Being Touched Often Might Help Improve Mental Health

Receiving physical touch, whether it is from other human beings or animals, can help in reducing anxiety, depression, and even pain in adults and children, as per the findings of a recent meta-analysis and review of 212 studies that was published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.

“The sense of touch has immense importance for many aspects of our life. It is the first of all the senses to develop in newborns and the most direct experience of contact with our physical and social environment. Complementing our own touch experience, we also regularly receive touch from others around us, for example, through consensual hugs, kisses or massages,” lead author Julian Packheiser from Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, and colleagues wrote in the study.

“The most common touch interventions, for example, massage for adults or kangaroo care for newborns, have been shown to have a wide range of both mental and physical health benefits, from facilitating growth and development to buffering against anxiety and stress, over the lifespan of humans and animals alike,” the researchers added.

To further explore the health benefits of receiving physical touch, the team conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of 212 studies that included a total of 12,966 individuals until October 2022. Their analysis delved into the impacts of interactions among humans with and without skin-to-skin contact. The vast majority of the touch interventions in those 212 studies comprised massage therapy in adults and kangaroo care in newborns (which refers to skin-to-skin contact with a baby soon after birth).

The researchers observed that adults who engaged in touch interventions with other humans experienced health benefits but surprisingly, it did not matter whether they were touched by their loved ones or received consensual physical contact from someone unfamiliar.

“Touch interventions can be performed either by familiar touchers (partners, family members or friends) or by unfamiliar touchers (health care professionals). In adults, we did not find an impact of familiarity of the toucher,” the researchers noted. “Similarly, investigating the impact on mental and physical health benefits specifically, no significant differences could be detected, suggesting that familiarity is irrelevant in adults. In contrast, touch applied to newborns by their parents (almost all studies only included touch by the mother) was significantly more beneficial compared with unfamiliar touch.”

For adults, they say, receiving consensual physical touch for 20 minutes and four sessions of touch interventions with an average time interval of 2.3 days between each session was associated with improved mental health. For newborns, studies showed that the touch duration was 17.5 minutes and the ideal number of touch interventions was seven sessions with an average time interval of 1.3 days between each session. “While it seems to be less critical which touch intervention is applied, the frequency of interventions seems to matter. More sessions were positively associated with the improvement of trait outcomes such as depression and anxiety but also pain reductions in adults. In contrast to session number, increasing the duration of individual sessions did not improve health effects,” the researchers explained.

“For the touched body part, we found significantly higher health benefits for head touch compared with arm touch. Head touch such as a face or scalp massage could be especially beneficial,” they added.

“Our work illustrates that touch interventions are best suited for reducing pain, depression and anxiety in adults and children as well as for increasing weight gain in newborns,” the researchers concluded.