At work, you rest your hand on your cheek while staring at your computer screen.
You touch your forehead while you’re lost in thought.
As fatigue sets in, you press on your eyes or reach for your face and hair.
Do you ever catch yourself doing things like this without realizing it?
This act of touching your own body is called “self-touch.”
It may look like nothing more than a habit, but the link between self-touch, stress and emotion has actually been studied in psychology and neuroscience.
Why Do We Touch Our Faces Without Thinking?
Self-touch covers many behaviors, such as folding your arms, touching your hair or resting a hand on your cheek.
Among them, touching the face and head is especially common.
Interestingly, studies have reported that these behaviors may increase when our mental state shifts, for example under stress or tension.
A research team including Leipzig University in Germany put participants under psychological stress and examined how their self-touch changed before and after.
They found that self-touch became more frequent in situations where stress was rising.
In other words, the way we unconsciously reach for our face or head when we’re tense may be about more than habit. Our psychological state may be involved, too.
Does Self-Touch Help Us Calm Down?
Even more intriguing is what happens in the body during self-touch.
In the research, after heart rate rose because of stress, a shift toward a lower heart rate was observed while participants were touching themselves.
The researchers suggest that self-touch may play a role in self-regulation, helping to adjust the body’s response to stress.
When we feel tense,
“resting a hand on the cheek,”
“pressing the forehead,”
“touching the hair or head”:
we may do these things unconsciously as a natural way of calming ourselves down.
That said, it has not been proven that self-touch always reduces stress.
Touching Your Face Doesn’t Always Mean You’re Tired
This is an important point.
Many factors are involved in self-touch besides stress, such as thinking, boredom, conversation or simply habit.
So you can’t conclude that
“touching your face a lot = built-up fatigue or stress.”
It’s simply not that straightforward.
However, if you don’t usually touch your face much and you notice changes such as
“I touch my forehead more on busy days,”
“I rub my eyes in the second half of the workday,” or
“My hand always goes to my head when I’m thinking,”
it might be a good cue to take a short rest.
The Places You Touch May Be Where You Feel Tired
With so much desk work and smartphone use today, we tend to hold the same posture for long periods, which puts strain not only on the eyes but also on the neck and shoulders.
Perhaps you’ve caught yourself touching your temples, resting a hand on the back of your head or rubbing your neck.
When that happens, we recommend taking a deliberate break: close your eyes for a few minutes, get up and move around, or take a few deep breaths.
Rather than waiting to rest until you’re exhausted, try using these unconscious habits as a cue to notice how you’re really feeling.
Give Your Hardworking Mind and Body Time to Do Nothing
La HEAD is a head massage and dry head spa salon with fully private rooms, a 3-minute walk from Shinjuku-nishiguchi Station.
Rather than treating the head alone, La HEAD cares for the head, neck, shoulders and arms as one connected whole.
Do you find yourself touching your temples or head during work without realizing it?
Or rubbing your neck and shoulders before you know it?
If days like that keep piling up, why not turn your attention to the body that works so hard for you every day, and give it time to truly rest?
We have a quiet, fully private space ready for you to spend a moment without thinking about anything, and we look forward to welcoming you.