Gimme some skin – huggers and huggees; hugs, kisses and oxytocin; more massage benefits; boosting oxytocin; tend and befriend; happy babies; DIY rejuvenation; lavender lies and self-care multi-tasking; paying for it
I’m a touchy-feely sort of person who starts to wither without physical contact. We’re not all like this, I know. My dad was physically affectionate; my mother not so much. He was the hugger, she the huggee. That’s what it’s like with me and Roy, too. I’m the hugger, he’s the huggee.
Gimme Some Skin
Since hearing somewhere that human beings require at least 15 hugs a day, I’ve started to demand that many from Roy. (Why it’s 15 is anyone’s guess… and probably was.) He’s sensibly acquiescing, no doubt seeing the wisdom of me filling my quota at home, rather than at the beach, the gym, the mall or the train station.
Physical touch in the form of hugs from trusted people is associated with lowered risk of infection. According to this study, hugs act as a form of social support, protecting stressed people from succumbing to viruses. (So much for the scientifically barren “social distancing” policy that so cruelly isolated vulnerable old people and hastened their lonely deaths.)
A couple of weeks ago, that mendacious arch-criminal Anthony Fauci admitted to the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic that the six-foot rule was sucked out of thin air: “It sort of just appeared”. That was the scientific basis for the “need” to lock people in their homes, close businesses, shut down schools and generally bring communities and entire economies to their knees. Moving on.
More Massage Benefits
I mentioned a few benefits of massage in Ageing Disgracefully, Part One, but of course there’s more to say. For starters, massage is a great oxytocin booster.
Sometimes called the love hormone, oxytocin is mainly known for its role in social, sexual and also maternal bonding… and no doubt grandparental bonding, too. More broadly, it has been shown to work as an anti-oxidant and an anti-inflammatory, helping us cope with stress while supporting growth, resilience and healing. (More here.)
We produce large amounts of oxytocin after nipple stimulation and during labour. Indeed, it has been shown to play a role in human behaviours as diverse as (1) social recognition and (2) orgasm. (That would be the preferred order, right?)
Other ways of boosting oxytocin include the gamut of sexual activity like erection and ejaculation; and, in time, also birth contractions, milk ejection and more.
Boosting oxytocin
Here’s draxe.com’s short list of oxytocin boosters: physical contact, including hugs and even shaking hands; essential oils like clary sage; making eye contact; giving and receiving gifts – including money; listening to calming music; exercising with someone.
Tend and befriend
So it’s not just for making babies, and both men and women produce oxytocin. It’s also called the “tend and befriend” hormone, with wider implications for health and longevity. For example, it promotes development, growth and healing. It helps keep us calm and supports emotional wellbeing, making us more compassionate, monogamous, generous and forgiving.
For happy babies
Massage is a safe and natural way to hugely increase growth hormone and other beneficial growth factors. It’s also been shown to promote development. In fact, babies massaged daily grow twice as fast as controls given the same diet, according to Deepak Chopra. He was referring specifically to the Ayurvedic practice of anointing oneself from head to toe with warm oil abhyanga.
Interestingly, I remember an infant-care centre in Singapore (they used to advertise with us at Expat Living magazine and website) that provided daily massage for all its babies. But that was 15-20 years ago, and it doesn’t seem to offer that service anymore.
DIY massage for rejuvenation
Massage undoubtedly has rejuvenation effects, not only due to growth hormones but also to free radical scavengers… especially if you use massage oils with antioxidants absorbed transdermally.
Best of all, you can do it yourself for nothing.
Deepak Chopra recommends daily self-massaging with sesame oil, which is an Ayurvedic favourite both for massage and oil-pulling. I keep a bottle of organic sesame oil in the fridge; but for massage, I tend to use instead the same MCT oil as I use for oil-pulling each morning, as it’s conveniently right there in the bathroom.
Also, the MCT version of coconut oil doesn’t reek of coconuts – in fact, it has practically neither taste nor fragrance. Sesame oil has a distinctively nutty aroma: quite pleasant, but not necessarily the scent I would choose to waft/emit all day.
I do some degree of self-massage most days, usually first thing in the morning. I have to multi-task if I’m not to be spending half my waking hours on self-care; so I self-massage in the ruddy glow of my red and NIR light panel. (Here’s a link to one of my previous blog posts on using red light to maintain crucial circadian rhythm.) I’ll massage face, neck, shoulders, arms, legs, hands and feet, tummy, bum, and as much of my back as I can reach. Simultaneously oil-pulling, by the way.
Lavender lies
My favourite massage unguent, however, is the lavender massage oil I’ve bought several times from the Cape Lavender Teahouse in Yallingup, Margaret River WA. It can be ordered online, too.
Having heard somewhere that the amount of lavender essential oil sold worldwide each year is more than twice as much as global annual production, I’ve become cautious. So I asked the young woman at Cape Lavender where their lavender essential oil is sourced from. She scurried off to ask someone more senior, and returned to reassure me that it came from fields somewhere in WA – sorry, I can’t remember the name, but it probably ended in “-up”. (The suffix “-up” means “place of” in the local Aboriginal language.)
Massage Benefits – paying for it, if necessary
But there’s nothing better a full-body massage from a really good masseuse.
For the moment, our medical insurance pays most of the going rate of about A$100 for an hour of remedial massage – up to about ten times a year. It would be foolish not to use this benefit. I’ve been going to Joondalup Sports & Remedial Massage, where I can personally recommend both Richard Shelton and Stuart Cole.
Then I spotted Remedial Massage listed on the menu of Rong’s Massage in our local mall; every mall has at least one version of this sort of massage place. I may be a convert – Kai is one of those intuitive masseuses, and it was even better the second time around.
But the best massage I’ve had for a while was at Bawah Reserve, a group of privately owned islands in Indonesia, where Roy and I were lucky enough to find ourselves for a couple of nights a couple of months ago. It is listed on Condé Naste Traveler Gold List 2024
See the beach below? Well, the massage at Bawah’s Aura Spa – from a Balinese therapist – was about as good as it gets anywhere. (Here’s a link to my blog post about that trip on Travels with Verne and Roy.)
Ja-well-no-fine… what next?
What’s up next? Part Three, of course!
