shared more hugs and kisses with the public in his visit to Australia and Samoa than his mother did in 70 years to the delight of the recipients.
And then today come reports in the press about how King Charles, in the middle of his cancer treatment, found that traveling and meeting people and touching people more therapeutic because it's a mind, body, soul sort of response rather than being sort of locked away.
Let's talk about the science of touch. Research demonstrating the need for human touch is absolutely vast. From a developmental standpoint, infants literally cannot survive without human touch. Skin to skin contact is vital.
So for those of us that think, oh, this is a touchy-feely subject with no substance, think again.
Sam Vaknin, world-renowned and highly esteemed psychologist, is kind enough to join me for the last time to talk about the power of touch. Sam, thank you so, so much. I mean, when we bring up holding and touching, if we do it and do it at all, we probably don't think about it at all.
But I know during COVID, for instance, and with a lot of people who have mental illness or who are isolated and never get to touch another human being for months, for weeks, we know it has a very detrimental effect, right?
Right, actually.
Good to see you again, Tricia.
In a famous set of experiments with baby rhesus monkeys, known as the Harlow experiments, monkeys, baby monkeys, preferred touch to food. They starved themselves just in order to be able to touch a mock mother.
So skin to skin contact also has a neuroscientific foundation. We have special neuroreceptors in the skin. They are known as C-tactile afference. And these special neuroreceptors are built to detecthuggingand very soft, pleasant, affective touch.
So clearly we are wired for touch. We are wired for, more precisely, for hugging.
But here's something very interesting. Skin-to-skin contact is crucial for well-being and even for survival. However, any skin would do, even your own skin, we discovered that self-hugging has the exact same impact as being hugged by someone else.
And these impacts can be divided into two broad categories.
The first one is physiological impacts, and the second one is psychosocial impacts.
And I'll start with the physiological one.
The minute you're hugged, even by your own self, this triggers a cascade of hormones and neurotransmitters and neuropeptides and every substance known to the body.
Oxytocin and endorphins and serotonin and dopamine and everything simply pours forth within the body.
And all these molecules actually have a single task, and that is to enhance your well-being, to reduce stress, to counter pain, to alter your mood so that you feel much better, to comfort you, a soothing function, and so on.
So the minute you're hugged, even by your own self, you release molecules into the blood and into the brain that change you completely, make you feel a lot better. It also affects your heart and your immune system for the better.
So, we could generalize and say that hugging and touch are undervalued and underutilized therapies. It's the most powerful therapy we have.
I could compare a single hug to 45 minutes of therapy in terms of efficacy.
Yes, really.
Wow.
In terms of efficacy.
What happens to people, I was going to say, what happens to people who, I know with a mental health service that we worked at, we kind of disguised it to get around a stigma as a beauty salon. And people could have massages. And we found that for many mental health service users that just going for a massage with no stigma attached once a week did more than medication on its own could ever do.
I fully concur. I think that's exactly the case.
Actually, we are beginning to introduce hugging into therapy.
In humanistic psychotherapy, this has been used for a long time.
But now, one of the standards of treating borderline personality disorder is to hug the afflicted individual.
Hugging seems to have a major beneficial effect in the case of borderline, which is a very severe mental health disorder.
And so these are the physiological effects.
And then we have psychosocial effects.
And the psychosocial effects are also multifarious, multiplied.
So hugging is a form of connection. Hugging is a form of emoting. Hugging is a social signal. Hugging enhances intimacy and trust.
Hugging, therefore, could be construed or described as a psychosocial, context-dependent language in various cultures, in various societies, various periods in history.
Hugging played a variety of roles. To this very day, in some specific cultures and societies, hugging is an integral part of human interaction, even the most superficial human interaction.
If you go to Italy, you're likely to be hugged by the waiter in a restaurant. Hugging is all the rage.
So it's really a good thing.
Hugging has no negative impacts, no side effects, no adverse outcomes. It's easy to administer. It costs you nothing. It's cost free.
And it has amazing effects, body and soul, body and body and mind.
Well, I hope that encourages a lot of people because, I mean, fathers hugging their sons, I mean, now there's kind of a push, isn't there, to do that.
But obviously, you know, within some cultures, like I'm going to stick my neck out here and say, you know, the old-fashioned upper, you know, stiff upper lip, where it's not deemed okay for a man to hug another man, they need to get over that, right?
Yes.
This is very counterproductive in terms of mental health, overall well-being, and from the medical point of view, survival is predicated on touch.
Touch is a way to affirm the external and separate existence of other people, which restores a sense of safety.
Take, for example, oxytocin. Oxytocin is released initially in the contact between baby and mother.
So whenever oxytocin is released, when we are hugged much later in life, it recreates the experience of being hugged and coddled and caressed by mother itself. It's a recreation of the maternal secure base.
You feel contained. You feel safe. You feel warm. You feel fuzzy. It's a wonderful feeling.
And so this is just one example.
Endorphins are used to reduce, essentially to reduce pain and restore an overall sense of well-being.
Pain is not only physical. We have proven in the past decade that heartbreak following a breakup is the exact equivalent of a heart attack in physiological terms. There's a release of the same molecules, a change in all the functions of the body, and so on.
So physical pain and mental pain are one and the same.
Once you are hugged and endorphins reduce pain, also mental pain, also physical pain.
If you've just gone through a period of stress and tension and anxiety, you've had a misadventure or a mishap. You have lost a loved one. Something really bad happened and so on and so forth.
A single hug, even from a stranger. And most importantly, even from your own self, a single hug would go a long way towards restoring you.
Thank you so much, Sam. I send hugs, virtual hugs, which I know aren't the same to you.
Sam Vaknin, now that's what he's been an absolute joy. I've been very privileged to have him contribute to this show over the hours.
My husband keeps telling me how many hours I've done. I'm going to read his text in a minute along with everybody else's text right after this break. I'm going to do.
You know.