I didn't know I had ‘skin hunger’. Then I attended a cuddle workshop

Photography by Marta Blue

I scooped up and buried my face in this small, soft creature, who did not ask for this yet patiently succumbed. What was meant to be a quick moment of affection became an eternity, the nourishment of it completely taking me by surprise, my arms drinking in his warm little body. I was more than just hungry for touch – I was starving.

This was something I’d felt on and off over the past few years: a kind of crawling sensation under my skin, a hum emanating from my body. What I missed wasn’t just touch, but the feelings of closeness that it generates. Going without it for too long left me feeling unmoored, my nervous system craving something to anchor it.

Only in the throes of the pandemic, when the whole world was united in this sensory void, did I learn this feeling had a name: “touch starvation”. Or (for more visceral effect) “skin hunger”. An animal need; the body crying out for sustenance.

It’s a need that we might be aware of, but have not prioritised. In 2019, the BBC and Wellcome Collection ran the biggest study of its kind on global public attitudes and experiences of touch, in which 72% of people reported a positive view of touch and 43% of typical adults felt society does not enable us to touch enough. And this was before social distancing led to resource scarcity.

Physical contact does more than feel good – it’s biochemical gold. When we receive a hug from someone we trust, or even when their hand rests on our arm, our vagus nerve lights up. Oxytocin, serotonin and dopamine flood our system. Cortisol levels start to drop. We feel more calm, safer, less alone. On the flipside, going without for too long can have detrimental effects on cognitive and emotional wellbeing. There was a period in my 30s where I found myself wading through emotional and mental quicksand, and even at the time I had wondered if a lack of physical contact was a contributing factor. For much of that decade I’d been single: partly through circumstance, partly by choice, too busy figuring out my own path in life to pursue a relationship. This had its price. “Can you die from lack of touch?” I had written in my journal. “Genuinely curious.”

Skin hunger is a deficiency more common than many of us are comfortable to admit, particularly for people whose lives – for whatever reason – don’t orbit someone else’s body. Not everyone has easy access to family; I live on the other side of the world from mine. Even then, ours is not a naturally “touchy feely” dynamic; we have to make a conscious effort. And while hello/goodbye hugs are standard with friends, these weren’t quite enough for satiety. For a while the only physical interaction I had with any regularity was being squished against other commuters on the Tube, a situation in which everyone tries hard not to touch, limbs and torsos recoiling from each other like trees in the throes of crown shyness.

There’s a difference between touch that brushes against you and touch that holds you. The skin-hungry crave prolonged, unhurried, intentional contact. Studies suggest that for a hug to give you a decent hit of oxytocin – enough to calm the nervous system – it should last at least six seconds. The ultimate: 20 seconds or more.

So – can you actually die from lack of touch? Sort of. Its reverberations on mental health – loneliness, anxiety and depression – are themselves linked to health issues like heart disease and a weakened immune system. For babies, consequences are more severe. Skin-to-skin contact between infants and caregivers regulates babies’ breathing, temperature and heart rates. Infants who are neglected, deprived of that contact, often fail to thrive. The benefits for the elderly are also substantial: a study published by the Royal College of Nursing suggests touch is a vital non-verbal communication with older patients, and often the only sensuous experience that remains for them.

It’s those of us in between who wither more discreetly. In adulthood, the nurturing contact delivered by care-givers in our childhoods and advancing years essentially gets outsourced to a romantic partner. This goes some way to explaining why it gets so tangled up with sex. On the rare occasions I mentioned my skin hunger to others, the response would inevitably be: “Have you tried dating apps?” (Always well-meant, always by those who haven’t recently swiped through endless grumpy-man-in-a-car selfies to know how grim conditions are.)

But then, this itself is telling. With sex being socially sanctioned as a biological need, it’s easy to prescribe – and justify – a perfunctory fling, the micro-erosion of one’s self-worth a small price to pay to have that need met. Of course there were trysts – I was single, not celibate. But while all sex is touch, not all touch is sex. Going home with someone on a date does not guarantee the kind of touch that soothes, rather than arouses. Cuddling, I found, seemed to suggest an intimacy far too terrifying to the emotionally distant. And yet sometimes, that was all you really wanted in the first place.

Post-pandemic discourse at least created an environment in which others could relate, or understand what I meant when I said I yearned for touch, and not give me a pitying head tilt. The truth is, it’s much easier to declare that you haven’t had a shag in ages than make the more vulnerable, mortifying admission that you really just miss being held. There’s a particular humiliation in needing something so small, so free, and not having it. Not getting laid in an abysmal dating economy? Fine, understandable. But touch? How can you not find touch?

This question was how I ended up at a cuddle workshop.

With sex being so inextricably woven into the idea of touch, it’s hard to see non-sexual contact as a singular need. And so deep is the weave that every single person I told about the workshop assumed it was erotic. A worrying number of people thought the cuddling would be naked (no), and there were vocal concerns I might just have signed up to a sex cult (unlikely).

