Years ago, experts said a person needed four hugs a day for optimum emotional and physical health. Today, some say 12 per day is ideal.
Helen Colton says a lot of Americans are too inhibited to be good huggers, or to hug at all. As evidence, she describes the popular “A-frame” stance, clasping only heads and chests when engaging in a hug.
She’s also critical of the “Baby Burp,” in which the person pats you as though you needed burping. Then there’s the “Chimpanzee,” an alternate flapping of the hands on the back, which is the custom of chimps. A person employing the “Drumbeat Tattoo” beats a rat-a-tat-tat on your back.
When someone hugs Colton in these ways, “His hand talk says to me, ‘I’m not comfortable doing this.’ But when a hugger presses his palms with fingers closed on my back or rubs his hands up and down caressing my back, this makes me feel good. It says, ‘I like you. . .’”
In her book, The Gift of Touch, she maintains that hugs and touches are crucial in childhood and remain important as the years go by, helping us enjoy life, improving communication, and making us feel better when we’re ill or feeling blue or grief-stricken. We all have a hunger for tactile contact with one another, and many people suffer from malnutrition of the senses, she says.
Some people remain discomfited by “the still-powerful Puritan heritage that taught us to equate touching with sexuality,” she adds. An incest taboo causes them to stop cuddling their children or other relatives. “The closeness most of us yearn for in family life is not sexual,” says Colton, a family counselor and teacher of family relations.
As we age, our skin changes, our palms lose some of their sensitivity. “However, tactile needs do not seem to change with aging—if anything they seem to increase,” says Ashley Montague, an anthropologist and the author of Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin.
“Because we are unwilling to face the fact of aging, we behave as if it isn't there,” he says, and this a main reason we do not understand the needs of the aged.
Tactile stimulation is the most important and neglected of these needs, Montague says. “One only has to observe the responses of older people to a caress, an embrace, a hand pat or clasp, to appreciate how vitally necessary such experiences are for their well-being.” These actions sometimes make the difference between life and death, he believes.
Massage also can make a difference. Studies show that it speeds the healing of wounds, reduces pain and improves the functioning of the immune system. At the Miami Touch Institute, 28 people each received a 20-minute massage twice a week. They returned to work more alert and completed math problems in half the time with 50 percent fewer errors.
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