Human Touch Starvation?
Human touch starvation?
It is when a person does not experience enough positive physical contact over a significant period of time, fundamentally becoming ‘starved’ of human touch.
Human beings need very few things to survive. Our bare necessities can be stripped down to two things: food-water and shelter. Since we are not simply living, respiring amoebas, but intelligent, conscious individuals, we need a lot more than just food-water and shelter. Similar to the cells in our body requiring nutrients in order to function properly, our psyche requires human touch to maintain sanity.
The science
Physical contact produces a chemical reaction. One of these chemicals, and possibly the most well-known is called Oxytocin, one of the four primary chemicals in the brain that effect happiness; dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins are the others. The happiness hormone is responsible for a lot more than just making us feel good. Oxytocin lowers levels of stress hormones in the body, reduces blood pressure and has shown to increase the rate at which wounds heal. When we experience positive touch, our bodies literally get an immunity boost. The hormone also seems to play an important role in building relationships, being linked to how much we trust others. Low levels of oxytocin have been linked to antisocial behaviour and anxiety in humans.We have never been so many, and we have never been so alone. Not only the lack of positive touch, but the presence of negative touch is detrimental to the quality of life we experience. There are many reasons why people end up alone, or don’t get touched often, or choose not to be touched often. Whatever the case may be, they will be suffering both physically and mentally for it, and that’s where human touch therapy, massage, can really make a difference.
Miraculous massage
The reason massage therapy is called ‘therapy’ is because it’s a medically proven therapeutic treatment. When practised in a respectful, compassionate manner, massage can do so much more than just ease physical aches and pains.It can calm brewing storms within our minds, teach us to fully relax and let go, and allow us to appreciate the simplicity of a touch within massage technique. Massage has many physical benefits, that also comes with positive emotional and mental well being. The two are entwined and in a symbolic relationship. In other words, what affects one will reflect on the other.An examples on just how amazing massage therapy can be, take a 3 day long headache. A condition that can be cured by a very simple, relatively short massage. They are most likely due to the headache being a cause of either stress and/or muscle fatigue, injury or tension in the upper back, lower neck and scalp. The same goes for cases of insomnia, anxiety, muscular cramps and mobility issues. Massage can reach so many layers. Through skin, fascia, surface muscles and the deeper ones, even affecting the functioning of organs and blood flow.There’s many reasons people receive a massage treatment, and even if they don’t fully comprehend what happens in their body during a treatment, they know that it feels amazing, and that it is improving their overall health. They are not wrong.It has been proven, touch heals and has been utilised for healing purposes since the dawn of humankind. Unfortunately, some medical communities still like to dispute the therapeutic benefits of massage.As the research deepens copious doctors, physiotherapists, chiropractors and massage therapists now endorse and combining their knowledge of treatment to providing a better results in patient treatment programmes. Good doctors recommend such things as massage, yoga, meditation, pilates and so forth. Not as ‘alternative’ treatments, but as a continuation and extension of treatment.
