to an overall healthier head of hair as well as allowing your pores to breathe. This is definitely well recommended, but you shouldn’t automatically assume that this is your only option.
It’s a powerful treatment to be sure, but the irritation and stress that you’re feeling in your scalp might actually be treated with something that doesn’t involve any kind of chemical.
That’s right. By simply massaging it the right way, your skin’s internal nourishing process as well as blood transport system may be spurred to a higher level of efficiency and effectiveness. All it takes is a simple scalp massage.
Best of all, when you get your head kneaded as you close your eyes to relax, you free yourself of unnecessary stress and pressure. Believe it or not, this can also have a positive impact on your skin health.
Please understand that your mind and your body are interconnected. They have a lot more in common than you care to realize. By allowing your body to fully relax through a special scalp massage, you can go a long way in not only relieving your mind, but this can also lead to better overall skin health and wellbeing.
How to massage your scalp the right way
Use the tips of your fingers to stimulate your scalp’s nerve endings. Underneath your skin, there are many nerve endings that can respond well to pressure. Use your fingertips to apply gentle pressure at the top of your skin in a circular direction.
This scalp massage positively impacts your nervous system by stimulating the ends of your nerves. This leads to a positive feedback loop. When you gently knead the top layer of your scalp’s skin, your mood improves.
You simply relax. There’s nowhere to be. No schedule to meet. No one to become. You just are there. The more you focus on how your fingertips are moving over your skin and you allow your muscles to go with the flow and direction of your thumbs and fingers, you feel even more relaxed, which allows you to physically calm down.
There’s an interplay between mood and the tension of the muscle underneath your skin as well as the surface of your scalp.
The benefits of a great scalp massage
As you learn the ropes of massaging your own scalp, you experience more and more of the benefits this practice delivers. First, let’s focus on the obvious. It relaxes you. How does this happen? If you’re like the typical person who has all sorts of duties, responsibilities, and obligations during the day, a lot of these can catch up with you. Often times, they manifest in the form of muscle tension.
By simply deciding to start with your temples and massage them slowly in a circular motion, it relieves all this muscle tension and leads to a lifting of your mood. The more you feel calm, the more your blood pressure starts to go down.
Also, your blood’s cortisol or stress hormone percentage starts to sink. Another great benefit of scalp massages is that it promotes the growth of hair. How can this happen? For your hair to grow, it has to have an energy source. This is your blood vessels underneath your skin.
When you gently physically massage your scalp’s skin repeatedly, these vessels undergo a lot of stimulation. The end result is that there’s more blood flowing underneath your scalp. This is a great thing.
Blood brings nutrients as well as oxygen.
These are precisely the 2 ingredients your hair follicles need for optimal growth. Not only does it ensure that your follicles are healthier, but this can result in thicker and higher volume hair.
Another awesome benefit of scalp massages is you can pretty much do it anywhere and at any time. You don’t need a special product nor do you need special equipment or you need to be in a special location.
In fact, if you have some time to spare during your morning or evening shower, you can do this right as you’re taking a shower. Wet your hair, apply shampoo, and just give yourself a deep scalp massage. 5 to 6 minutes is plenty.
This is an all-natural remedy for not only improved scalp health but also a great way to deal with migraines and headaches. Paired with a warm shower, your mood can improve and this leads to higher serotonin levels.
Serotonin, of course, is the neurotransmitter that is often linked to the human perception of wellbeing. Ultimately, developing a head massage habit can lead to improved overall nervous system health.
Different ways of massaging your scalp
Start with the basic fingertip massage process I described above. Try to massage your entire scalp within the span of up to 6 minutes a day. You can do this repeatedly. In fact, you can do it as much as 4 times every single day.
After you’ve done that in the shower, the key is to not scrub very hard. Just allow yourself to keep massaging not only during the application of the shampoo but as well as through the rinsing process.
Another way you can massage your head is through the use of brushes and massagers. There are all sorts of brushes that are gentle on your skin and have special protruding units at the end made out of rubber. You can try these.
The key is to keep experimenting until you find a product that can produce a massage that truly relaxes you.
Also, you should massage with a wide variety of essential oils. Not only can these help you cut down on dandruff, but they can also boost overall hair growth and soothe your skin as you massage it.
If you keep this up, don’t be surprised if you start to see the heavier volume and healthier looking hair after around 24 weeks.
What happens if you massage your scalp every day?
Additional benefits of scalp massage
If you’re suffering from a condition called androgenic alopecia, you are undergoing hair loss because of the amount of DHT in your skin. This is a variety of the testosterone hormone that has been linked to hair loss or thinning hair.
