Touch hungry

THE skin is the largest organ in the human body. The sense of touch is the first sensory system to develop in the womb. When a baby is born, in the first three months, physical touch between the primary caregiver – typically the mother – is essential for the baby to form secure attachment bonds with people.

In attachment theory, a child can either form a secure, anxious or avoidant attachment style that will be continued into adulthood.

Relationship psychotherapist Ester Perel says a person’s first language – their mother tongue – is body language. For the first 18 months of a child’s life, non-verbal communication is used to express its needs to its parents.

David Wallin in Attachment in Psychotherapy explains in a secure attachment the child and primary caregiver are attuned to each other’s feelings. Attunement is recognising and responding to another’s emotional needs.

The parent is able to sense when the child needs affection and when the child wants to be left alone.

All children, regardless of how young, are able to sense the emotional disposition of their parents. Their moods can be reflective of their parents’ moods.

When a child is anxiously attached, typically the primary caregiver also has an anxious attachment style. The child receives love and support from the parent, but the parent is not attuned to the child’s needs, misreads cues from the child and the parent’s anxiety, which is unpredictable, is rubbed off on the child.

When a child is avoidantly attached, the child craves affection but has learned that the parent is not going to provide it, so the child moves away from wanting a connection to the parent.

Wallin said while the child avoids the affection from the parent, its body still craves it. The child’s heart rate and skin crave the comfort, affection and connection from the parent, but the child’s mind tells the body to avoid it.

These attachment styles follow children into adulthood. Attunement is not only reliant on touch, but touch is a form of communication and connection between people, similar to reading a person’s facial expression, body language and tone of voice.

For most of the year, the world was told to socially distance themselves from each other. Now, the rhetoric has changed to physically distance. No touching, no kissing, no hugging and stay indoors.

David Linden, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University, describes touch as social glue.

“It’s what binds sexual partners into lasting couples. It’s what bonds parents, children and siblings together. It’s what binds people and the community in the workplace into effective teams,” he said in a 2016 TEDx Talk.

Newsday spoke to Dr Katija Khan, a neuropsychologist and a member of the UWI, St Augustine covid19 task force.

A neuropsychologist is a clinical psychologist who specialises in how the brain and the nervous system influence behaviour and thoughts.

“Touch is very important. This is something we have realised many years ago,” Khan said.

Harry Harlow in the 1950s did an experiment in which he separated baby monkeys from their mothers and gave them a choice of a mother made of wire or a mother made of terrycloth, a soft fabric.

The baby monkeys preferred the terrycloth mother because they could get a big hug and cuddle from the mother, regardless of whether she had food or not.

They would go to the wire mother and get food, but then go back and cuddle with the soft mother.

“That shows the importance of touch for child development and how very important it was for children to have that caregiver touch very early on. So touch is important not just for children, but for adults as well.”

Recently she read research on high touch cultures and low touch cultures. Though correlational, the researchers found associations with high touch cultures having lower rates of violence, more corporation and more pro-social behaviours than low touch cultures.

“You find with the low touch culture, because they are not accustomed to touching in a pro-social, affectionate way, and for me, a big weakness is when you don’t have much of an experience in that, touch could be used in negative ways.”

A study on the National Basketball Association Teams by researchers Michael Kraus, Cassy Huang, and Dacher Keltner from the University of California, Berkeley, showed the NBA teammates who touched more before their games, be it hugs or high fives, won more games than teams that did not touch as much.

The players were more likely to be more co-operative and the star player would frequently pass the ball.

“It is a science, so the touch is both the sign and the medium through which some of our co-operation gets manifested.”

Touch, she said also helps to moderate the effects of a stressful event.

“Having a hug before you face something challenging helps. If you think of children, when they’re scared of something, what do they do? They want to hold on to their mummy and daddy’s hand or they want a hug, so the benefits of touch are quite real.”

The body has nerve endings that respond to and recognise touch. Touch calms the heart rate, reduces blood pressure and it stimulates receptors that carry signals to the vagus nerve in the brain and helps control the nervous system.

The vagus nerve helps the brain communicate with the parasympathetic nervous system. The parasympathetic nervous system is responsible for sexual arousal, salivation, tears, urination, digestion and defecation.

Khan said touch can be considered emotional nutrition.

“Touch lowers cortisol levels. It lowers stress levels. It gives us what we need to sustain ourselves emotionally. It is important for things like bonding, communication and mental health.”

Touch helps stimulate brain chemicals such as oxytocin, a bonding hormone; endorphins, known as the feel-good chemical that helps the body deal with pain and stress; serotonin, a neurotransmitter that helps regulate cognition, the reward system, learning, memory, and more; and dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with the pleasure centre drives motivation and reward.

These neurochemicals help people deal with mood disorders like depression and anxiety.

“When you to have touch hunger – skin hunger – that can be associated with things like more depression, more anxiety, higher stress levels and especially with what this pandemic is doing.”

The pandemic did not introduce touch hunger, she said. People were dealing with touch hunger before the pandemic.

“People who are lonely, people who are not too social would have experienced it, but in the pandemic because now we have to all distance you find that it will exacerbate social exclusion and depression.”

Now that touch is limited because of physical distancing, Khan said it is important to be aware of emotional disorders because of lack of touch.

Touch hunger will vary from person to person depending on their needs and reception to touch.

“Some people do not see removal of touch as a significant stressor, they feel well with quarantine and less contact and they are able to work with less social connections without problems. Others are struggling. The physical distancing measures are making people feel lonely.”

Touch hungry people would feel anxiety and depression and a sense of unease. They would be tenser.

“It is also having an impact on the people they do interact with. Some people, while they may have the company of others, they may not have the company of those they want to be with. That might lead them to be a little more irritable with the people they are with.

“We’ve seen so many different ways, different identities, different variations of how this reduced social contact and physical contact is affecting people.”

To help soothe touch hunger, Khan said finding alternative ways of connection can help. People have adopted more pets.

“Having pets is a fantastic source for some touch, some cuddling. Things like having a fluffy blanket or teddy, can stimulate some of the feelings that we get from touch and it will stimulate some of the touch receptors as well.”

Self-care and providing regular and sensual touch are important ways of self-soothing, whether one is touch hungry.

“Self-pleasure can be important especially if you’re being denied physical intimacy. But you can also get touch through sensuality.”

Rubbing lotion on the body, having a long shower and a self-care routine can help.

One thing she noticed coming out of the covid19 lockdown was that people are reconnecting with friends they lost touch with. Family members and friends are forming closer bonds.

“This gives us an opportunity to widen and deepen our bonds of social connecting, which can be not just a substitute for the lack of contact now, but this could set up for a more sustainable friendships and relationships going forward post-pandemic.”

This is the first part of a three-part touch hunger series. Next Wednesday, Newsday will continue Touch Hungry, discussing touch and community and the following and final story Newsday will discuss self-touch.