By Kelly Edwards,
As a couples therapist, a lot of the work I do has to do with building or rebuilding meaningful connections between people. Frequently, one of the signs of disconnection in relationships is the lack of touch. Touch often plays a crucial role in maintaining connection within interpersonal relationships. Touch is essential because of the ways it communicates emotions to others and because it stimulates the production of oxytocin, sometimes known as the love hormone.
Touch in Communication
Touch can be a powerful way of communicating emotions non-verbally. It offers a subtle and more nuanced approach in which we interact with others. Whether it is a hug or a pat on the back, touch can communicate positive emotions such as love and gratitude. Contact can also be an essential way of conveying sympathy. For example, when someone is experiencing grief, sometimes an arm around their shoulder provides more comfort than words alone.
Touch or hesitation in touch can also signify negative emotions. Imagine a parent and child holding hands when the parent tightly squeezes their child’s hand. This situation could alert the child their caregiver is experiencing fear and signal a warning. Safety and connection are necessary for more intimate forms of touch, such as a long hug. People can often sense when someone feels uncomfortable or not receptive to that kind of touch. Touch also has the potential to expand the depth of communication when combined with conversation, eye contact, and body language.
Oxytocin, The Love Hormone
Oxytocin, also known as the love hormone or the cuddle hormone, is crucial during labor and infancy. After birth, a flood of oxytocin creates a post-birth high, which helps develop a sense of calm after what is often a physically and emotionally exhausting labor. Oxytocin also encourages bonding between mother and infant by promoting feeding and regulating stress for the infant. Although we often associate this hormone’s importance with birth and infancy, oxytocin continues to play a vital role in intimate relationships throughout our lives.
According to Bonnie Badddnoch, a therapist and author whose work focuses on the use of brain science in therapy, oxytocin helps to negotiate the experience of attachment. It creates a feeling of well-being between two people. Oxytocin is both a hormone and a neurotransmitter, which means that it helps the communication within our brains and bodies and facilitates the way our minds and bodies communicate with others. Oxytocin inhibits stress and increases calmness and connection between people. Studies show that increases or decreases in neurotransmitters, such as oxytocin, can have a striking impact on thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and interpersonal relationships.
If you have been feeling down because you have been quarantined alone or have been away from someone you care deeply about, it is helpful to know that there are science-based reasons behind this. Lack of oxytocin from physical contact with others can affect our mental and physical health.
Tips for Self Regulating When You Cannot Touch Others
The good news is that many of the benefits gained from touch and oxytocin can be fostered through connection that does not involve touch. Perhaps now more than ever, it is a valuable time to remain in close contact with friends, family, and loved ones, even if it is only virtually. Connecting conversations and expressions of gratitude and appreciation towards others help the production of oxytocin. I would also like to offer a few “hacks” to help stimulate the regulating effects of oxytocin.
1.) Take a bath while visualizing the embrace from a loved one. The warm water surrounding your body has a similar effect on someone embracing you, and the mental image helps to intensify that.
2.) Have a video chat with someone you care about while having a weighted blanket on top of you. The weighted blanket also imitates the effects of a warm embrace.
3.) Give yourself caresses and massages. Whether rubbing your shoulders, rubbing your neck, or massaging your temples has many benefits such as improving sleep and reducing stress.
And last, permit yourself to be disappointed about the lack of touch. It’s okay to miss it. Hopefully, current scientific research on the pandemic will soon inform us of ways to touch one another again safely. In the meantime, it is crucial to find other ways to care for yourself and regulate stress.
You’ve likely heard the saying, “Happy wife, happy life” or “Happy spouse, happy house.” But are these popular sayings actually supported by research?
The short answer is likely, yes. Several studies link the quality of a couple’s marriage to each partner’s individual happiness. In fact, psychologist Eli Finkel shared survey findings that show 57 percent of people who say they are “very happy” in their marriage also say they are very happy with their life overall. Whereas only 10 percent of people who say they are just “pretty happy” in their marriage say they are very happy with their life overall.
Studies also suggest being happily married may be good for your health. Researchers Kathleen King and Harry Reis followed the recovery of patients who had undergone a coronary artery bypass graft. They found that patients who were married, rather than single, were 2.5 times more likely to still be alive 15 years after their surgery. And patients who said they were happily married were 3.2 times more likely to be alive 15 years after surgery.
The quality of one’s marriage is related to being happy and healthy. However, the bad news is marriage quality tends to decline over time.
It is possible that some couples might stay as happy as they were on their wedding day or even become happier over time. But on average, marital quality tends to decrease throughout one’s marriage. Many large-scale and longitudinal studies, which follow married couples for years, show a clear and consistent downward trend in marital quality over time.
But before you swear off marriage, or give the most depressing wedding speech of all time, a research study by Eli Finkel, Erica Slotter, Laura Luchies, Gregory Walton, and James Gross has revealed one way to preserve relationship quality. When couples argue or experience conflict, as they inevitably will, they can stop downward spirals by thinking about the conflict from a third-party perspective.
How to Think Differently About Conflict
One reason why relationship quality dips over time is negative-affect reciprocity, when one partner is upset or in a bad mood, their partner tends to respond in an equally bad, or even worse, mood that escalates the conflict. Responding to a partner’s accusation with criticism or contempt, for instance, triggers a downward spiral of negativity that can be difficult for couples to break.
One tip to stop the slide of declining relationship quality is for couples to use emotional reappraisal, or reinterpret the conflict in a way that makes them feel less angry and distressed. Instead of thinking of the conflict from a first-person perspective, emotional reappraisal requires couples to look at conflict from a third-party perspective, as an outsider would. How was I wronged by my partner?
To determine whether emotional reappraisal can preserve relationship quality over time, researchers Eli Finkel and colleagues followed 120 heterosexual married couples for two years. Every four months, the researchers measured a couple’s relationship quality by asking about their relationship satisfaction and feelings of love, intimacy, trust, passion, and commitment.
After a year, married couples on average experienced a robust decrease in relationship quality. Thus, replicating previous research that showed decreases in married couples’ satisfaction over time.
Then, the researchers implemented an emotional reappraisal intervention. For the next year, half of the couples were asked to write about any conflict they experience in their marriage from the perspective of a neutral third party who wants the best for all involved. Specifically, they wrote how this person might think about the disagreement and how he or she could find any good that could come from it. Participants in this condition were also asked to try their best over the next year to always take this third-party perspective, especially when they experience conflict with their partner.
The other half of the participants were in the control condition. They received regular check-ins from the researchers but were not asked to think any differently about the conflict they experienced in their marriage.
After the second year, married couples in the control condition continued to show the same, significant decreases in relationship quality over time. However, married couples in the emotional reappraisal condition stopped declining in relationship quality. Thinking about conflict from a third-party perspective did not make them happier in their relationship, but it did stop the normative decreases in relationship quality that most married couples experience.
These findings are promising because an emotional reappraisal intervention is relatively easy for couples to implement. Simply thinking about conflict from the perspective of a neutral, third party appears to make a meaningful difference in couples’ marriages. It might not increase their relationship quality, but if couples reappraise conflict early and often, their marital bliss may continue long after the honeymoon.
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