You ARE touching your face!! 2 simple tricks to avoid this: COVID-19
Everyone is saying don’t touch your face but no one is saying HOW. Here are 2 simple tricks that you can do to avoid fomite-mediated Corona transmission.
First, here are video/pics of officials warning us not to touch our faces to stop corona spread
Why is it so hard to stop touching your face ?
In 2015, a Sydney university observed medical students and found each of the 26 future doctors under observation touched their faces an average 23 times per hour which means ~300 times per day. Nearly half of those times — 44% — involved contact with their eyes, nose or mouth.
It just might be the case that even you are reading this post like this right now :
Constantly touching face, starts at a very young age and becomes a habit. Some people associate it with reducing stress and discomfort.
“Spontaneous facial self-touch gestures are performed manifold every day by every human being, primarily in stressful situations,” the study says. “These movements are not usually designed to communicate and are frequently accomplished with little or no awareness.”
Touching your face is so common, there’s a website that uses your webcam to notify you when you touch your face and keeps track of how many times you do it.
Important question now is:
How to stop this?
We need to understand that this outbreak is not here for a few days or weeks. It might take months for us to go back to previous normal, so moving to a new behavior of not touching our face, and more so when we are outside our home, is very important. Here is how you can prevent it:
Trick 1 — Sensitization and habituation
Sensitization is having an enhanced response to stimulus. Habituation is weakened response to stimulus because of repeated presentation of stimulus.
As mentioned in the previous section, touching our face is something that we have been habituated to from childhood and hence we don’t even realize when we are doing it.
Usually as kids, when we learn new behaviors, the responses are triggered by the Prefrontal cortex (PFC) but when we repeat those habits we form neural pathways. Once it becomes a habit a new part of brain controls the habits, which is Striatum (Auto-pilot). PFC can think about some other things while we are performing our autopilot actions, performed by striatum. You would have observed this while driving back home.
We need to sensitize this stimulus of repeatedly touching the face, so the impulses go to PFC instead of Striatum, without which we can’t exhibit a different behaviour. We need to become aware that our hand is going to touching our face.
How to sensitize / bring something from subconscious to our conscious (Striatum to PFC )— by providing new cues to brain, or by making the nervous impulse of touching our face different than what it used to be before so the stimulus can be processed by the PFC and not the striatum.
Simple example: Sticking tape or thread tightly around 2/3 fingers. This mild discomfort caused by the tape when you move your hand acts as a different stimulus when we have an urge to touch our face.
Thus we can get sensitized to this slowly as this information is biologically very critical to our survival now and is going to PFC
Once we are aware we can do new behaviour repeatedly by our decision making center to form a new habit patterns eventually. For example, using tissue from our pocket to touch our face and disposing it off, or using shoulders to touch the face, instead of our hands, to control the scratching urge. I have been trying this trick and this has been extremely helpful.
Trick 2 — Dominant hand usage
If you notice carefully you would observe very important pattern: Mostly, we use our dominant hand to touch our face (if you are right-handed, then right and vice versa).
Suggestion — whenever outside — use your non-dominant hand for holding doorknobs, milk packets, grocery items, other objects which you feel might be contaminated. So even when you touch the face with your dominant hand, you are not touching it with the hand that got exposed to the virus, hence preventing fomite-mediated transmission.
Now, this might also be hard as this is also a habit of using the dominant hand for doing most activities. We need to be more aware of how we are using our dominant hand. Here also, you can use Trick 1 to make sure that you are aware of how you are using it and then create a habit of not using your dominant hand for touching things when outside.
If you are aware and even if you end up using right hand for such tasks like doorknobs, milk packets, newspapers etc, you can use a sanitizer/ wash your hand instantly post that.
Hopefully, with a combination of Parts 1 and 2 we will be able to contain the spread of COVID-19 and will eventually rise from this pandemic.
If you find these tricks and information helpful for preventing fomite-mediated transmission, make sure you share this so more people could use it.
Stay safe folks!!
