Episode 6 - Touch Deprivation

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hi, everybody. This is Dr. Todd. Welcome to another episode of the Dr. Todd Podcast. And today we're going to be talking about something that many of us may not think about much or may take for granted, but it is very important for our mental and physiological health. And that is touch. Touch is something that we all need as human beings. As we evolved through time, right, human beings were around each other. We needed each other. We cooperated. And so there would, we would sit next to each other, we would share sleeping quarters, we would engage in coordinated activities, whether it be hunting or fishing or moving stuff, building things, preparing food, rearing children. All of those things involved touching each other and being in proximity with each other. And because of that, the human brain has evolved to always be seeking that as a way of feeling grounded and feeling okay, as though, you know what, we are we're connected, we are engaged with the world around us. And when we are deprived of touch, then we can experience a whole host of uh of problems, such as an increased sense of loneliness, uh, an increased sensitivity to stress, kind of a low grade but constant state of feeling irritable and stressed and difficulty sleeping. I mean, there's just a whole host of things that that we experience when we just simply don't have enough touch, when we don't experience enough affectionate touch. And in fact, studies have shown that uh one of the main stress hormones that circulates in the blood is a hormone that's called cortisol. And cortisol is designed to help the body uh uh address an injury. It is it's kind of an inflammatory hormone that the body uses whenever we experience some kind of stress or uh or injury, it is designed to be used in the short term to help the body heal. However, when we experience cortisol over the long term, uh when we just have kind of a chronic low-grade, elevated um level of cortisol circulating in the blood, it not only affects our physical body and causes premature aging and blood sugar dysregulation and uh changes in sleep patterns, um, but it also has it has a detrimental effect on the brain itself. So uh cortisol over the long term can actually uh kill some of the brain cells inside the brain, which can lead to uh early dementia and problems when in cognition and emotional regulation and things like that. When we experience touch, um there are also some hormones that are released that have the opposite effect, right? So when we experience being touched, and we actually in our skin, we have nerve endings that they're called tactile C nerves that are specifically tuned to the experience of touch. And so when we when we get touched, when we experience, when we hug or hold hands, or there's get a massage, or there's some kind of nurturing touch that we experience. And it doesn't have to be sexual, right? It doesn't have to be sexual touch, but just, you know, um as some kind of nurturing, caring touch. Then the level of cortisol drops. Um, there's a release of a couple of other hormones. Um, there's one called dopamine, which is associated with the experience of pleasure. There's a hormone called oxytocin, which is a kind of a human bonding uh hormone. That's one of the hormones that's released when a mother is nursing that helps stimulate the bond between the mother and child. And oxytocin is also another one, another hormone that is released during stress, uh during sex, that uh helps facilitate the bonding between partners. And the third one is serotonin, which is a neurochemical, a brain chemical, that is responsible for helping to stabilize or elevate mood. In fact, there's a whole class of antidepressants that are called SSRIs, which stands for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, such as Prozac and Zoloft and all of those. And the mechanism of action of those antidepressants is to is to elevate levels of serotonin in the brain to help people who are feeling depressed and lethargic and have a depressed mood. Now, it doesn't work for everybody, but that's the mechanism of action for those, that class of antidepressants. And so literally, just through human touch, not only do we experience the physical pleasure of that touch, but it also helps to elevate mood through the release of serotonin and also just helps feel uh stimulate that sense of bonding, that sense of connection, that sense of being present with others. And in society that has become so virtual and digital, and where, you know, touch is oftentimes, I don't really want to call it demonized, but but viewed with suspect. It's like, ooh, why are you getting close to me? And oh, you know, I mean, it is we have a tendency in society to to shun touch or be very wary of touch. Um, that we, you know, our our bodies just don't get in general, get enough of it, unless you come from a family where there's a lot of hugging and a lot of, you know, uh people are very affectionate and there's a lot of touch. But the reality is that for most people, especially once you get into adulthood, um, and especially once your children get over, get older, many um, many people just don't get enough touch in their lives. And so they they will suffer some of the um physiological and mental side effects of that. There's a term that is called touch deprivation that was coined by researchers in this area that really describes the phenomenon of stress on the body and on the mind that is associated with a lack of affectionate touch. And in this doesn't necessarily have to be just to a human being. We can actually get some of those same benefits by, for example, holding a cat or petting a cat uh or a dog. Uh goldfish, not so much, because they're not particularly affectionate, but kind of the warm, cuddly, fuzzy animals that that we can caress and touch and they sit on us and all of that. That touch counts as well. So