one time I got a massage -- a really good, deep, thorough massage, first in a very long time if not first ever. afterwards therapist told me to drink some water. I did and took a nap, feeling great.

woke up and something was wrong. really wrong. massive headache, could barely walk, seriously wondered if I needed to call 911. "Is this what dying feels like?" I thought.

(I didn't die im okay)

(con't)

I had just woken up feeling like death. Leaning against the wall in the bathroom, I tried to think. Isn't that what TV characters say when they have a hangover? I don't drink so I've never had a hangover. Since I probably wasn't dying -- was this what a hangover felt like? And isn't a hangover mostly just dehydration?

The therapist did say to drink water, and I thought they meant, like, a cup or two. I turned on the sink, trying not to drink too fast, and within maybe 15 min I was back to normal.

Massage is as much about "fascia" -- the connective tissue that wraps muscles and organs, anchoring them in place -- as it is about the muscles itself.

Fascia is thixotropic, which means that it becomes less tough and more fluid under mechanical stress. (It also gets more fluid when warmer, like most things.) Normally, the movements of your muscles provide enough movement and heat to keep them loose. When you don't get enough movement, the fascia around them becomes thick and tough, less permeable. The metabolic waste produced by your muscles builds up in the fascia around them.

A good massage uses heat, pressure, and motion to loosen the fascia, allowing your body to clear the metabolic waste. That's good in the long term, but in the immediate term it means possibly *years* of waste buildup has just been dumped into your bloodstream. Some of this waste is the stuff your body checks for measure how fatigued your muscles are, some is just toxic in large quantities.

All of this gets filtered out of your blood by your kidneys for excretion, which means also taking water out of your blood. So you need to replace the water, and if you don't, your kidneys will slow down / stop filtering toxins out to avoid drying out your blood.

So drink a *lot* of water.

note that if you're clenching or tensing your muscles a lot, they are producing waste (b/c they're working!) but not movement, so they aren't keeping your fascia loose enough for all that waste to drain.

that's basically the worst case scenario, and it happens a lot with chronic stress, etc.

doing vigorous exercise to loosen things up would be a good idea, but that's probably hard (your muscles are tense, sore, and exhausted) and it would also produce more waste.

A good hot soak will help (remember to drink water for the sweat *and* the kidney filtration!), as will massage -- having someone *else* vigorously squeeze and stretch your fascia.