I Want to Hold Your Hand… and Here’s Why

Holding Hands with Friends, Family, or Lovers is Good for Us!

Before we can even see colors or more than a few inches from our faces, we can hold a hand. Even before we can control our hands, we crave the hands of others, especially our parents or primary caregivers. From our earliest moments, our primary sense for experiencing the world around us is touch and the palms of our hands are surprisingly good at providing us with information. Despite how little of our body they comprise, our palms hold about 15 percent of our tactile nerve fibers. That’s a lot.

Known as Meissner corpuscles, the nerve endings on our palms and fingertips are remarkably responsive to even the most subtle touch. Studies reveal that we also receive a lot of emotional information when our hands are touched. A 2009 study featured 248 strangers who were paired up, one blindfolded and the other asked to touch the blindfolded person’s hand and silently express an emotion while doing so. Even without hearing or seeing the person touching them, the blindfolded participants were easily able to recognize emotions like happiness, fear, gratitude, and disgust.

This is part of why holding hands, regardless of how young or old they are, helps us feel more relaxed, safer, calmer, and more emotionally connected. It even helps decrease pain! The mere act of touch drops stress hormone levels like cortisol and lowers our heart rates, which contributes to healthier blood pressure. With all these advantages, it’s no wonder that both humans and primates reflexively grasp the finger or hand that touches their palm. There’s even a name for it. It’s called the palmar grasp reflex.

Given that holding hands is something we were born to do, researchers started to question their assumptions about why we do it. Instead of holding hands being something we learn to do over time because we are all born lonely, what if feeling lonely is unnatural? What if reaching out to one another for touch and connection is as natural as breathing? If that’s the case, then it’s no wonder we feel “touch starved” when unable to hold hands or share an embrace with someone we trust and whose physical contact starts our oxytocin levels to rise.

For those not up to date on all the hip medical lingo, oxytocin is what makes us feel in love. The more oxytocin, the closer we feel to the person touching us. It’s also why we love sweets, chocolates, and certain scents. All those things light up our orbital frontal cortexes, which are part of our brains that live above our eyes. A lit orbital frontal cortex is a happy orbital frontal cortex.

If learning about the brain is your thing, dig this. When we hold hands, our brains’ hypothalamus slows down. This is a good thing because the hypothalamus is responsible for controlling our responses to stress. The less active our hypothalamus, the less stressed out we feel. Meanwhile, the physical pressure of touch activates a complex web of pressure receptors known as the pacinian corpuscles. Although the corpuscles are close to the surface of our skin, their gift of lower blood pressure and a healthier heart are delivered by the vagus nerve to the hypothalamus.

All the doctor talk aside, holding hands does wonderful things. It lets others know that we are friends, family, or lovers with the person whose hand we’re holding. This does not exist in a social vacuum, though. In many Arab countries, as well as North Africa, the Mediterranean, Southern Europe, and parts of Asia, men hold hands to signify respect or friendship. In some other cultures, this would be seen as homosexual touch and condemned. Likewise, a heterosexual couple holding hands in many of the aforementioned countries would be seen as a vulgar display, yet in the West, we consider it a sign of romantic, filial, or platonic affection, depending on the situation.

Ultimately, what’s important is that everybody gets to hold somebody’s hand. Not just when we’re sad, in pain, stressed, or feeling lonely, but also when we’re feeling happy, joyful, mushy, calm, turned on, in love, and dedicated to the physical and emotional care of ourselves and those who matter to us.