if you're if you don't have a partner, uh, but you have a nice cat or you have a nice dog or something like that, um, you know, the their touch matters too. There was a couple of interesting studies that were done regarding touch. Um the first was back in the 1950s, there was a guy by the name of Harry Harlow at the University of Wisconsin. And you know, many you may have heard of this experiment before where um Harlow would take these baby monkeys, and the the whole experiment was, well, um, is food more important to the monkey to get from a mother, or is comfort, is that kind of contact comfort more important to get from a mother? Because the the thought at the time was that it was all about the food. And so what Hartlow did is he created these two dummy monkeys, and one of them was just made out of uh out of wire. I mean, it was like chicken wire fencing that he made into a tube with a little monkey head on the top. And he would put a bottle with, you know, with the nipple sticking out that the baby monkey could go up and uh so he could feed. And then next to that, or a little ways away, separated by a little partition, was another monkey, same size, same basic shape, also made out of chicken wire. But this time, um this one did not have any food, same head, but it was covered with really comfortable terry cloth. So, like a nice, nice cushy towel. And what was interesting is that when these baby monkeys were hungry, they would go to the wire monkey to get food. But uh, as soon as they were done eating, as soon as they had food, they would run over and want to be cuddled by the soft and cozy uh terrycloth monkey. And another, another part of that experiment that they found is that whenever one of these young monkeys was distressed, they would instantly run over to the terry cloth mom, right? Where they felt that contact comfort of that terry cloth. And that was a little bit of a surprising result because at the time everybody thought that, no, the only thing that matters is the food, that that's the nourishment, because that was important for the physical survival of the monkey. So they thought that all of these baby monkeys would just kind of cling to that wire monkey because that's where the food was. And they found that that just wasn't the case at all. Another case, and this one is really pretty sad, um, happened in Romania. And this this really came to light in the 1980s and and early 90s, where at the time the uh the new leadership, uh Sosescu, who took over the um the government of Romania, his philosophy was that in order for that country to really become vibrant and become successful and to be able to compete in the world marketplace and become financially uh financially grow and be a player on the world stage, is that they needed to increase their population. And so what they did is uh they outlawed birth control and they really, really encouraged everybody to have lots of sex and to have lots of kids. And uh you can imagine what followed is that this impoverished country where everybody was poor suddenly was producing thousands and thousands and thousands of babies that the parents couldn't afford to raise. And so these parents would have these kids and then hand them over to orphanages that were run by the state. And there were tens of thousands, upwards of a couple hundred thousand of these children over a period of about a decade or so that um that were turned over to these state-run orphanages who also didn't have a lot of funding. And to make matters worse, the uh the physicians at the time, who really, I mean, at and we have to give them a little bit of a break, right? There just wasn't there wasn't the awareness of how important human contact was, right? There was still this mindset that as long as they were food, you know, fed and they were clothed and they were occasionally bathed, that all the kids would be fine, right? So they they would line up these iron cribs in row after row after row and put these kids in these cribs. And out of a fear of spreading, of disease spreading, of nurses inadvertently spreading disease among these different kids, the nurses were told to minimize their contact with these children. I it it sounds just utterly horrifying to think about that. But uh most of these kids just sat all day in an iron crib uh with no very little, if no human interaction, only feeding time, and then they would be fed and put right back down once a week uh or so. They would get a quick bath, uh, their clothes would be changed, and again back down into the iron crib. The results of that were just absolutely horrifying to see because many of these kids, their their weight was like in the the lowest 5% of children that age. I mean, they just weren't growing, they weren't communicating. And one of the one of the people that actually visited the site commented on how there's this huge, huge room full of these cribs full of babies, and none of them were crying. And they were just all laying there silent, just kind of blankly staring into space. And they weren't crying because they had learned that there was going to be no one there to comfort them. If they fussed, they would there would be no one to be there to pick them up, to hold them, to feed them, to change them, to do any of that. And so these kids just went into a state of dissociation where they they just were completely disconnected with their emotions. Many of them were nonverbal, they couldn't speak, they didn't pick up on cues from other kids, and sometimes, you know, they would sometimes there would be a little bit of interaction between kids uh in in different cribs, but a lot of them would just sit there and and just rock and you know try to self-soothe and all of that, but were pretty disengaged from the world around them. When that story came out, I mean, obviously, I mean, people in the in the Western countries in the West were just utterly horrified by what they saw. And there was a massive number