Massage therapist and former dancer Miranda Jankowska from Compass Massage explains the importance of touch in a Covid era.
Through the worst parts of the Covid crisis, touch was demonized as something dangerous; it could spread disease and harm our loved ones. This fear of touch, coupled with the view that massage is an expensive luxury, has meant that many people are put off the idea of massage therapy, writes Miranda Jankowska.
In quite remarkable timing, at the outset of the pandemic, the Wellcome Collection, working with psychologists at Goldsmiths, University of London conducted a study called The Touch Test to find out how touch impacts us. The Touch Test was a self-selecting programme with nearly 40,000 participants from 112 different countries.
Here are four of my favourite points from that research:
Touch is the first sense to develop. In the womb a foetus is thought to experience touch before it can hear, smell or taste. As the pregnancy progresses, twins even reach out to touch each other. After birth we know that ‘kangaroo care’ – where the baby is held close to a caregiver’s skin – helps the baby to feel calmer and to sleep better.
The touch of another human being can reduce stress in adults as well as babies.
We use different kinds of nerve fibres to detect different kinds of touch. Fast nerve fibres respond when our skin is pricked or poked, relaying messages to an area of the brain called the somatosensory cortex. But in recent years, the neuroscientist Prof Francis McGlone has been studying another type of nerve fibre (known as afferent C fibres) which conducts information at around a fiftieth of the speed of the other kind. They relay the information to a different part of the brain called the insular cortex – an area which also processes taste and emotion. So why has this slow system developed as well as the fast one? Francis McGlone believes slow fibres are there to promote social bonding through gentle stroking of the skin.
Even a simple touch on the arm can convey a range of different emotions, experiments have shown that people can convey a list of emotions to a stranger through nothing more than a touch on the arm. If their arm was stroked or pressed or squeezed, a stranger could correctly identify the emotions the person was trying to communicate up to 83% of the time, with emotions ranging from anger, fear and disgust to love, gratitude, and sympathy. My work with end of life care holding a hand was one of the most important, reassuring, comforting forms of touch that I used. For those who could no longer communicate verbally, touch was a way to still feel part of the social world and allowed for comfort in moments of difficulty.
Massage therapy, a form of controlled touch manipulating the soft tissues of the body, provides a layer of benefits to the daily workings of your body. Massage increases blood circulation which brings oxygen and nutrients to muscles, this can help sore muscles and also help keep muscles with low mobility healthy and nourished! This hands-on therapy also helps lymphatic flow to move toxins out of the body to allow for quicker healing and keep illness at bay.
Whilst there are many more benefits to hands on therapy, you can take with you from this that massage is a preventative measure against health issues as well as an amazing treat to receive!
Miranda offers treatments at Swell Yoga retreats, as well as low income treatments at Barnstaple Chiropractic Clinic and full price treatments elsewhere.