Owning It: The surprising power of human touch for reducing anxiety

Owning It: The Anxiety Podcast

Caroline Foran

Overwhelm, Education, Health & Fitness, Panic Attack, Caroline Foran, Stress, Anxiety

4.4 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 31 May 2021

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this bonus episode of Owning It, brought to you in partnership with NIVEA, I am joined by Claudia Hammond. Claudia is an award-winning broadcaster, she is visiting Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Sussex and the author of four books, most recently The Art of Rest. We talk about the significance of human touch - something we've been seriously missing since lockdown - when it comes to lowering our anxiety in particular. It's not just something that feels nice, it has a real impact on your body at a biological level, boosting the nice hormones and dissolving the bad ones. We talk through the science behind it, the findings from an incredible piece of research called The Touch Test, and how we can gently reintroduce human touch back into our lives as things begin to open up. We also talk about the natural apprehension we're likely to experience as things return to 'normal', and how to circumvent this. NIVEA Cares beyond Skin, to find out more about NIVEA's #CareforHumanTouch initiative visit nivea.co.uk/humantouch

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for listening to Owning It. If you would like to support the series, the best thing you can do is just tell a friend or better yet share it on social media.
0:08.0	If you really, really want to support, you can subscribe to me on Substack where I write a weekly column.
0:13.0	Listeners of the pod get a 20% discount forever at carolinephorun.substack.com.
0:18.7	Thank you.
0:31.0	Hello, dear listeners, and welcome to owning it the anxiety podcast with me, your host and author Caroline Forin. Now, I know I said last week was the end of season five, but I'm actually
0:36.8	back here for a brief
0:38.3	interlude with a very special bonus episode that I'm doing in partnership with the lovely folks
0:43.8	at Nivia. And we are looking specifically at how human touch can be a very effective tool for
0:49.4	managing anxiety and boosting our overall well-being. It's particularly relevant right now as we begin to emerge
0:56.3	from pandemic life and start to open up and start to be around each other again and it starts to
1:02.1	become safe to embrace and hug and touch and we get to reap all the benefits of what we've been
1:08.6	missing for the last over a year, I suppose.
1:11.3	So in a recent episode I talked about how there is a lot of anxiety, certainly for me,
1:16.2	an apprehension around life returning to normal or whatever, this new normal will be,
1:20.7	or however shape it will take. And it's not just a mental apprehension. There's a bit of
1:26.3	apprehension around readjusting our bodies to being in crowded
1:29.1	spaces, to being closer to people. We've all been conditioned to, you know, to stay away and we've
1:34.6	been on high alert for so long and for good reason. But as we emerge from the pandemic and it becomes
1:41.0	safe to do so again and it's no longer a threat, we're no longer at risk.
1:46.0	Touch is something we should really, really strive for and try and reacquaint ourselves with.
1:51.8	It might feel a bit uncomfortable at first. I totally get it.
1:54.7	We're not used to it. We're a bit rusty. But it's really important. And in this episode,
	...

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