What do people mean when they say Reiki calms the nervous system?

When people say Reiki calms the nervous system, they usually mean something specific: the body spends a lot of its day in a low-grade alert state, muscles braced, breath shallow, mind running ahead of itself, and a session gives that state somewhere to land. Vanessa works with the body in that state directly, through hands-on or distance sessions in Canggu.

The alert switch

The nervous system has two broad settings: one for getting through a threat, and one for resting, digesting and repairing. Most people who come to see Vanessa have been stuck somewhere near the first setting for a long time, often without noticing it happened. Stress, grief, overwhelm and anxiety all keep that alert setting switched on even when nothing is actually wrong in the room. A session gives the body an hour where nothing is required of it, which is often enough for the alert setting to ease off on its own.

What people notice

Clients describe the shift in ordinary terms rather than dramatic ones. Breathing slows and deepens. The shoulders drop. Some people fall asleep partway through and wake up unsure how much time has passed. Afterwards, the reports that come back most often are sleep that finally comes properly, an appetite that returns, pain that sits further away, and a steadiness that was not there walking in. None of this is promised for any individual session, and it varies from one person to the next, but it is the shape of what people describe.

Where the tension actually lives

A lot of what people carry is nervous-system tension rather than an injury: a jaw that will not unclench, shoulders that have crept up towards the ears, a chest that will not open out, a stomach that grips before anything has happened yet. That is exactly the kind of tension a session works with. If the problem is a strained muscle or a specific injury, massage is usually the better first call, and Vanessa will say so, but ordinary bracing that builds up from weeks of stress is well within what a session addresses.

What the research actually says

A 2022 review in Frontiers in Psychology looked at fourteen randomised, placebo-controlled trials and rated the evidence high for stress and depression that were clinically relevant, and moderate to high for clinically relevant anxiety: the effect showed up in people who were genuinely struggling, not in people who were already doing fine. A 2025 review in Systematic Reviews, covering eleven trials and 661 participants, found a significant improvement in quality of life, with the best results coming from sessions of an hour or more repeated eight times or more.

This suits someone who has been running on empty for a while and wants an hour where nothing is asked of her, more than someone looking for a quick fix for a single sore muscle. When people tend to come covers this in more detail, and a private session is the place to start.