Why is it so hard to stop touching your face?

It’s a key recommendation to stop the spread of coronavirus. If only we could stop.

It’s like a grim twist in a disaster movie: the one thing that could save the human race from impending doom is something that people do constantly and simply can’t stop doing. According to the CDC, one of the best ways to fight the spread of coronavirus—and, you know, slow a pandemic—is simply to stop touching your face. And for some reason, this seems to be all but impossible.

It is, of course, not the only thing the agency recommends: you should also wash your hands often, cough into your elbow, and avoid contact with sick people. (By now you’ve hopefully heard that masks are not recommended for healthy people—neither is shaving your beard.)

So why is it so important not to touch your face? We don’t yet know for sure how long the coronavirus can survive on hard surfaces like doorknobs, railings, and subway poles, but similar viruses have been shown to last for days. This gives our grimy little fingers plenty of opportunities to pick it up and put it directly onto our face’s mucous membranes—our eyes, noses, and mouths—which are capable of funnelling the virus straight into our bodies.

Of course, it’s not just coronavirus. All kinds of other diseases—colds, the flu—end up infecting us this way. Nor is it the only reason to avoid touching your face: stopping can also lead to clearer skin.

But it’s not just you. A 2015 study where a group of medical students were filmed during a lecture, found that they touched their faces a whopping 23 times in an hour on average; half of those touches were to a mucous membrane. These are people in the medical profession who presumably know better.

And maybe the worst thing about trying to not touch your face is the compulsion to do it when someone brings up that you shouldn’t be. It’s like when someone else yawns and then you start yawning. (This phenomenon is unfortunately still “largely unexplained” by science). The more you hear about how important it is to avoid touching your face, the more your hands seem drawn to it.

We don’t want to get sick and we don’t want zits, but we still can’t manage to shake the habit. Kelley Zinka, a family nurse practitioner at the Vancouver Clinic in Vancouver, Washington acknowledges that it’s really, really hard to stop.

“People have an itch, their nose is running, or they’re trying to fix their hair,” she says. “But these are basic fundamentals for preventing getting sick are washing your hands and avoiding touching your face—things that we should’ve been doing already.”

Ultimately, the answer isn't complicated. Touching our faces is a habit, and habits are by definition very difficult to change. But we could all benefit from channelling any fear about an outbreak into improving our own personal hygiene. An easy place to start: The CDC recommends that we should wash our hands with soap and water for 20 seconds, as long as it takes to sing the “Happy Birthday” song twice—or about the length of this clip from the 2011 movie Contagion when Kate Winslet’s character describes the dangers of face-touching.

Source: GQ