“Vital Signs – ideas and inspirations for a healthier you – Reach out and touch someone: This simple act can lower your blood pressure and help reduce stress.  Get in touch.

Whether you enjoy a monthly massage or a daily hug, physical contact can keep you well.

You practice yoga, take a daily multivitamin, and even manage eight hours of sleep a night, but do you hug? If not, your health routine may be missing an element that’s crucial for keeping stress and sickness at bay.  ‘Touch is just as important to our health as diet and exercise,’ says Tiffany Field, Ph.D., director of the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami School of Medicine.  Physical contact helps control levels of hormones that, when left unregulated, can destroy our natural killer cells – the frontline of our immune systems – and leave us vulnerable to illness, Field explains.

Touch suppresses stress hormones by rousing the body’s pressure receptors and thus stimulating the brain’s vagus nerve (considered one of the most important nerves in the body).  ‘Activity in the vagus nerve slows heart rate, lowers blood pressure, and leads to improved health overall,’ says Field. Simply rubbing lotion onto your skin may prompt vagus nerve activity, but massage provides one of the most powerful forms of stimulation and can even promote total-body rejuvenation. In fact, one of Field’s studies, published in the October 2005 issue of the International Journal of Neuroscience, found that an average of 30 minutes of massage can lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol by almost a third.  ‘Apart from being a great stress reliever, massage helps boost circulation, cleanse the body of toxins, and ease pain,’ says Demara Stamler, executive director of the Potomac Massage Training Institute in Washington, D.C. ‘It can also help you recover faster form injury.’

Getting a tension-melting rubdown about once a month should help shield you from the fallout of day-to-day stress, says Mary Beth Braun, president of the American Massage Therapy Association. And when you’re not having your knots kneaded away by a massage professional, seek out the healing touch of those around you.  ‘Hugging someone-or even just giving a firm handshake-can be enough to stimulate your pressure receptors,’ says Field.  ‘That kind of everyday touch is critical to keeping healthy.’ “