[2021-07-26] The power of touch
A heartwarming video came up on my LinkedIn feed this morning. It's of a teacher greeting each of her young students by name and engaging them in a hug, high five, elbow bump or dance, depending on which of four pictures the student points to on the wall. There is so much I admire in her approach:
- She greets each student by name. (It reminds me of a quote by educator Justin Tarte: "Some students go an entire day at school without anyone saying their name. Be the adult who speaks to each student by name. Everyone loves to hear their name.")
- She offers the level of touch that each student chooses. She doesn't give everyone a hug, nor does she refrain from giving hugs to students who want and need that. The kids are in control: a hug, a high five, an elbow bump, or a no-touch dance. It's their choice.
- She provides pictures of the options, which is wonderful for kids who are more visual than auditory.
You can hear giggles coming from the classroom after the students pass through the doorway. What a wonderful way to get everyone's day off to a positive start.
A calming effect
I have long believed in the power of touch to connect people. Ten years ago, I wrote a blog post in which I recalled events that had occurred 10 years earlier, on September 11, 2001. It was an unusual day for reasons beyond the tragic events that would play out over the day. The Public Service was in the midst of a strike. I had gotten up at 5:00 a.m. so that I could head to work early to take the first shift as a management monitor on the picket line outside my office. When my shift ended at 9:00 a.m., I entered the lobby at 580 Booth Street in Ottawa and was greeted by a colleague who asked me whether I had heard that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Centre. The live footage showing smoke coming out of one of the Twin Towers was visible on a small monitor at the commissionaires’ desk. I assumed that the plane had been a small four-seater, and didn’t give it much thought.
I proceeded to my office. The few employees who had made it into work that day had congregated in a boardroom down the hall from my office to watch on television as the day's historic events unfolded. From time to time, I wandered over to the boardroom. On each visit, I learned new facts: not one but two planes had hit the Twin Towers; they had not been small planes but large aircraft; a third plane had crashed into the Pentagon and a fourth, into a field in Pennsylvania. Even then, the significance of the events had not sunk in. On my last visit to the boardroom, one of my employees told me: "The Twin Towers are gone." "What do you mean the Twin Towers are gone?" I asked. "They've collapsed," he replied. I was incredulous. The images on the television were horrific. It was at that moment that I started to feel afraid.
As I passed through the door of the boardroom to return to my office, a colleague reached out and put his hand on my shoulder. It is one of my most vivid memories of that day. Without saying a word, my colleague communicated so much: it’s okay; you’re not alone; this is scary. His touch had a calming effect that I will never forget.
A means of connection in the workplace
At the time I blogged about my 9/11 experience, I was reading an article in the Chief Happiness Officer blog. In his post The science of touch, blogger Alexander Kjerulf wrote about the value of touch in the workplace: "A hand shake, a high-five, a pat on the shoulder or even a hug—all of these are simple, effective ways to create better relationships at work—and thus better communication and more mutual respect."
I have hugged many colleagues over the course of my career, especially after spending a few days with them at a retreat or on business travel. Perhaps that physical contact was less fraught with risk because I'm a woman. Even so, I would ask my coworkers whether they were huggers. Some would say "hell yeah" and come in for a warm embrace. Others would say "no" or "not really" and we'd settle on a handshake. Like the teacher in the video, it was actually very easy to respect everyone's preferences.
As Kjerulf stated: "physical contact is a natural way of how we communicate and if you eliminate it from a workplace it will be much harder to create a happy workplace." Touch is one of the most immediate ways we can connect with each other.
A powerful form of communication
Kjerulf's post led me to an article in The New York Times indicating that researchers had found that physical contact can be a powerful form of communication. The article stated that "Momentary touches...—whether an exuberant high five, a warm hand on the shoulder, or a creepy touch to the arm—can communicate an even wider range of emotion than gestures or expressions, and sometimes do so more quickly and accurately than words." The article went on to say: "A warm touch seems to set off the release of oxytocin, a hormone that helps create a sensation of trust, and to reduce levels of the stress hormone cortisol."
That was certainly my experience when my colleague reassuringly put his hand on my shoulder on 9/11.
A modulator of stress and pain
The value of touch is perhaps more evident now than it has ever been. As we have followed public health measures to deal with the COVID pandemic over the last year, we have been working from home, isolating ourselves in our bubbles and distancing ourselves when we do meet. The absence of touch brought about by these drastic changes in our habits has had a negative effect on many of us.
Writing in The Guardian in January 2021 (Lost touch: how a year without hugs affects our mental health), author and journalist Eleanor Morgan stated:
As adults, we may not comprehend the importance of touch even when it disappears. "We might begin to realise that something is missing, but we won’t always know that it’s touch," says Prof Francis McGlone, a neuroscientist based at Liverpool John Moores University and a leader in the field of affective touch. "But when we talk about the problem of loneliness, we often ignore the obvious: what lonely people aren’t getting is touch."
Morgan quotes University of Oxford psychologist Robin Dunbar who contends that touch has a huge impact on our psychological and physical well-being and notes that close friends and family members touch each other more than they realize.
Morgan also quotes Dr. Katerina Fotopoulou, a professor of psychodynamic neuroscience at University College London:
"Touch is a modulator that can temper the effects of stress and pain, physical and emotional. We have seen in our research that a lack of touch is associated with greater anxiety," says Fotopoulou. "In times of high stress—the loss of a job, or a bereavement, for example—having more touch from others helps us cope better, particularly in calming the effects of [the stress hormone] cortisol." Even if we’re used to not being touched a lot, after a while the need can feel very physical—sometimes described as "skin hunger" or "touch hunger".
Perhaps I responded so enthusiastically to the video of the teacher hugging her students because I was envious of the human contact it reflected. I look forward to the day when we can once again hug our willing friends, family and coworkers, without fear or guilt.
