I am really struggling with something I don't want to talk about it but before I do I need people if you are a parent who was like touched out by your children I do not want to see you in the comments if you are someone with any kind of neurodivergency and it manifests or shows up as you not liking touch or people touching you I do not want to see you in the comments but I am I feel like I'm dying from like touch starvation y'all I don't this isn't I don't I don't get hugs I don't know I feel like if I were to get the kind of hug that I [ __ ] really want I would crumble into pieces how do you deal with that I really like need to be like touched and I know someone's gonna say like okay go to the salon and get your hair done or get a massage or or get your nails done right so someone could hold your hand and none of those people love me none of those people none of those Services love me right but I am really I'm really struggling I'm really struggling with like I don't I don't get hugs that [ __ ] is it could be like maybe a hello you know whatever maybe um but it's not enough I don't know how I don't know how you how am I gonna go the rest of my life like this I really I'm just really struggling I'm really struggling like I spent like last night just going like this play 20 minutes oh yeah I'm just if anyone else is struggling what are you what are you doing okay that is some heavy stuff and I hate to say this but I think she is spot on um I think she's really tapped into something that I think we've sort of struggled with so let's like start by understanding a couple things the first is that this is not a isolated experience I also think something that a lot of people don't realize is that this is also not like a gendered experience there are other really interesting thing is even if you talk about some of the stuff around like neurodivergence and people who don't like to be touched I've heard a lot of people who are neurodivergent and don't like to be touched but are also starved for touch they're still longing for it and they're in some ways like in an even trickier situation because their body and we'll talk about this in a second needs exactly what everybody else needs but there's somatosensory cortex doesn't even allow them to engage in it so like what's going on here so I think what we're seeing so we've seen that there's a loneliness epidemic some indicators of mental illness are getting way worse than they ever have before the percentage of people who have never Urban in a romantic relationship is rising astronomically the percentage of people who have never had sexual relations is also Rising astronomically the number of people who have never had a friend or have zero friends is also Rising so I think this is going to be kind of weird like we're going to talk about signs for a second but I think this goes like way further than science so the first thing is let's talk about the physiology of like touch starvation and there is a ton of physiology to it so and it's not just oxytocin so there's one hormone that's kind of like our bonding hormone this is oxytocin so oxytocin is what's released when we like cuddle with other people like when like we look at parent-child bonding and when you like cuddle with something like you get a spurt of oxytocin oxytocin does things like calms down your nervous system reduces your stress hormone response it's kind of like inversely proportional and so like literally a hug makes us feel better it's not just a subjective experience it's a physiologic experience these signals are also what allows us to be in love and to feel so when you cuddle with someone there's oxytocin and you feel love it creates a loving bond between two people but it's way more than oxytocin so there are studies on touch deprivation and the scary thing is that these studies used to be done in orphans we used to have to go to an orphanage to find a group of people who were starved for physical touch and we'd study them these orphans in Romania now if we want to do a study on touch deprivation where do we go the average person we no longer need to go to orphanages to find people who are starved for touch it's a society why it's become the norm so we see changes in cardiovascular outcomes we even see changes in things like hemoglobin A1c so people who are starved for touch their diabetes is worse we see of course changes with things like cortisol mental health parameters like depression and anxiety but when a human being gets touched it does way more than oxytocin and this is what's also interesting there was one study that took patience and and shocked them with electrical shocks we administered electrical shocks to patients there were three groups of people one group was by themselves one group was holding hands with a stranger third group was holding hands with a loved one and the perception of pain the way that the pain was traveled to the brain the way it was interpreted by the brain the brain's response to getting electrically shocked changes and is blunted and attenuated by human contact and especially by human contact from a loved one it literally makes the experience of Life less painful like literally it's not like some like oh like it like it's easy to be no like literally there's like the the perception and response to a simple electrical shock is attenuated by holding hands with a loved one and what are we seeing we're seeing worsening like diabetes we're seeing worsening inflammatory issues everyone's going gluten free in keto diet like why what's happening with Society why is everyone so prone to inflammation why is everyone so damn star for touch there are two things that have happened the first is that our society has become increasingly independent we've decided that Independence is king and the way the What We should strive for is Independence Financial Independence emotional Independence the thought of being interdependent with someone else is something that we call weakness so if you think about a problem in your life what does everyone tell you to do with problems in your life fix them right you should fix it it's your responsibility if you're broke it's your fault on the flip side what we'll also do is we'll blame society and so we'll say it's society's fault that you're broke and both both angles are correct but both angles are missing something else which is that when I hear you complain about oh you're homeless that's society's problem or it's your problem you know whose problem it isn't it's not mine it's not mine so in our strive for Independence each individual in the world has absorbed solved themselves of the responsibility of caring for other human beings because it's society's problem it's the government's problem or it's your problem you need to go to therapy you need to get help you need to start meditating and by the way if you need to meditate guess what there's an app for that you can do it all on your own how is meditation how did it used to be taught people used to go to ashrams they used to sit in a gigantic Hall and meditate together so we've decided that Independence is King we've decided that the needs of the individual surpassed the needs of the community and we've outsourced the needs of the community to institutions like