A hug a day keeps the doctor away

"EVERYBODY NEEDS TOUCH, especially the elderly," says Beata Aleksandrowicz. "Very often they are alone, their partners have gone or have died or they're sick, and nobody is touching them." Aleksandrowicz, a massage therapist, is speaking about a project she launched last month that saw therapists across England give free hand massages to elderly people in nursing homes. The response was heartening. "I had reactions such as, 'Oh, I had no idea that I need touch so much' or 'Oh, it's like I'm in fairyland!' "

Bertrand Russell once wrote: "Not only our geometry and our physics, but our whole conception of what exists outside us is based upon the sense of touch." But our experience of touch is dwindling. Increasingly we live alone, have virtual friends, shy away from any kind of physical contact with strangers for fear it might be unhygienic or inappropriate or could become violent.

The effects of not touching can prove detrimental to our wellbeing, both as individuals and as a society. "When you touch or are touched, you get the feeling of being connected with yourself and with others," Aleksandrowicz says, placing one hand on my arm. "When I touch you, you feel my touch - so by my touch you feel that you exist and you can connect with me. It is a feeling of being important, of being taken care of."

A 1997 study into the amount of touching and aggression among adolescents looked at the behaviour of 40 teenagers in McDonald's outlets in Paris and Miami. It found American adolescents spent considerably less time stroking, kissing, hugging and leaning against their peers than their French counterparts did.

Interestingly, the Americans showed more self-touching, such as playing with rings on their fingers, wringing their hands, twirling hair, wrapping arms around themselves, cracking knuckles, biting their lips, and also behaviour that was more aggressive, verbally and physically, towards their peers.

These findings are worrying, particularly because research suggests an absence of touching and physical interaction during adolescence may result in violent behaviour in later life. Touch deprivation appears to lead to a depletion in norepinephrine and serotonin, which, with dop-amine, are neurotransmitters affecting mood. When levels of norepinephrine and serotonin fall, levels of dopamine are left uninhibited, leading to the impulsive, often aggressive, behaviour associated with high levels of dopamine. (Research also suggests that levels of norepinephrine and serotonin may be increased through touch.)

Even though we're isolating ourselves from it, humans crave physical touch. It is one of the reasons people keep pets, Aleksandrowicz believes. "Because they can touch them, they can exchange warmth with them."

In many ways it was her own yearning for touch that brought Aleksandrowicz to massage. "I had some problems with my second husband," she says. "We had a lot of problems with intimacy, we couldn't open up for each other, and our friend just gave us the advice to try to touch each other a lot and just see how it goes. And I was amazed how closed I was to touch. I could not receive touch - it made me panic."

Now she offers courses for couples (as well as encouraging parents to massage their children, so they grow up to find touch usual). "You suddenly see these men who open up so much," she says.

Aleksandrowicz recently returned from a trip to meet bushmen in the Kalahari. She expected them to have a much freer approach to physical interaction and was shocked to find that was not the case. "I was in the middle of Namibia, 40C, sitting on the sand, with people who I've never seen before, whose culture is 40,000 years old, and they were all asking about touch," she says.

She massaged everyone in the village, sometimes several times. The first to be massaged was the oldest woman in the village. "Suddenly there was silence, this whole village stopped what they were doing - they stopped talking and started to sing," Aleksandrowicz says. She believes that the political situation of the bushmen - landless, powerless, severed from their traditions and history - has led to this intense feeling of disconnection. "It was very interesting. All of them asked me to touch their chests, the most emotional part of the body and also responsible for the ego. They don't know who they are - they're lost."

Some would say that people in the West are also losing sight of who they are. We shy from touching each other but are obsessed with appearance. We would rather, for example, go under the surgeon's knife than accept our own bodies. "We are living in a materialistic time where if you don't see you don't have," Aleksandrowicz says. "So we have cars, we have high salaries, we have the right shape of our bottom ... But we stop believing that we have enormous potential inside us."

And what does Aleksandrowicz get from a career that involves touching people all day? "It's amazing," she says. "It is a communication on the most basic, fundamental level, where there are no words or judgement or ego. It's just the purest possible interaction between two people."

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