One of the first questions new clients ask is “how long will it take for Feldenkrais to work?”
They often aren’t sure whether they should expect to feel immediate relief, like you feel after a great massage, or if their pain or discomfort will be relieved after a few visits or in several months.
This is a reasonable question, and here’s the frustrating answer: it depends.
It depends whether a person has been suffering with a particular issue for several days, months, years or decades. It depends what the issue is. It depends how often a person is willing or able to receive treatment. And it depends whether the person is willing to practice the assigned movements while at home, or in group classes, between sessions, in order to reinforce the new healthier neural pathways that are created during a session. To learn more about how to get a clearer sense of how long treatment might take, read “How Long Until I Notice Results from Feldenkrais® Sessions?”
And like almost anything else in life, it depends on how long the person has been practicing certain habits.
Neural Pathways
Neural pathways are the connections that form between the neurons, or brain cells, in your brain. They’re like a pattern that represents any thought about anything you’ve ever had – as simple as an apple, as complicated as love and integrity, every thought is a neural pathway.
These neural pathways, or connections between neurons, light up when you think of something or learn something like movement for the first time, and the connections form a pattern in your brain. Your brain has now attached meaning to that specific pattern.
When your brain processes a new connection for the first time, like when you first learned to walk as a baby, the neurons connected from your brain to your muscles, for balance, etc. The more you did the movement in the same way again and again, the stronger and more dominant the neural pathways became. And now, as an adult, you don’t need to think about walking anymore because it’s a well-formed dominant neural pathway in your brain.
Habits are learned — habits we want to continue AND habits that aren’t serving us; mental habits, emotional habits, and physical habits.
And unfortunately, this learning process happens if you’ve had many years of practicing muscular habits that aren’t healthy, like poor posture, or you’ve been unconsciously compensating for an injury (even from 20 years ago), or have been practicing a repetitive action in misalignment. You’ve now learned to associate certain muscular tension with these movement patterns.
This holds true for any type of learning. The more you practice something and it becomes a habit, then it will take a certain amount of time to change it to a new habit.
Feldenkrais® is not the same as massage or physical therapy. These other modalities work directly with strengthening, releasing or training muscles. Feldenkrais® works with the brain, the controller of the entire body (including the muscles). In this way, it’s actually a method of “learning” and also of “unlearning.”
To learn more about how Feldenkrais® works, click here.
When you first learned your multiplication tables, you probably were taught each table, one at a time, at school. Then you were given homework to practice at home. At first, that table might have been hard to remember. But after several weeks of writing and reciting the 3 times table out loud, it became second nature to you.
It took some time to create new neural pathways, but once reinforced, it became a “habit.”
A 2009 research paper by the University College of London says “it takes on average about 66 days of repetition to form a habit (which could indicate a change in the neural pathway). But it’s different from person to person. Some people change habits in as little as 18 days, others take as long as 254 days of repetition.”
So, having said this, this is what a person can expect with Feldenkrais.
If you’ve been experiencing pain or discomfort for a few weeks, then it is likely that a series of 6-8 sessions, received within a few weeks will begin to change the neural pathways. Unconscious habits of muscular contractions may have been practiced for much longer than the few weeks you’ve been experiencing pain, however. But the brain is always looking for the most efficient and healthiest way to move. And if you can practice some of the movements at home or in a weekly group class, then the new healthier neural pathways will be reinforced and lasting.
If you’ve been experiencing pain or discomfort for 10 years+, then most likely it will take longer to reverse the unconsciously held muscular patterns of tension. I recommend you begin with a series of 6-10 sessions, received within a month or so, and then see where you are. Very likely you’ll feel better and encouraged and will want to add another 6-10 sessions, perhaps spacing them out a bit more. Again, reinforcing the work at home or in a weekly group class is critical.
Anything between a few weeks and 10 years is someplace in the middle, depending on what the issues are that you’re experiencing. Regardless of the length of time an issue has been with you, most people feel better after their first session.