We’ve all been told one of the best ways to avoid getting sick is to keep our hands away from our faces – but it’s not easy.
One study found medical students touched their faces an average of 23 times during a lecture – about once every two-and-a-half minutes.
Why do we do it then?
WIRED has come up with some answers – and it turns out stress is one potential culprit.
Some recent research on 15 women from week 24 to 36 of their pregnancies showed that foetuses were more likely to touch their faces with their left hands if the women said they were feeling stressed.
Another German study that played unpleasant sounds (Justin Bieber’s latest album?) at participants while they were completing a memory test also showed the more stressful the sounds, the more likely participants were to touch their faces.
The researchers speculated that “spontaneous facial self-touch” helps people to control their emotions.
Scientific research also suggests that face touching could have a social purpose.
In a 2015 paper, Israeli scientists hooked up volunteers to devices that measured the air flow through the nose before secretly filming them meeting people and shaking hands.
They discovered that the participants often brought their hands to their noses after shaking hands with people of the same gender and doubled the airflow through their noses at the same time – implying that they weren’t satisfying an itch but instead testing the scents of the people they had met (like how dogs sniff each other’s behinds?)
So, what can you do about that predilection for scratching your nose?
Well, there are a couple of fixes out there.
Donottouchyourface.com is a website designed to retrain people to stop touching their faces using your webcam and machine learning – it yells at you if your fingers go near your face.
But for obvious reasons, it only really works for office workers who sit in front of a computer all day.
Another US start-up Slightly Robot has redesigned its wristband designed to stop trichotillomania – a disorder that compels people to pull out their hair – as the Immutouch, a wristband that vibrates if you touch your face.
We’re not quite ready to be buzzed every two minutes though so we think we’ll go with the best option: washing your hands regularly and avoiding shaking hands.
Winking really is the new high-five! (See the video at the bottom of the newsletter for an explanation).
Image Credit: AAP
