Can’t Stop Touching Your Face? Congratulations. You’re Human.

Great news, everyone.

I’ve found a way to take our minds off our vanishing 401Ks, IRAs and other investments: 

Instead of compulsively checking balances, think about not touching your face.

I mean, really THINK about it. You won’t be able to think about anything else.

Like other germaphobes I’ve been feeling pretty smug about most of the suggestions to minimize our risk of being infected with the coronavirus. I long ago mastered the art of the foot-flush. I can elbow my way through almost any door and I’ve learned to discreetly put my hands behind my back when someone wants to shake.

Hand washing? You have no idea.

In fact, at my annual skin cancer check - long before virus was on the loose - the dermatologist touched the back of my hands, looked at them under a magnifying glass and muttered something like, “So dry.”

“Well, I wash my hands all the time and use hand sanitizer,” I boasted.

I thought she’d praise me for such vigilance. After all, if anyone understands the importance of immaculate digits, it’s a doc.

“You can do too much of that,” she said with a frown. 

Moments later she was called out of the examining room to take a call and I gave myself a fresh squirt of sanitizer to spite her.

Yet there is one CDC recommendation that seems impossible. Those instructions about not touching your face.

I get it. Our hands are germy - or at least some are, mine are raw from hand sanitizer - if you  touch your eyes, mouth or nose with one of those contaminated paws you send an army of pathogens marching into one of your orifices.

The next thing you know, you’re feverishly begging a local hospital to test you for the virus.

Unfortunately, face touching seems to be my hobby.

As I sat in church Sunday I focused on not touching my face. For an entire hour. 

It was exhausting. I didn’t hear a word of the homily. 

The more I tried not to touch my face, the more I wanted to do it. A few minutes into the service my face started itching, so I used the earpiece of my glasses to scratch. My cheek itched, my chin, my eyebrows.

Then my nose had a tickle and I longed to rub it. Suddenly it felt like I had a speck in my eye. My bangs are too long and I reached at least a dozen times to brush them out of my eyes.

I lost count but I almost touched my face about 50 times during those torturous 60 minutes.

It’s worse when I’m working. I’m a writer and a bundle of nervous habits when I wait for the muse.

I sit at my computer every day with my chin cupped in my hands. When I’m stuck, I gnaw on my cuticles, play with my hair, rub my eyes.

I wear glasses for reading so I’m constantly putting them on and talking them off. Shoving them up on my nose, lowering them to see in the distance. 

The only way to keep my hands off my face would be to sit on them.

Am I alone, I wondered.
Not according to a wonky study of what the National Institutes of Health calls “spontaneous facial self-touch gestures.” The researchers there discovered that we all touch our faces during stressful situations. We can’t help it.

Great. 

Frankly, it stresses me out to think that the government is spending tax dollars to study people touching their noses. Where’s Sen. William Proxmire and his Golden Fleece Award when you need him?

Yet another study found that we touch our faces on average about 24 times an hour.

In an amusing look at compulsive face touching, “Don’t Touch Your Face,” Warn Public Officials Seconds Before Touching Their Faces, The Washington Post found multiple instances of government and health officials fondling their own faces and licking their fingers while warning us not to touch ours.

Finally, I found a recent Business Insider piece explaining that face touching is a comfort to most of us.

“An April 2014 study suggested touching one's own face helps to regulate stress and memory formation. 

“Since face-touching can be a relational tool, humans start touching their own faces from a young age and it becomes a habit, making it even harder to stop, even if a person's health is at stake..

Here’s the money quote:

“Telling yourself you can't touch your face will (likely) make you touch your face more.”

No kidding.

Pass the Purell.