Are We Missing Out On The Power of Gentle Touch?

Abstract:

The power of gentle, non-sexual touch has been studied and extensively proven to be indispensable for human psychological balance and emotional health. In this paper, I present why touch is so crucial for our health- and lifespans, make the case for how modernity and neoliberalism might have taken away this crucial necessity of life, and offer a deceptively simple solution on how to bring it back.

Why Touch?

It starts with a simple “Why do we touch?” — a rather innocuous question, one whose answer may sound all too obvious to us. But even as the answer to why we need touch in our lives seems intuitive, we somehow often fail to apply it. I’ve always wondered… Is it a coincidence that the rise in mental health problems has emerged alongside an alarming fall in physical touch?

The answer is: No, it is not a coincidence at all.

Before addressing mental health outcomes though, it is crucial to recognise that social touch is not merely a psychological comfort, but a biological necessity for human survival. From infancy onward, humans depend on physical contact to regulate core physiological systems, including heart rate, breathing, body temperature, blood sugar levels, the stress response, and even immune function. Physical touch is essential for important developmental processes to begin, such as growth stimulation. Decades of developmental research have shown that infants deprived of adequate touch fail to thrive—even when nutrition and shelter are provided—demonstrating the crucial role social touch plays as a fundamental biological necessity rather than a mere luxury for psychological comfort (Harlow, 1958; Spitz, 1945).

But the importance of touch isn’t limited to infants alone. In fact, the role touch plays in our lives seems to only grow more significant as we age. A large meta-analysis integrating 212 studies found that physical contact significantly improves physical and mental wellbeing, including reductions in anxiety, depression and stress in adults. Moreover, controlled studies report that hugs and soothing touch reduce cortisol responses to psychosocial stress, indicating that physical contact acts as a buffer against permanent stress.

In a study of over 250 German households, ranging from families to singles, and encompassing multiple age groups, Professor Beate Ditzen at the Institute for Medical Psychology at Heidelberg University Hospital found that stress hormone levels decreased more rapidly in people who experienced pleasant touch compared to those who experienced less of it.

In another study participants exposed to brief physical contact reported significantly lower feelings of neglect and loneliness — effects that suggest positive touch directly supports emotional wellbeing even in culturally low-touch societies.

Our entire physiological and psychological wellbeing are highly dependent on receiving gentle touch from others. Touch has the quality of improving our mental health, and allows us to maintain emotional balance by helping us better cope with stress and reducing feelings of loneliness.

Scientists’ warnings usually go unheeded, and I’m afraid that their warnings about the dangerous health implications of a touch-paranoid society will suffer the same fate. When we don’t eat for lengthy periods of time, we call it starvation. Lack of touch, in its most severe form, can cause what experts have dubbed “Touch Starvation”—a soberingly clear sign of how social touch is as fundamental a need as food and water.

At the heart of Touch Starvation are lower oxytocin levels (a.k.a. the cuddle or “bonding” hormone), which we depend on for feelings of social trust and safety. Touch stimulates the release of oxytocin, which is what binds groups together, and helps us deepen our feeling of belonging. Even better, in addition to its profound calming and growth-inducing effects, oxytocin influences the immune system too. And studies show that couples with long-term elevated oxytocin levels even live longer. They have higher pain tolerance, lower blood pressure, and are less prone to stress. Remove or even reduce oxytocin, and we begin to see increased loneliness, depressive symptoms, and compounding negative effects on emotional regulation and self-esteem, as reviewed by Field (2010).

And for the greatest proof on the effects of depriving people of social touch, I’d invite you to look into the greatest social experiment of its kind in recent history.

It’s called The Pandemic.

During those gruelling years of COVID-19, we all stayed indoors, unable to meet—let alone touch—our loved ones. For months on end, worldwide quarantine served as the largest and longest-running social experiment of its kind, almost as if meant to answer the question on everybody’s mind back then: “What if we took away people’s ability to touch each other?”

Well, years later, the results are in.

Loneliness shot up, along with every other parameter that caused mental health issues: depression, anxiety, fear, feelings of neglect, abandonment, resurfacing of old traumas—you name it. It was found that due to social distancing and decreased social touch, there came an alarming increase in mood and anxiety symptoms, increased depression, and greater perceived loneliness — even when other social contact remained.

Psychologist Dr. Martin Grunwald at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Leipzig explains, “Physical contact is absolutely essential to the existence of our species. If it’s missing for too long, physical, and above all psychological damage can occur.”

That doesn’t look promising.

A Society That Took “Do NOT Touch” Too Literally

I remember when I’d go to the supermarket with my parents as a child. It was always a wonderful, and quite inquisitive experience. I was naturally curious, particularly about really anything behind glass counters—cheese, sour delicacies, even poultry. I’d often lean on the glass to take a closer look, which is when mum or dad would remind me “See what this sign says here? DO NOT TOUCH!” Well, it seems to me that, as a society, we’ve taken this warning ridiculously out of context and applied it where it hurts us the most.

It is no secret that skyrocketing screen times have caused a huge drop in face-to-face interactions. Online interactions and the rising work-from-home culture decrease the daily amount of touch we receive, and not without significant consequences on our wellbeing. We’ve created a world where we touch our phones and tablets far more than we touch other people. The virtual has all but replaced the in-person.

Nowadays, children and young people are growing up in an alarmingly isolated environment. Their ever-more physically deprived world has caused a normalisation of lower levels of touch. No longer is hugging with wide-open arms between friends seen as normal, particularly in male-to-male interactions. Women seem to have been able to successfully preserve their natural instinct for hugs in their friendships, though the rates of positive social touch between women is also on the decline—albeit less severely than their male-to-male counterparts.