of these kids who were adopted into homes, uh, both in Europe and the United States. And uh, and what they what they found, and when following up on a lot of these kids, is that the moment that these kids started having physical interaction again, they were being touched, they were being spoken to, they were being interacted with, their body weight increased, their cognitive development started to improve. And uh, and you know, I mean, even though they were going to be developmentally delayed because of the amount of time that they just sat in these iron cribs, um, they they really started to do well. And many of them, over a period of a decade or so, were able to pretty much catch up with the other kids around them. Now, obviously, some just never were able to fully recover. Some of the early childhood experiences of that lack of responsiveness with caretakers will is gonna have an impact on how they're able to relate to partners later in life. But at least as far as cognitive development and physical growth and all of that, once those kids were able to start getting touched and interacted with, and there was engagement that they were able to develop. There was another interesting study that was done by a researcher. Well, it was led by this researcher by the name of James, James Cohn. And what he was looking at was the subjective experience of pain and measuring brain activity in an in what was called an fMRI. So it was like an MRI machine, but they were able to look at blood flow patterns and look at areas of the brain that were activated during the experience of pain. So the way that this experiment was set up is he would have he'd have a person go into an MRI machine, their head would be inside the actual tube, and uh then the rest of their body would be exposed. And then he would have this device that would generate an electric, a painful electric shock to a part of their body, and usually it was like a foot or an ankle or something like that. And so um they would shock the person, and the person would be like, oh, that hurt. And they could measure, um, they could measure what parts of the brain lit up. And that they were able to measure those and and see what areas of the brain were activated when um when the person experienced pain. Then they had another, then they did the same thing, except they had a loved one of the person in the MRI come in and hold their hand while they were going through the experiment. And what they found was fascinating, even though the same areas of the brain lit up when the shock was administered, people didn't feel as much pain associated with it simply by having another person there with them holding their hand. It's fascinating, isn't it? That just the the sheer presence of another person and and somebody holding our hand can help reduce our experience of pain. And you know that that experiment was done with physical pain, but I I have found the same to be true with emotional pain, right? It's like if somebody is just there with us, if somebody can hold our hand, if somebody can hold us, if we can get a hug, if somebody puts a hand on our shoulder, if you know, if somebody is just there with us, it all of a sudden makes the the pain of life or the pain of our experience more um easier to tolerate. Even though it doesn't remove it, things just don't feel as intense as when we are all alone. So the bottom line with all of this is that we as human beings need a touch, we need to be held, we need to be comforted, uh, and we need, you know, we need to be hugged, we just need physical contact, we need people around us. That's how we're wired, that's what makes us human. And when we don't get enough of that, it is going to impact us both physically and mentally. And so what I would encourage you to do is if you are not getting much human touch in your life, if you are not getting a lot of human interaction, it is going to be important for um to find some ways of making that happen. And if you are fortunate enough to be in a uh in a committed relationship or you have very close friends that uh that can you know where close physical contact is um is something that you can ask for and um you know and and get on a regular basis, that's great. But if you're not, then there are a couple Of things that you may want to consider doing. If you have the means to afford it, getting regular massages is one way of affecting the body, affecting all of those touch sensors and all of that. Because even though massages are non-sexual, they are very nurturing and they're very intimate. And so all those nerve fibers in our brain and our body respond to that touch, just like if we were being held by a loved one, right? And it has the added benefit of making us more relaxed and increasing circulation and like improving our health and doing all of that other kind of stuff. But the touch piece of that is very important. There's also a benefit in having an animal. Having something that just unconditionally loves you, no matter how flawed or imperfect of a human being you are. They are always just excited to see you. They want to jump on your lap. They just, they don't care about your day. They don't care if you, you know, experienced road rage on your way home because the person in front of you was going too slow. They just don't, they just don't care. All they care about is just, they're just glad to see you and they want to be by you. And uh cuddling and holding and caressing an animal can also have a very similar effect. It'll and it stimulates those same areas of the brain and those same nerve endings in our body for touch and will help us feel a lot better. And so, really, any way that you can increase the amount of physical touch that you get in a day will not only benefit you emotionally, but it'll also just make your physical body more relaxed and healthier. I hope you found this episode helpful, and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Talk to you soon.