‘THE LANGUAGE OF TOUCH IS ESSENTIAL’
Touch has arguably always been the most underrated of the senses, but one big lesson of the pandemic has been to show us how critical it is to our emotional wellbeing, says palliative care doctor Rachel Clarke
Dr Rachel Clarke on why physical contact is key to our wellbeing
When was the last time you reached out and clasped another hand in yours? Or flung your arms around a friend and felt a flood of joy? We are so used to living inside our skins that we rarely give touch a second thought. Touch is underrated and remarkable. Hugging, holding, caressing, grasping, reaching, rubbing, stroking… this is how we make sense of the world around us. Life is a tactile experience. It’s no accident that we are moved by things we find ‘touching’ and call our emotions ‘feelings’.
Touch is the first of our senses to develop in the womb; a foetus can feel before it can hear, smell or taste. Touch has a critical influence on development, affecting who we like and dislike, inspiring cooperation, and creating and cementing social bonds.
Why is it so crucial for our emotional wellbeing? The key is how it links the outside world to the brain. The skin is a tactile bridge, using several billion nerve endings, neurotransmitters and chemical receptors to transmit the world beyond our bodies deep into the brain. Skin-to-skin touching releases endorphins and oxytoxin, both of which activate the brain’s reward and compassion centres. Studies have shown that simply holding the hand of a loved one as they anticipated going through a stressful experience can deactivate the stress-related regions of their brain, while touch between
mammals can act as a natural painkiller. Scientists have even found that touch can improve the health of patients with fibromyalgia and rheumatoid arthritis. Hands, it turns out, really are healing.
For the past four years, I’ve worked as a palliative care doctor and I regularly witness the astonishing power of human touch to comfort, console and heal. Perhaps the most poignant evidence for the importance of touch is the psychological damage experienced by those who are denied it. In the past year this has been shown in the most heartbreaking way, when social distancing forced us into a bleak, touch-free existence. Those living in care homes have been cut off from their loved ones. Adults yearn to hug their parents and grandparents. Children have learned to flinch from the hands of others. Single people living alone often struggle as much as the elderly, swapping social lives and dating for an existence as reluctant recluses.
My own mother, aged 78, having painstakingly constructed a new life for herself after widowhood three years ago with friends, neighbours and community groups, suddenly found herself in self-isolation. My siblings and I were fiercely proud of how bravely Mum had built this vital, yet fragile, new social network and watching Covid-19 reduce it to rubble was one of the pandemic’s particular cruelties. Denied the intimacy of touch, we resorted to words and pictures. Every week, my children, Finn and Abbey, posted letters to their granny, adorned with felt-tipped unicorns, love hearts and penguins. And when, at last the first lockdown was lifted, last July, I walked into Mum’s kitchen to see the cupboards plastered with every one of those letters – the most moving reminder of how much she’d ached for those lost cuddles with her grandchildren.
We communicate love through the tips of our fingers
Skin hunger
The pandemic has caused a surge in what is often referred to as ‘skin hunger’, or in neuroscientist terms, ‘affection deprivation’. We are wired for touch, and skin hunger arises when this basic biological need is denied. Often, it feels like grief. Lack of physical proximity can trigger the same kinds of emotions (sadness, emptiness and yearning) as a bereavement. In the hospital where I work, one of the most painful sights during the pandemic has been the handful of cars in the hospital car park. Each contained a relative, longing to be at their loved one’s side, yet banned by Covid visiting restrictions. Cold tarmac was as close as they could get.
Just before my father died from cancer, touch spoke of our love when words had run dry. Once, as I lay beside him on the bed where he dozed, I found myself overcome with tears. Quietly, tenderly, while I sobbed inconsolably, Dad took my hand in his and pressed it down on to my chest. ‘Rachel,’ he said, ‘you know I won’t be gone. I will keep living in here. And in Finn and in Abbey.’ He was right. That gesture, the warmth of his thin fingers on my skin, will be carried in my heart. For the last days and nights of my father’s life, his hand was passed from one of ours to another’s. Not for one moment was Dad alone. From palm to palm, love flowed.
Like so many things in life, we don’t realise how much we depend on human
Life is a tactile experience
touch until we no longer have it. Anyone deprived of touch for long periods is at risk of stress, depression, loneliness and anxiety, but those living alone are particularly vulnerable. ‘I just want to hold someone,’ a dear friend kept telling me during the first lockdown, enduring months of self-isolation while receiving cancer treatment. One day, when we were finally able to meet in person, we stood in her garden beneath dappled August sunlight, and invented, through sheer desperation, the ‘backwards hug’. With hands obsessively sanitised, I gently wrapped my arms around her frail, thin waist from behind (our way of making it safe for her so our faces were separated). As I pressed the warmth of my cheek upon her spine, she gripped my arms like her life depended on it, pulled me in as though my body was sustenance. It felt electric, uncanny, a jolt of pure energy. It was love that surged through our skin. We began to giggle, the joy irrepressible. And when we pulled apart, crying and laughing, her face was beaming pure radiance.
In hospitals and hospices, we have discovered quite how painful it can be to be physically cut off from our patients. My colleague Tracey summed it up when she said it was like being torn in two different directions at once. ‘As soon as someone with the virus coughs, your natural reaction is to stand back,’ she told me. ‘Normally, my instinct is always to move in, to be closer. That internal dilemma has been horrible.’
If there is one thing I have learned from this terrible disease that turns physical contact into a potentially mortal threat, it is this: I am inescapably warm-blooded. I’m a mammal who craves contact like a fish needs water. Every hug with my children, every snuggle at bedtime feeds my soul as much as theirs. We communicate love through the tips of our fingers. And even when sheathed in a blue plastic glove, one human hand still conducts warmth to another.
Perhaps the greatest lesson for us all is never to take tactility for granted again. To remember that we speak through our skin, and that the language of hugs and embraces is essential for health. ‘No man is an island,’ wrote the poet John Donne, yet at one time or another, Covid-19 has made islands of us all. Here’s to cherishing our post-pandemic freedom, when it comes, to dispense the one drug that comforts and soothes – and costs nothing at all.
Breathtaking: Inside The NHS In A Time Of Pandemic by Dr Rachel Clarke (Little, Brown) is out now