Why touch

The role that touch played in all of that growing was immediately clear. It is the dominant sense at the start of life, and we would be lost without it. I remember the first time my daughter noticed her thumb and that there was a space between her face and her digits.

The way to bridge that gap was to bring her hand to her face. And that, to her, was one of her first revelations, one of her first smiles. It is no accident that in those first couple of years everything is a journey, from first touching something to picking an object up to putting it into the mouth to confirm its reality. We can access it anytime we want. Through compassionate touch, we are afforded direct access to safety, love, abundance, and connectedness.

It brings us into deep communion with each other and with ourselves in the healthiest of ways. Your partner on the receiving end gets to feel their stress and pain melt while you get a direct experience of bliss. He takes us on a journey into how touch has grown in importance in the scientific world and puts us on the forefront of some of those discoveries. Gopnik shares that even in the scientific community, knowledge of the richness and diversity of this sense is relatively new.

I love and resonate deeply with that truth. Our ability to find balance, to breathe deeply, to hold onto stress, to be sick, to be well, to have good days and bad, and whatever our deepest thoughts are… it is all expressed on our skin.

With our inner life, our stress, our joys, our biology all available at skin level, it shows that touching that skin with love, kindness, and awareness can have dramatic effects on those being touched and those doing the touching. One idea Linden shared that I had never considered before is comparing the lack of touch with the loss of other senses.

Many may fear going deaf or blind, and the subsequent struggles that are likely to come with it. At the same time, there are countless stories of people who overcome those challenges to live full, happy, and productive lives. Stevie Wonder is blind and has made some of the most beloved music of modern times. Vagus is one of the 12 cranial nerves, and it has a lot of branches all over the body from the gastrointestinal system and the heart to our vocal chords and so forth.

We have measured vagal activity and that increases, and with that, you get a decrease in cortisol, the stress hormone. You get a decrease in Substance P, that senses pain. We consider yoga a form of self-touch, self-massage, rubbing your limbs against the floor or the ground, and we get very similar effects.

TF: They injected a cold germ into these people who were in the study, and those who had more hugs had a better immune response to the cold virus. And then [there are] some studies showing that if you get hugged by your partner before a stressful condition like giving a speech or doing math problems, people do better. TF: We did one study where we had the elderly people massaging babies versus receiving massage, and we found that the effects were greater when they were giving the massage rather than receiving.

JJ: Are there lessons we can learn from France and other cultures in terms of how they experience touching? TF: I think we need to have more touch in the school system. I would say we can have kids giving each other back rubs.

This story was originally published by A Beautiful Perspective. Become a subscribing member today. Tiffany Field. Prof Banissy adds: "Touch plays a really important role from the earliest stages of life; it's deeply linked to how we form social bonds, and these have been shown to be one of the biggest predictors of mortality. So, although a year of social distancing has heightened awareness of how close contact can spread infection, there is such a thing as being too cautious, experts say.

In our survey in the early days of the pandemic, 54 per cent of people said they had too little touch in their lives. Other research has shown that the proportion of people missing touch has increased to 60 and 70 per cent since then. In fact, a new study by psychologists at University College London and Royal Holloway, University of London, could be the first to show the effects of touch deprivation on mental health during Covid In a study of 1, participants in the UK, France and Mexico who had been practising social distancing or had been in lockdown for an average of However, not everyone is craving a cuddle.

The study showed that desire for contact was related to personality type. People who are more introverted tended to dislike touch more than extraverted people. Especially, parents and children and even grandchildren can participate in Touch together, which is something FIT encourages as a community sport. Everyone can play Touch, no matter if you have a disability, if you are new to the country or if you have never heard about the sport before. Courtesy of Touch Football Australia.

Home What is Touch?