Are We Touch Starved?

I think so many of us are touch starved, far more than we realise. We move through the world guarded, rushed, or isolated by circumstance. We’re connected ont’ interweb, but physically alone. And our bodies feel that absence more than we admit. And when touch goes missing, we tend to unravel.

Not being touched leaves us feeling dysregulated, irritable, lonely and depressed.

We need touch the way we need breath: to soothe ourselves, to regulate our nervous system, to feel held in a world that feels uncertain and fast. Touch is our earliest language, our very first sense. Before we have words, before we can recognise faces, before we can interpret tone, we understand contact. We know what it means to be stroked, held, rocked. We know safety through skin.

The newborn understands touch much better than they understand sight or sound. The elderly lose their vision, their hearing, their balance. But they don’t lose touch.

Read more here.