These are alarming developments for our species, which has depended for hundreds of millennia on the power of gentle, positive, non-erotic touch for the feelings of safety needed to ensure psychological harmony, emotional equilibrium and strong social bonds. The depth of one’s connection to others can be substantially limited by a lack of tactile interactions. And it’s a self-sustaining vicious cycle. Lack of touch creates an invisible barrier between people, which makes them less willing to engage in positive social touch, further undermining our already fragile social tapestry.

Experts have been sounding the alarm on the rise in loneliness in society. Loneliness has become so pervasive that experts have given it a chilling name: ‘The Loneliness Epidemic’.

“Loneliness is just as big of a health threat,” Dr. Grunwald warns “as nicotine and alcohol consumption.” And the consequences, as you might imagine by now, are particularly grave. When we are lonely, the body feels we’ve lost the protection of our group, and begins sounding the alarm. Stress hormones flood the body, bringing with it higher risk of heart attacks, strokes, depression, and over time, mortality. And with the chances of an early death from loneliness hovering just below the 50 percent mark, far higher than the odds of an early death from smoking, diabetes and pollution (which are around 35 percent), we have to ask a brutally honest question: How did we get here in the first place?

The Individualistic Society

What we perhaps have missed in the discourse around fixing this ‘pandemic’ of loneliness, is the fact that what lonely people don’t receive is … touch. But why have rates of touch fallen under the watch of modern civilization?

Part of the answer may lie in the changing societal paradigms under the curse of late modernity: Neoliberal individualism. In everyday life, many men—including myself—experience a real discomfort around platonic, male-to-male touch, even in contexts where comfort or reassurance would otherwise feel natural. While this discomfort is often experienced as emerging alongside increased visibility of diverse sexual identities, research in social psychology and masculinity studies suggests that men’s avoidance of same-sex touch is shaped by persistent homophobia and rigid masculinity norms that frame such touch as a threat to heterosexual identity (Anderson, 2009; Herek, 2000; Floyd, 2006).

Now, I have nothing against the gay movement — I personally have friends who are gay. Their preferences are none of my business, and I certainly do not intend to judge them. My contention is that, one of the challenges of modernity and its new social system is that it has brought with it a deep, tectonic shift in what is considered normal in the social contract between males. I’ll just go right ahead and confess it: I personally hesitate to even ask any of my male friends for a hug—leaving it to my gal (female) friends alone to fulfil this fundamentally crucial yet undermined human need.

Fears of Peers

The decline in peer-to-peer tactile interactions is especially alarming. The ever-more pervasive soccer mum culture, what Nassim Nicholas Taleb aptly names “the touristification” of our lives, is at the heart of the issue. It is safe to assert that overprotective parenting is on the list of suspects for this general fall in ability to give or receive touch, especially amongst men.

I personally have experienced this since an early age when my mum used to tell me to never let anyone touch me, not even if in jest or joke. I do appreciate the intention—it was meant to protect me, after all. But, if it wasn’t for my insatiable curiosity overriding that early programming I would probably still have been that same shy young man who’s averse to anyone ‘touching him, even if in jest or joke.’

It is not hard to see how this initially benign protectiveness can easily lose context and spill into other areas. Think of all those moments when we held ourselves back from crying on the shoulder of a friend, or refrained from asking for a hug at a challenging time when reassurance of safety — not touristifying boundary-setting measures — is what we needed the most. The rise in men and women who are afraid of letting their romantic partner touch them is yet another glaring proof of how early childhood programming under the excuse of ‘protectiveness’ can lead to adults incapable of providing and/or receiving gentle touch even from those closest to them.

We’ve created a world where no one, not even naturally curious kids, can experiment or live freely. A world where skepticism, cynicism and a general, pervasive atmosphere of distrust has taken hold. Fellows, how sustainable is this really?

Naturally, this has caused an over-reliance on romantic relationships for one of our most basic needs—gentle, platonic touch—and has led to an overvaluing of romantic relationships (where touch is, thankfully, still normalised) and an undervaluing of friendships. Again, this is especially the case amongst young men, who are disproportionately affected due to their neoliberally-heightened aversion towards interpersonal touch. You can read more about the overvaluing of romantic relationships in my flagship article Everyone wants to fall in love, but few are willing to fall in friendship.

A Starved Society Built On Tech

Unfortunately, the rise of artificial intelligence made things only far worse. I’ve had a friend who was suffering from a problem in her relationship, and instead of seeking solace and/or advice from me or another of her friends, she went and confided everything to ChatGPT.

Granted, there’s nothing wrong per se in using A.I. for advice, if that subject matter warrants it—if the topic is historical, legal, technical or scientific. I use A.I. to inform myself about historical events, gain insights into technical matters, and, in some contexts, broaden my scientific understanding. I used A.I. to refine some of my writings and gain more experience about narrative arts. So this isn’t anti-A.I. ranting; it’s about something far more pernicious.

It seems we are entering an era where people replace human advice with machine reasoning. And I’m sure the story of my friend isn’t unique, but it adds to the mounting anecdotal evidence that reinforces the notion of how we’re slowly creating a society where resorting to technology for solving emotional human problems is as normalised as googling the population count of Malta. In essence, we are sleepwalking into a world where we’re not just outsourcing our technical knowledge from A.I., but relying on it for guidance on matters that are deeply human.

More Touch, Not More Tech

As the pandemic showed us, what we long for isn’t more tech, it’s more touch. I wonder when we, as a civilisation, as a modern society, will finally wake up to the most uncomfortable truth of all: that seeking technological solutions to deeply and intrinsically human problems is no different than running in place—we may get the feeling that we’re going somewhere, when in fact, we aren’t any closer to the fulfillment we so long for.