Andrew Huberman

They're a flag that

Your immune cells are being recruited to that area.

The lymph is staying in those areas longer because your immune system is trying to fight something back.

So you should pay attention to that, but you don't want to be squeezing those lymph nodes.

And as a general theme, I should have mentioned this earlier.

If you've ever had deep tissue massage, right?

You may notice afterwards, even if you weren't lying face down in that halo-like thing where your face is there constricting your breathing a little bit, those things aren't that bad.

They're actually,

lie on your stomach, get a massage.

But if you've ever had a deep tissue massage, you may notice afterwards that your face is kind of puffy and you feel a little bit inflamed.

And they'll often say, oh, you know, make sure to drink a lot of water.

Turns out that deep tissue massage

can encourage enough movement along those deeper lymphatic vessels and can push things through the lymph nodes earlier than it would have been pushed through.

And in some sense, generate an inflammation response, not a major one, but a minor one.

And usually this resolves within a couple of hours if you're up and walking around a bit, again, gently pushing through the lymphatic flow as it's supposed to be pushed through.

The point here is that your lymph nodes are a site for combating infection.

You don't want to push things through them any faster than it normally would occur, but you also don't want accumulation of lymph to occur in the nodes too long.

And the way you ensure that it doesn't happen for too long is to keep the general lymphatic circulation going.

And we've talked about ways to do that earlier.

Earlier in our discussion about lymphedema, which is the swelling of typically the lower limbs that can occur, for instance, in people who are being treated for breast cancer or for other cancers, where the lymph nodes are intentionally destroyed by chemo or radiation therapy.