Hello friends and welcome to my twenty-fifth blog.
Before I start on the blog, I would like to thank you all so much for your outpouring of love, care, kindness, concern, empathy, and sympathy following the passing of our Muz last week. We are just the luckiest family to have so many amazing and wonderful people in our lives.
The power of touch. An interesting topic considering the world we are living in at the moment.
From the moment we are born to the final days of our lives, touch acts as a central aspect of the human experience, impacting our physical, mental, and emotional health, and quite literally shaping the way we go through our lives. Every human on this earth needs physical touch.
Large parts of our brains are involved in making our sense of touch and our skin has billions of cells that process information about this. A friendly touch like hugging your partner or linking arms with a friend calms your stress responses down, decreasing your cortisol levels. This positive touch activates a big bundle of nerves in your body that improves your immune system, regulates digestion, and helps you to sleep well. It also helps release the neurochemicals that make you happy, dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin which we chatted about in a previous blog.
We crave physical contact from our parents and our caretakers from the tine that we enter this world. In fact, physical touch is one of the first ways we learn to communicate our needs. Skin to skin contact is vital for mental and emotional and physical health. Touch is our fundamental language of connection. Children who do not receive a positive touch in early childhood have shown cognitive and developmental delays.
Covid-19 has changed our freedom to do this and this is having an enormous impact on so many folks all over. With individuals around the world practising social distancing, masses are really feeling the effects of a lack of human touch. Shaking someone’s hand, like a colleague or giving a friend a hug is not allowed at the moment and for the foreseeable future. Could you have imagined this happening ever? Unfortunately, the elbow bumps and foot shakes are not really doing it for us, as novel and creative as they may be. This social isolation leads to loneliness and is a huge concern for those quarantining alone or people quarantining with others whom they have no physical contact with. When we experience a lack of touch, we may start to experience feelings of hopelessness, depression, anxiety, stress, or we may have sleep issues. This leads many people to experience skin hunger or being touch deprived. Skin hunger or touch deprivation is a very real thing and can severely harm your mental health. These four words just sound so sad.
We need to manage this for our total health, so I decided that I needed to research, explore, and find ways in which we can do this during this time of lockdown and social distancing.
- If you live alone there are a number of things you could do. Give yourself a hug, by crossing your arms across your chest and holding your upper arms firmly and tightly. Do this for twenty seconds. If you are fortunate enough to have a dog or cat, cuddle and stroke them as much as you can. Cuddle a stuffed animal or soft pillow, take a long hot bath or shower, swaddle yourself in a blanket, play with textures against your skin like a feather, silk, or leather, or brush your skin with a brush. You could also apply lotion to your body. These are all actions you can perform without anyone else.
- Talking to other people has a big part to play in helping stave off that touch deprivation. Phone a friend who may be in need or who may be a great listener and a positive and loving influence in your life. Once you have made contact, connect with the person by asking them about their health and welfare, showing your compassion for them. You can do a similar thing by setting up a video call with a friend or friends or a family member, trying again to take a few minutes at the start of the call to focus on really connecting with them by asking them how they are. More often than not, they will ask you the same question and you can chat and open up about your vulnerabilities, fear, and anxiety. You can laugh together and share silly stories, too. This can be mutually beneficial. They will feel good and you will too. This all without any actual physical contact with them.
- Dancing, singing, or doing yoga online with others can also be highly effective substitutes for physical contact. This may help your body release those previously mentioned neurochemicals responsible for happiness. I feel so good singing along to music, and am still one hundred percent convinced that there is a Kylie deep inside of me just waiting to be found! This can be also so much fun. The radio is also great but just make good choices here. We also need to be a little careful and to try to maintain a balance between digital time and time spent alone without social media. Remember we want this to make us feel better, not worse. Even in pandemic times, people still manage to post stuff that may make us feel yuk, so watch out for this.
- Let us also fill our bodies with delicious nutrient-dense foods and revel in this process. Let us exercise alone or online with a group and let’s keep our magnificent bodies moving and grooving. By managing our stress with meditation, routine, and kindness to ourselves (to name but a few previously mentioned), we can most definitely manage our skin hunger and touch deprivation.
Dr. Tzipi Strauss, the director of the Department of Neonatology, Safra Children’s Hospital, Sheba, Israel has an amazing model for the power of touch. These are the three C’s, and they really resonate with me. They are Contact, Connection, and Compassion. We make contact with ourselves or others as described above. Once we have done this, we connect with ourselves or others and we do this with compassion and love. More often than not, the compassion and connection and the contact are returned. Frik, I just love this!! It can be applied with or without physical contact, during and after pandemics, plagues, prohibition, time spent in prison, or even lockdowns!!
I have inadvertently and unknowingly applied these principles in my work with physical touch. In my own practice at home, I do some form of massage for most of my patients as part of their physio treatment. Since lockdown I have been covering for a physio friend who is at risk. Apart from enormously increasing the number of treatments, I am doing on a daily basis, I get to positively touch so many elderly folks who otherwise would not be touched positively at all. This ensures that my cortisol levels remain low, my serotonin levels remain high and my feel-good endorphins are so chuffed, not to mention my superb oxytocin levels. I believe that this enhances and improves their well-being too as I transfer some of my energy to them, fabulous for them and for hyper Hayles. This all done with shields and /or masks and loads of sanitizing before and after. It still saddens me that I was not able to do all this for Muz over the lockdown period, but I need to let this go. However, I was so blessed to be able to love and hug Muz just after her passing and this has helped me more than I could ever imagine.
Over this devastating time of our dear and most loved Muz passing, I have also been able to chat to and shed tears with most of my patients and they listen and are genuinely concerned and caring. We often share our sadness as many of them have had terrible losses. This helps them and me tremendously. So, we get to contact, connect and there is mutual compassion. I also get to chat to most of them about nutrition which is just awesome. I was also so blessed to have long conversations on the phone with Muz during lockdown and we both loved this.
So, folks, stay in, keep safe and healthy, and get that power of touch going, with or without physical contact.
Once we are able, and it is safe to do so, go and hug a friend, kiss a loved one, touch someone positively, shake someone’s hand, and appreciate and revel in this.
Tip number twenty-four
Let us appreciate the simple things in life, a beautiful sunset, the sounds of the birds singing in the morning, or the fact that we have a warm and comfortable bed to sleep in at night. These are some of life’s beautiful blessings.