governments the second thing that we've done is technology and we've decided through technology that we're going to meet all of your needs without needing to interact with another human being so you want to meet people there's an app for that you can do it on your phone you don't have to leave your four walls you need food there's an app for that you don't have to leave your four walls you have to go talk to another interact with another human being good God now even if you look at ride sharing apps they have an option on ride sharing apps we are so tired of interacting with other human beings we can't take a conversation so now I can select something on my app that says Don't Talk To Me heaven forbid you're talking to me is wrong with you you're talking to me I did not invite you to talk to me or interact with me in heaven forbid that you touch me in any way when I was training to be a psychiatrist we had this whole segment on touching patients and it's a good segment right you have to be super careful about when you touch another human being and what that means and one of my supervisors told me never touch a patient it is not allowed within the psychoanalytics and it's like that was hard for me and I listened to them right because there's someone who's crying in your office and like what do I want to do I want to give him a hug but we're not allowed to do that right because they like they need to like manage those emotions on their own have and forbid you hug them and there's good reasons for that okay so like there's it's smart so I talk to other people right and I said hey this is like hard for me help me understand they said a lot of brilliant things so the first question is if it's hard for you to hug a patient that's about you you should never hug a patient because it's hard for you to not hug a patient because then you're putting yourself ahead of the patient brilliant I shouldn't hug people to make me feel better and if I feel like an [ __ ] for not hugging someone I should not do something to a patient that alleviates me feeling like an [ __ ] brilliant actually so a lot of good stuff in there when I also talk to people about is it okay to hug patients and sometimes I hug my patients but there's a way to do it in therapy right you talk to them about it you say hey like what does it mean to you what does it mean to me like what does this mean for us we explore what that means but in the rest of society we don't touch people anymore I'm not saying go out there and touch people but like you can invite someone right you can ask people like hey you need a hug today like you can do that I think this is what's so challenging is then like then we get into a whole other can of worms which is like a good can of worms like in in the sense that it's valid because if you go around you're asking people if they want hugs they're going to call you a creep they're gonna call cops and so somewhere along the way we become so independent that touching other people makes us uncomfortable like we don't even know how to do that anymore and this is what you end up with a society of people who are disconnected Because by the way if you need friends there's Discord if you want to talk to someone you can chat right and you know what I I hear you're feeling down let me send you an emoji of two people hugging that's what we've come to we've stopped hugging each other and we've started sending emojis of people hugging like what the [ __ ] we've created substitutes for human needs it's not actually fulfilling the need it's a substitute I recently learned that there's a virtual girlfriend app don't have a girlfriend here you go right and now we can get human-shaped pillows and we can even get sexual devices and we can we can substitute a relationship in so many different ways and it's only a matter of time before someone takes chat GPT and outsources an API to make a virtual girlfriend who adapts to you and learns like a human intelligence substitute substitute substitute substitutes and why because the individual humans today don't want to give people what they need it's not Society it's like each and every one of us this is what's happening right and there are a lot of people out there who are you know as we're watching this or like somewhat like give that lady a hug and that's what I felt too but this is the other problem like it's great that we had that emotional reaction and that she was wrong she shared her experience that resonated with a ton of people but just think for a second that what it takes to get someone to hug that person she's literally got to put something on Tick Tock that explodes and that's the threshold for human contact that's that's the hurdle she has to jump to get a hug we've got to lower the threshold to help other human beings and so like what do we do about this situation right I think it's like pretty simple we've got to be careful about using technology as a substitute for human needs can technology be used as a tool to fulfill human needs absolutely but it's crossing the line into substituting and trying to provide the needs in and of themselves second thing that we've got to do is we've got to start stop blaming people for their problems and stop blaming Society for their problems we've got to start blaming ourselves for other people's problems which runs completely alien right and that's like literally why I started streaming because I was like you know what I can do more for people it's not about like I got frustrated with like certain institutions that are related to my profession and I I thought they weren't doing enough and they're like good reasons for that right they were like big busy with other things like opioid epidemics that were literally killing people and this is these like dormant problems or subsurface not dormant and so y'all can the only way this works I can't do it by myself I can't even do one percent of the work that needs to be done because what people need is hugs like I can't hug everyone on the planet I want to there's a part of me that really wants to I think it'd be cool but like I can't do this on I can stream on Twitch I can talk to y'all but like what how close can you and I really get the only way this works is if we start accepting responsibility like we as individuals start accepting responsibility for the needs of the human beings around us and that's hard because if you start doing that it can be painful for you and so that's just the that's the core of the problem because what's happened in our society is we've decided we've moved further and further along the road of if it's painful for me and it benefits someone else I don't have to do it and I actually agree with you there you don't have to do it no one else is entitled to your sacrifice but that's the problem with Society is like people are trying to there's a group of people that's trying to it that feel entitled to the love of others that's not right and on the flip side if we're not entitled to the love of others can we still give it can we still receive it like that that's the thing is like no one no one is forcing you I don't think it's fair to force you but the only way this works is if we actually step up as a group of people and we start caring about other human beings foreign