The Importance of Touch

I'm pretty sure this is in the first several blog posts I wrote through my massage therapy website (Rooted Elevation Wellness Original Blog). When I think about massage therapy, I always come back to the basics. It's human touch. It is therapeutic even in light touch because of what skin-to-skin contact does for the human body. We were born with the basic need of connection. The article below talks about this basic need for babies.

Infancy and Early Childhood Matter So Much Because of Attachment.

In the 1930/40s, psychiatrist René Spitz studied infants living in institutions and described what he called “hospitalism.” The children could receive food, hygiene, and basic physical care while experiencing profound deprivation of consistent, affectionate human caregiving. Spitz documented severe developmental deterioration in some institutionalized infants, including withdrawal, developmental delays, illness, and in some cases death.

In the 1980's Tiffany Field discovered that if you massage NICU babies, they gain weight faster and are released from the hospital sooner than if they are met with only necessary care. Read more about that here: Tiffany Field: Touch Therapy Researcher.

Here's another article: Study on Nurturing.

BUT...It's not just babies who need physical touch.

Since the pandemic in 2020, where touch was limited and mental health was plummeting, studies were founded to scientifically see what touch does for adults. The 2024 Nature Human Behaviour meta-analysis is one of those studies. It combined 137 studies involving nearly 13,000 people rather than relying on one small experiment.

For adults, touch interventions were associated with reductions in pain, anxiety and depression, along with benefits involving cortisol and blood pressure. The researchers also found that human-to-human touch produced greater mental-health benefits than touch involving objects or devices.They found that more skin-to-skin contact helps improve adults mental health.

Research suggests that positive, consensual touch isn't simply comforting. It can have measurable effects on both our physical and emotional well-being. For some adults, especially those who live alone or don't have much physical affection in their everyday lives, massage may be one of the few places they regularly experience safe, intentional, consensual human touch.

Another study proves that our bodies benefit from touch physiologically, even if we aren't emotionally feeling the benefit of the touch. Read that here: Self-soothing touch and being hugged reduce cortisol responses to stress: A randomized controlled trial on stress, physical touch, and social identity. This study involved 159 adults ages 18–35 who were put through a standardized laboratory stress test.

Before the stressor, participants either received a hug, practiced self-soothing touch, or were in control conditions. Researchers measured cortisol and found that people in the touch conditions had lower cortisol levels after the stressful event than the controls. Interestingly, they didn't necessarily report feeling less stressed—the measurable difference appeared in their physiological stress response.

How cool that our bodies respond positively to touch, regardless of how we feel from it.

Taking it one step further in this study, they also found that frequent healthy physical touch decreases inflammation in our bodies. Read that here: Lost Touch? Implications of Physical Touch for Physical Health.

We don't "outgrow" the need for physical touch. The coolest thing is that even if we do not feel the effects of touch, our bodies change in positive ways from it! Wild, right? Research has linked massage and positive physical touch with benefits ranging from reduced pain and muscle tension to lower stress, improved relaxation, better sleep, and greater feelings of connection and well-being.

Touch can affect us physically, emotionally, socially, and physiologically—and massage gives us a structured, consensual way to experience therapeutic touch.