Humans are designed to touch and be touched, which is why so many who live on their own have suffered during the pandemic, writes author Eleanor Morgan in The Guardian. Will we ever fully recover?
There’s only so much a dog can do. I live alone with my Staffy and by week eight of the lockdown she was rolling her eyes at my ever-tightening clutch. I had been sofa-bound with COVID-19 and its after-effects before lockdown, then spring and summer passed without any meaningful touch from another person. More than anything, I missed the groundedness only another human body can bring.
The need for touch exists below the horizon of consciousness. Before birth, when the amniotic fluid in the womb swirls around us and the foetal nervous system can distinguish our own body from our mother’s, our entire concept of self is rooted in touch. “The human body has built all its models based on touch received from caregivers,” says Dr Katerina Fotopoulou, a professor of psychodynamic neuroscience at University College London. “We’re utterly reliant on the caregiver to satisfy the core needs. Little can be done without touch.”
As adults, we may not comprehend the importance of touch even when it disappears. “We might begin to realise that something is missing, but we won’t always know that it’s touch,” says Prof Francis McGlone, a neuroscientist based at Liverpool John Moores University and a leader in the field of affective touch.
Touch has a huge impact on our psychological and physical wellbeing, says Prof Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Oxford. “With our close friends and family, we touch each other more than we realise,” he says. As adults, Dunbar’s research has found, we have a core set of, on average, five friends who we can call on as a shoulder to cry on.
“We see exactly the same thing in primates,” he says. “Even in much bigger primate societies, groups of five best friends appear at every layer, who do all their grooming together – their form of social touch. In primates and humans, these intense coalitions act as a buffer; they keep the world off your back.”
As the pandemic continues, many of us will be trying to cope with profound stress without the comfort of touch. We all have different needs and boundaries (McGlone says “not everyone suffers from a lack of touch; I don’t really like being cuddled”), but the total absence of touch, particularly when emotions are high, contravenes the hardwiring.
“Touch is a modulator that can temper the effects of stress and pain, physical and emotional. We have seen in our research that a lack of touch is associated with greater anxiety,” says Fotopoulou. “In times of high stress – the loss of a job, or a bereavement, for example – having more touch from others helps us cope better, particularly in calming the effects of [the stress hormone] cortisol.” Even if we’re used to not being touched a lot, after a while the need can feel very physical – sometimes described as “skin hunger” or “touch hunger”.
In high-stress states, it can feel as if our bodies can barely contain our emotion if there’s no one there to hold us. “Lots of studies support the theory that touch gives the brain a signal that it can delegate its resources for coping because someone else is there to bear the brunt. This relaxes the body, going some way to restoring the stress budget, if you like,” says Fotopoulou.
But touch is not a single sense. The two square metres of skin that contain us are teeming with nerve fibres that recognise temperature, texture and itch, etc. One set of fibres exists purely to register gentle, stroking touch: the C tactile afferents (CTs).
McGlone has been studying this since 1995. “These neurons, in the skin of all social mammals, transmit slow electrical signals to the emotional processing parts of the brain. They play a critical role in developing the social brain and our ability to withstand stress.”
The highest density of CTs across the body are in the parts we can’t “groom” ourselves, such as the shoulders and back. “If you love having your back rubbed it’s because there are more CTs there,” says McGlone. “Stimulation of these neurons releases oxytocin and dopamine, and has a direct impact on cortisol levels, which regulates our mood.”
In our normal lives, we’re not going round stroking each other all the time. “No, you don’t need that touch all day,” McGlone says. “We only need this gentle kind of touch intermittently.”
In these times of touch deprivation there is no real substitute for what we get from other humans, but there are ways to soothe ourselves. Fotopoulou’s lab will soon publish a study conducted during the pandemic that builds on the theory that, in the same way we think we can feel others’ pain, we may be able to experience touch vicariously, too.
Researchers have found that seeing touch (on TV or in films) – particularly social, affective or pet touch – can give some of the benefits of feeling touch. “This is called ‘vicarious touch’,” says Fotopoulou. “This is not a permanent or complete substitute, but a partial one.”
Products such as weighted blankets can help. Interacting with animals is also settling.
This resonated: the warmth of my dog’s back under my hand has been the most grounding thing for me over the past year. Why? “When you’re stroking your dog, you’re engaging systems that would be activated if the dog was stroking you,” says McGlone.
A hunger for touch is a signal that a primitive need is not being met. But evolution is on our side. Every scientist I spoke to was hopeful that, once we can come together again, we will adjust quickly. “It will differ between people, probably based on the duration people have been alone, and there may be a period of clumsiness and renegotiation,” says Dunbar. “But we have evolved to adapt.”
[link url="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/jan/24/lost-touch-how-a-year-without-hugs-affects-our-mental-health"]Eleanor Morgan's unabridged article can be read in The Guardian[/link]