Healing Touch Therapy: The Science Behind Human Touch and Healing
When you feel invisible, there’s nothing quite like a warm embrace, a hand on your back or fingers laced with yours to remind you that you’re seen.
Human touch has always mattered, and the medical community has understood its power for a long time. But recently, touch therapy has gained more mainstream recognition as a wellness practice and is getting its moment in the spotlight.
A quick online search can connect you with a professional cuddler or touch therapist in minutes. But what exactly is touch therapy? And can consensual touch really support someone’s health?
Today, we’re talking about healing touch therapy, including what it looks like in practice. We’ll even hear from someone with firsthand experience healing through touch.
What Is Touch Therapy?
Healing touch is a hands-on therapy that uses light or near-body contact to support physical, emotional and spiritual well-being. Practitioners work gently, sometimes without even making direct contact, to encourage a sense of calm and connection.
The approach is rooted in the belief that energy flows throughout the body. In traditional Chinese medicine, this life force is known as qi. According to this complementary and alternative form of medicine, even slowly passing a hand over the body is thought to help balance or strengthen this energy.
The Science Behind the Power of Touch
Now, we’re not putting our faith in “funky energy” — at least, the writer of this post isn’t. But the impact of human touch on the body is hard to ignore.
Skin-to-skin contact right after birth helps calm newborns, reduce crying and regulate temperature, heart rate and breathing. The benefits continue well beyond infancy. Touch is associated with lower:
- Anxiety
- Blood pressure
- Depression
- Stress
Regular, caring contact also appears to support immune function. People who experience long-term touch deprivation are more likely to struggle with immune-related issues, which helps explain why the lack of contact during COVID-19 felt so devastating for many.
Touch even shapes how the brain responds to stress. When someone holds your hand, activity in the brain’s threat and pain centers can quiet down, especially when that hand belongs to someone you love.
Does Human Touch Therapy Actually Work?
Recently, researchers took a close look at touch-based interventions to see whether they actually help. After reviewing a large body of work, including a meta-analysis of 137 studies and a systematic review of 75 additional studies, they found clear evidence that touch interventions benefit people of all ages across many physical and mental health outcomes.
- For adults, touch-based practices such as hugging and massage were linked with reduced feelings of anxiety and depression, as well as less physical pain.
- For newborns, nurturing touch like kangaroo care was associated with increased weight gain and healthier development, offering a simple way to support babies and caregivers alike.
Inside a Touch Therapy Session
Epiphany Jordan, M.P.H., has spent more than a decade studying and writing about the power of human touch. Trained by the Institute for Mind Body Therapy to collaborate with therapists and support clients through integrated care, she no longer practices but shared what her sessions looked like. Jordan describes her work as “a ritual of human connection” rather than conventional touch therapy.
How a Session Works
After greeting the client, she and another practitioner bless the client and wash their feet. The client then changes into a ritual garment and lies down on a bed, where the session moves into light, comforting touch.
From there, Jordan and her colleague cuddle with the client in a way that mirrors how parents hold an infant. “[I]t’s like our bodies remember,” she explained, “because that’s how humans take care of their young.” Within 20 minutes, she often saw clients relax into “a puddle on the bed.” Sessions ended with the client changing back into their clothes, followed by tea and snacks and a chance to talk.
When asked how clients felt afterward, Jordan remarked that they often felt relieved. Jordan joked: “I literally have thought about marketing this as a beauty treatment because people look 10 years younger when we’re done with them.” More importantly, her clients reported feeling that they had been seen and helped.
Who Seeks Touch Therapy?
Jordan’s clients came from all walks of life. “[Y]ou just never knew who was going to walk through the door,” she said. Jordan saw:
- Veterans who struggled with PTSD
- New mothers who had overdrawn their nurturing bank account
- Lonely, single people who lacked day-to-day connections
- Married men who weren’t experiencing affection or intimacy at home
A major misconception, she noted, is that men only seek this kind of care because they want sex. Touch therapy is a healing, nonsexual experience, and maintaining that boundary is essential.
The Satisfaction of Providing Touch Therapy
For Jordan, offering touch therapy was “deeply, deeply satisfying on an emotional and spiritual level,” more so than any other work she has done. She views it as a way to push back against a culture that has gatekept touch and limited who is “allowed” to receive it.
“The way that we think about touch now, it excludes a lot of people,” she reflected, “and I want it to be more inclusive and accessible for more people.” For those interested in exploring this kind of care, she points to Cuddlist as a starting point for finding trained practitioners. You can also read her book “Somebody Hold Me: The Single Person’s Guide to Nurturing Human Touch” for a deeper dive into the topic.
Her final piece of advice is simple: Human touch is an underused resource for calming the nervous system and blowing off steam. (Just remember that consent is nonnegotiable.)
Healing Through Touch: A Powerful Connection
Before today, did you have any idea that human touch could do so much? That something as seemingly inconsequential as taking someone’s hand in yours could improve their mental and physical health?
Expand Your Understanding of the Human Body
Want to learn more about the human body and the science behind experiences like this? Consider exploring UF’s online medical sciences graduate programs.
Taught by experts in their fields and grounded in evidence-based coursework, these programs offer the human physiology education you need to understand how and why touch and other phenomena affect the body.
Visit our programs page to discover where your curiosity about the human body can take you next.
Sources:
https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/cancer-terms/def/healing-touch
https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-healing-touch-therapy-5214494
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-asymmetric-brain/202404/the-healing-power-of-touch-new-scientific-insights
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/everyone-on-top/202108/the-vital-importance-of-human-touch
