Understanding our behaviours - Why do we touch our faces

A man walks up to you and asks you a riddle.

“There is a global pandemic around, everyone is scared and humanity’s best defense against it is to a) Stay home b) wash your hands & c) not touch your face. Now tell me, what year and what century are you in?” he asks.

There is no way, you would have picked the 21st century as your choice, right?

But in reality, here we are — sitting at home, washing our hands, touching our faces. Oops, that last one is on the not-to-do list. And yet, that is the one thing that all of us are doing most often.

On the face of it (pun intended), it seems like a simple thing. Don’t touch your face!

The rationale for it is just as simple and logical — Your hands could be infected and if you touch your eyes, nose or mouth, you might transfer that inside your body. But we just can’t seem to be able to stop ourselves, can we?

In these times of #lockdown, we seem to be inundated with new information all the time. Sometimes, there is news about a new case discovered close to our homes and sometimes there is a video of someone behaving irresponsibly in another part of the country. While both seem equally real and equally ‘close by’, the fact remains that neither poses as much threat to us specifically as the rather involuntary habit of touching one’s face and transferring any infection.

So why is it so hard for us to do something so simple? Partly because it isn’t ‘so simple’ and maybe by understanding why that is the case, we can begin to protect ourselves from it. So here are three of the most common reasons ‘Why’ we touch our faces

1. The feeling-itchy situation

Let’s start off with the most common and most irritating one. These days, everyone is wearing a mask of some sort. While most of us have adhered to some level of lockdowns, we still have to step out for buying essentials or an occasional trip to the bank. On a separate note, imagine being a bank teller during these times. Everyone who walks into the bank is wearing a mask. The poor teller can’t tell the good guys from the bad ones anymore ??

But jokes apart, we are all wearing masks that we are not used to. That often causes an itch, usually where the mask rubs off against the cheek or the top of the nose. And as most of us know from experience, once it itches you have to scratch it!

That’s probably the silliest but most common reason why people are touching their faces, when they know they should not.

2. The forbidden-fruit situation

A bench was placed in a park, along a walking path used by people who regularly used the park for their evening walks. The bench bore a sign saying ‘Wet Paint — Do not touch’ on it. Interestingly, about 30% of people who approached it, did something odd. They lightly touched the seat of the bench with a finger to see if it had wet paint on it!

There is something in our makeup as a social species. When we are told not to do something, we tend to remember that thing more than the instruction of not doing it. Maybe it is something we learnt as kids, when we wanted to rebel against our parent’s instructions or advice, maybe it is something deeper. While we can’t be sure, we know it exists. So, the more medical & govt authorities tell you not to touch your face, the more often you think about it & possibly touch it too!

3. The cognitive-protective situation

According to a paper written by Kwok, Gralton & McLaws in 2015, when they observed a bunch of medical students in Australia, they found that an average student touched his/her own face about 23 times in an hour. Important to note that these are medical students and are well aware that their work might regularly expose them to infections. Yet their brains blanked out the danger — pretty much like how you blanked out the names of the authors of that paper!

And now, you just glanced up to see them again ??

It is perhaps important to remember that face touching is a primitive form of stress reducing behaviour that we learnt as part of our social or perhaps even genetic coding. So, it is unlikely to vanish from our behaviour completely, just because of a clear and present danger these days.

But that’s not the point of this post. The idea is to make us all just a little bit more aware of what we are up against, in terms of our own behaviour patterns. So, please don’t beat yourself up if you can’t control the face touching. After all, like the riddle in the beginning showed you, these are absolutely unprecedented times and perhaps need rather fresh approaches to tackle them.

Maybe, just maybe, understanding why we do this, might be able to help some of you reduce the habit — just a little bit.

I would love to know what each of you is doing to tackle this at your end. Do share your ideas in the comments so that we can all learn from each other and beat the virus from causing more harm, to us and our dear ones.

This article was first published in https://medium.com/@adisave