Touching and being touched by the people we love is more than a biological necessity, it is part of our language, it is to feed emotional needs and validate affection, erase fears and receive a lot of oxytocin as a gift.
Letting all of this be lost not only creates a thirst for human contact, but also causes increased stress and even a physical discomfort that appears more frequently or more strongly.
Skin is our most extensive sensory organ. Touch, on the other hand, is the first sense we acquire with smell.
It is also known that practices such as skin-to-skin contact with babies (especially premature ones) promote the somatosensory development of your brain, while optimizing your cognitive, perceptual, social and physical development.
Humans, like other animals, need this contact and not just in the early stages of life.
What has already been observed is that in many nursing homes where the elderly receive hugs, affection and physical contact that relates to gestures of affection, they have an improvement in their processes of care and communication, in addition, they feel less tired and their joint pain also decreases.
Our brain needs this type of contact (always offered by people who make sense to us) to find that emotional balance that promotes a state of psychological calm.
Today, science is discovering even more processes associated with touch than we knew recently. Let’s look at more data below.
“We forget how important it is to be touched, but we need them to survive” – Camilla Luncberg-
Do people need to touch and be touched to communicate their feelings, help, receive, and comfort?We have known this for a long time and science has also shown us these facts empirically in recent years. Now there’s an even more interesting look.
This work caught so much attention that the experiment was subsequently re-conducted at the University of Miami. Tiffany Field, director of the University of Miami’s Institute of Tactile Research, reached the following conclusions.
A physical therapist uses his hands not only as a working tool; through them, you can also experience worries, tensions, unfavorable emotions that intensify contractures.
In turn, these expert hands not only improve mobility and relieve pain, but also have a wonderful ability to convey well-being.
The authors of this study highlight the need to deepen it, repeating it with a wider sample of the population, in fact, this is already happening in countries such as Spain and the United Kingdom, however, with this first step, we can already establish some hypotheses:
Not so long ago, neurologists thought that the somatosensory cortex only allowed us to decode characteristics as basic as if a surface is smooth or rough, if its temperature is high or cold.
Now, as we move forward in understanding the sense of touch, we discover that it is also related to emotions.
“Touch is a much more sophisticated way and must communicate emotions, more versatile than voice or facial expression” – Matthew Hertenstein-
This area of our brain is also linked to social and emotional components, for example, it helps us to perceive the tension or anxiety in our children and to seek their closeness to embrace them, thanks to this contact we offer comfort, safety and affection. .
Michael Spezio, a psychologist at Scripps College and author of this study, shows us that playing is not just a physical experience, it’s an emotional experience and a kind of language, it’s a mechanism by which we can understand and respond without need. for words.
It is often said that a person never has as many sensory experiences through touch as when he was a child, is it because cultural factors and the way we are educated facilitate or stop?But they usually hinder our ability to maintain this type of communication through hugs. and hugs in adulthood.
We even know that sports team players use touch (a touch, a hug, a pat on the back to congratulate) to lean on a moment of celebration or encouragement in the face of difficulty between teammates.
These are times when you have to use something more intense than a word. It’s working. Therefore, retrieving and valuing such languages is critical.
Because touching and being touched goes far beyond a biological need, it is a social basis that allows us to improve our emotional universe.