How often should you get a massage?

The honest answer depends on what you want from it, and the three common answers are very different.

For general tension: every two to four weeks

If nothing specific hurts and you just carry more tension than you would like, two to four weeks is the useful range.

The reason is simple. Tension rebuilds. At two to four weeks, each session starts from a better baseline than the last one and makes progress. Past about six weeks, most of a session goes on undoing what came back since the previous one, and you stay in roughly the same place indefinitely.

That is still worth doing. It is just worth knowing that a session every two months is maintenance at best, not improvement.

For a specific problem: weekly, for a month

This is where most people get the frequency wrong, and it costs them money.

If one shoulder has been locked for weeks, four sessions clustered a week apart will do considerably more than the same four spread across six months. Tissue that has been worked recently has not fully reverted, so each session starts further along than the last. Spread them out and every session starts from zero.

Book 90 minutes rather than 60 for this, and ask for deep tissue massage by name. A 60 minute session spends about a quarter of itself warming the tissue before real work starts, which leaves very little time on the part you actually care about.

After three or four weeks, reassess. Either the problem has meaningfully changed, in which case drop back to maintenance, or it has not, in which case massage may not be the right tool and it is worth seeing a physiotherapist or a doctor.

For sleep and stress: as often as you like

There is no meaningful ceiling here, because light work is not doing anything the body needs to recover from.

Aromatherapy massage is built around settling the nervous system rather than working tissue, so booking it weekly is fine and booking it twice a week is fine. The limit is your budget rather than your body.

If sleep is specifically what you are after, the timing of the session matters more than the frequency. Late works better than early, and it is one of the few cases where a 1am booking genuinely outperforms an afternoon one.

Can you have too many?

Yes, but only with firm work.

Deep tissue more than about twice a week does not leave the tissue time to recover, and you will notice it as background soreness that never quite goes rather than as progress. If you are booking firm sessions often and always feel slightly beaten up, that is the signal to space them out or go lighter, not to push harder.

Light treatments do not have this problem.

One session a year

Plenty of people book once a year, on holiday or at a birthday, and there is nothing wrong with that.

Just be clear with yourself about what it is: a good hour, not a fix. A single session will not undo twelve months of sitting at a desk, and a therapist who tells you otherwise is selling. If you enjoy it and you want one a year, book it and enjoy it.

What actually changes the answer

Two things move the number more than anything else.

**How much you sit.** Desk work builds a specific pattern of tension faster than almost anything else, and it comes back at a predictable rate. People who sit all day generally need the shorter end of the range.

**Whether you do anything between sessions.** Ten minutes of stretching a few times a week extends how long a session lasts more than an extra session does. This is the least popular advice in massage and the most reliable.

The practical version

If you want a rule rather than a range: book 90 minutes every three weeks, and move to weekly for a month whenever something specific flares up. That covers most people, most of the time, without overthinking it.