How does DHT work? It shrinks down the size of your hair follicles. When your hair follicles get too small to support your hair, the strands simply don’t have anything to hang on to. So they fall out of your scalp.
This doesn’t mean that your follicles stop producing hair. But the follicles can only produce at a much slower rate. This also due to the fact that the follicles shrink due to DHT lowering the amount of blood flowing to your hair follicles.
When you massage your scalp, you help boost the overall blood flow underneath your skin to your hair follicle. When you do this in addition to using products that clear out DHT from your scalp, the massage can facilitate the transport or clearing away of this hair killing hormone.
You have to work on 2 levels. Not only do you have to constantly massage your scalp, but you also have to be proactive in using products that actually clear out DHT from your scalp’s skin.
Massage boosts the production of sebum in your scalp
Just like any piece of skin on your body, your scalp produces sebum. This is a natural oil that ensures that the top layer of the dead skin cells on your scalp is properly moisturized. Please remember that your skin is, essentially, just a dead layer of cells.
You need to properly take care of it for it to look its best and also to prevent any unhealthy skin conditions like fungal growth or dandruff. This is going to be a challenge for a lot of people because when they use all sorts of shampoos or haircare products, there’s a lot of residues that tend to build up.
What makes this challenging is a lot of this material can’t be seen with the naked eye. It’s as if they’re invisible, but they’re there because the effect is very visible. Just how bad can too much hair care products or styling gels’ residue have on your skin?
You can tell if your scalp is suffering because it starts to flake or it feels dry to the touch. It can also be very easily irritated. The most common symptom is itchiness. When you look really closely, there might even be red patches.
All of these factors can lead to the overall moisture level of your skin becoming imbalanced and the sebum ends up clogging the follicles. So what happens is that the natural moisture balance has gone off the rails, so your scalp is producing a lot of sebum to compensate for the clogged follicles.
This repeats an endless cycle of skin oil overproduction and your scalp becomes extra oily. This can lead to a nasty case of dandruff because if you have enough bacteria on your skin or there’s a fungal infection, your skin starts to flake.
This is why it’s a really good idea to massage your scalp while using a very good exfoliator. The exfoliator will clear out whatever extra oil your skin has produced and the massage will get your skin’s sebum production back to normal.
Working together, this can clear out the old residue while making sure that the new layers of skin have a balanced level of moisture and oil. This can lead to a healthier scalp and, by extension, better looking and healthier hair.
The secret is all about balancing the production of sebum on your scalp. You shouldn’t overdo massaging because if you massage too much or you stimulate the scalp over its limits, your scalp can feel greasy and you start the process all over again because the excess grease on your skin will lead to follicle irritation.
This, in turn, will lead to weak hair, which falls out, and because your pores are clogged, the new hair doesn’t get out. So you’re actually slowing down your overall hair growth.
On the other extreme, reduced sebum production is also bad news because your scalp becomes extra dry, flaky, and irritated. It also can become reddish. It really all boils down to having a good strategy for optimal scalp health.
One of the best ways to do this is to massage your scalp with the right exfoliant and oil clearing product.
Additional massage techniques
Effleurage massage
Using your fingertips, go on a light circular motion at the edge of your scalp. You just have to use very light pressure. This technique uses pinpoint pressure and has been known to truly boost both the scalp’s lymph and blood circulation.
It also relaxes muscles, which can lead to reduced tension and stress. Most people prefer this method because it delivers so many benefits at once.
Petrissage massage
If you want a more hands-on way of massaging your scalp, you might want to try this method. You basically roll your hand through the surface of your scalp. Much like you would knead a piece of dough as you try to bake it into a loaf of bread, you do the same with your scalp because you’re using your knuckles as well as your fingertips.
The key here is to use hard pressure so as to really push into the surface of your scalp’s skin. The downside to this technique is if you have a very sensitive hair type or your hair is actually very thin, you can’t put too much pressure otherwise, it’s going to have the opposite effect.
You might end up putting a lot more strain and stress on your hair follicles. This is not a good thing because you’re trying to keep your hair healthy and prevent them from falling out. Stress and strain will make them fall out.
Vibration effect
There are all sorts of gadgets you could buy that have a vibrating effect. Some even have multiple settings. You just have to hand-select these products because they might not have the right surface or they might not have the right protruding plastic parts that would stimulate your skin the right way.
You have to try them out. Also, their settings might either be too weak, too gentle, or too strong. Everybody’s different. So the key to using this kind of device is that you want to buy something that you will continue to use over a long period of time.
It’s very easy to just pick up this type of product and after using it for a couple of times, you put it down and never use it again.
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