In reality the workshop I joined (found via a Google search) took place in a London yoga studio scattered with cushions and afternoon sunlight, a tray of PG Tips and biscuits offered on arrival. There were about 25 of us, men and women (very slightly more of the former) aged anywhere between 35 and 70, sitting in a circle on the floor, the relaxed body language of regulars discernible from nervous novices like me. Over four hours a serene host guided us through breathing exercises and icebreakers. She established key rules up top: no touch without consent and clothes stay on at all times. And just as I was worried the subject wouldn’t come up… “I encourage you not to think about each other as male or female,” she said. “Just fellow human beings coming together with a shared need.” I wasn’t sure if this would be enough to deprogramme the sexual boundaries so inherent in us, but I was willing to try.

We practised asking for touch we wanted, and in saying no to anything we didn’t. We followed guided instructions: I pressed my palms against the shoulder blades of an elegant older woman. My socked feet were rubbed by a man wearing all-white linens. It felt strange – but unfamiliar, not unpleasant. In one exercise I sat cross-legged in front of a quiet man with whom I exchanged barely a word and whose hand I caressed for a full five minutes. It occurred to me that I had never caressed anyone’s anything without it being a warm-up to something more titillating. Untangling this mindset requires serious work.

But perhaps, a little progress? Once I presented my own hand for touching I closed my eyes and leaned into the simplicity of it. The nerve endings in my palm absorbed the contact like a plant watered, the caresses of fingers childlike and soothing. There was something safe in it being just a hand. It gave space to accept intentional touch, free of expectation, and knowing that’s all it was ever meant to be. When the time was up I noticed, to my surprise, that my entire nervous system had relaxed. As if someone had turned off a high-pitched ringing I’d long become used to, and now all was quiet.

This calming response is precisely why people like Lindsey Parker do what they do. Alongside her role as an occupational therapist, she’s a certified professional cuddler: an accredited therapist (one of many) who provides consensual, platonic touch. My experience at the workshop had led me to her, via certification body Cuddle Professionals International, keen as I was to understand this curious world of prescribed embrace. “Being held in a cuddle position tends to be the kind of touch a person is yearning for, that they tend not to have available to them,” she told me. “It’s something we work up to slowly over the session, or sessions, because building trust, safety and touch tolerance is crucial for a regulated nervous system.”

The spectrum of people who come to a professional cuddler, and their reasons for doing so, is surprisingly diverse. “I work a lot with people with significant dementia,” Parker said. “They’re in distress. But even something as simple as a hand on their arm while you’re talking to them helps their regulation and makes them feel safe.” Similarly full-time wheelchair users, for whom a lot of touch is more functional. “For them [our cuddle sessions] help with things like muscle spasms, but also validation and social connection.” And then there’s also the newly single or bereaved; women in need of unsexualised contact in a safe environment; and those who need a secure space to be themselves – like a cross-dressing client, not yet openly so, who longed to be held and accepted as that version of themselves. To receive sustained, intentional touch is to be seen.

Skin hunger, then, isn’t the scourge of sad singles. As a society we just don’t have the right understanding or language to find platonic tactility. We hug our mates, but how often do we cuddle with them? Hold hands? When did you last spoon your bestie? If we’re happy to lean on someone figuratively, why not also physically, while sitting together? It’s not an easy shift to get comfortable with; broadly speaking, women wrestle with safety and consent, and men with stigma around male vulnerability. And, of course, there are cultural elements at play – in places like Brazil or Italy, touch is a more common part of daily life. In India, male friends hold hands. Brits, however, aren’t exactly renowned for their cuddliness.

“We are a low-touch culture,” Parker told me. “But I see it changing. Younger generations are far more comfortable touching each other, holding hands, getting close…”

I thought about something a friend had said: “Isn’t the fact people need to go to a workshop to get a cuddle a bit… sad?” To which I had countered: surely the sad part is that we live in an increasingly contactless world? And isn’t the fact there’s a place for people to come and safely hold each other… kind of lovely?

One of the workshop assistants moved to sit beside me, wordlessly handing me a box of tissues. Which is when I realised I was crying. It dawned on me then: now the physical need for touch was sated, I was still missing another component. Intimacy. The language of connection; saying things without words. Being seen by another person who gives meaningful touch not because it’s expected, or even asked for, but because they care. Even in relationships, those quieter forms of touch – holding hands, being draped across each other on the sofa – can go missing, and when they do it says something about a loss of closeness.

Intimacy, then, was another need woven into the pile. And something within me knew being swallowed up in a mound of strangers couldn’t give me that.

Untangling sexual touch from the platonic is just the beginning. There are so many different kinds of touch, jumbled together like a drawer full of cables; each serves a need, but reaching for one often brings others with it – or reveals you have all but the one you need in that moment. Some touch is easier to find than others. But it’s a language we’ve not been taught. Learning to communicate and ask for what I needed was going to take practice.

Eventually the group emerged, smiling and cuddle-drunk, making me think of infants after too much milk. In their state of bliss, high on oxytocin, murmurs of feeling soothed and safe and loved were shared with the circle. While this form of touch was not for me, it was clearly beneficial for so many, and how wonderful to know it was there, for those of us who were starving.

Without planning to, I turned to the assistant beside me and whispered, “Could I please have a hug?” She smiled, reached out her arms and held me in an embrace for the rest of the session, no rush to let go, much like I had once desperately clutched a cat. And I soaked it up, feeling no shame in asking for what I needed in that moment, only comfort.