TIL - There are Surprising Psychological Benefits of Hand Washing
If there’s anything we’ve learned from the coronavirus pandemic, it’s that washing our hands is one of the best ways to protect ourselves from the dangers of contagion. But hand washing does much more than cleanse us physically; sometimes it can wipe our mental slate clean. Here are some examples of what a bit of soap can do for our psyches.
"I'm going to wash my hands of it." is something we've all probably heard at some point. I wondered if there was anything behind the saying. Turns out there is.
Allow me to introduce you to my OCD
It's a part of me, as clear as can be.
I'd bet those benefits also come with a little hit of serotonin making hand washing slightly addictive.
It feels so soothing and is almost always worth the bloodied cracked knuckles
Seems like most of them are small sample sizes. I'd like to see some repeatable results, too.
Indeed, it is a small sample size.
However, I think it’s possible that these results are true. If you understand relational frame theory, then you can see how the act of washing hands can activate some schemas or deactivate others.
Seen through this lens, the results of these experiments are not special, but are simply implications of an already established theory of cognition.
I respectfully disagree. The Germ Theory of Disease did not fully take root until the late 1800s, less than 200 years ago.
A fine example is Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis who proposed hand-washing for doctors because he noticed that there were fewer miscarriages and post-labor deaths when doctors washed their hands between an autopsy and a birth. This was, for one, against commonly accepted theory at the time, as the Germ Theory had not yet taken serious hold or had much evidence for it. For two, his proposal was later rejected, doctors stopped washing their hands, and Semmelweis was later committed into an asylum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
The CDC in the USA didn't even suggest hand-washing for doctors until the 1980's.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK144018/
The 1980s represented a landmark in the evolution of concepts of hand hygiene in health care. The first national hand hygiene guidelines were published in the 1980s, followed by several others in more recent years in different countries. In 1995 and 1996, the CDC/Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee (HICPAC) in the USA recommended that either antimicrobial soap or a waterless antiseptic agent be used for cleansing hands upon leaving the rooms of patients with multidrug-resistant pathogens.
"Washing our hands of it" is a relatively recent phenomenon, seriously. If it was "simply implications of an already established theory of cognition" I would think that we'd have a much longer, serious history of actual handwashing. For most of human history, humans have been absolutely fucking filthy. Early human history didn't even use soap for bathing as much as it was used for textiles. Even the Romans, known for bathing, used oils, not soaps. Further, before the Industrial Revolution, soap was mostly accessible to the aristocracy. The Industrial Revolution was... *checks notes... was 1760, about a hundred years before Semmelweis was one of the first people to propose hand-washing.
This is an extremely short time period for this behavior to be part of "an already establish theory of cognition." Whereas we have millions of years without serious hand-washing as part of human culture... which is where that established theory of cognition was developed... prior to handwashing.
Those are not the benefits I expected to read haha. I just use it as a nice mindful moment to notice the warm water and smell of the soap. It's a pretty good check in during the day for me.
I guess having anxiety and eczema is a bad combo then, because either my brain or my hands are getting irritated
We need some studies about the benefits of hand washing while wearing rubber gloves. As easy as it is to fool ourselves I'd bet that those benefits still exist to some degree.
COVID is a horrible example to give for hand washing being effective as it's an airborne virus. like sure, handwashing is great for other viruses and will never hurt when doing COVID prevention but wearing a respirator is the actual best way to prevent contagion for anything airborne
That is true but what happens when you sneeze into your hand and then touch a doorknob? Much better if you washed your hands first.
"Out, damned spot!"