The World Needs a Hug

I love hugs.

I was blessed to grow up in a family where physical affection was common. My parents exemplified it to my siblings and me by hugging each other often and for minutes at a time. My mom taught me to hug from a young age, and whenever someone tells me I give good hugs, I give her credit. A hug from my mom is one of the first things I want when I get to Heaven, after a hug from Jesus.

I consider hugging to be an increasingly necessary and beneficial display of love, especially when working in church ministry. So many people either want a hug and never get one or don’t realize how much they need a hug until one is offered. I also know people who have had bad experiences with physical displays of intimacy because of past trauma or affection deprivation, and while I generally respect those boundaries, those are the people I most wish I could hug—to show them that a real hug should be a comforting and selfless gesture of warmth and affection, not a transaction or fodder for veiled abuse.

Here's a great example from modern media of the power of a long hug:

TV show: Ted Lasso Season Two

TW: brief profanity

Context: British footballer Jamie faces his abusive, alcoholic father after losing a game, and receives a hug from Coach Roy, his mentor and hero. Neither of them were previously “huggers.”

But why hugs?

A quick Google search about the science of hugging will tell you that a long, warm embrace has healing properties. It has been shown to reduce stress and promote well-being by triggering the release of oxytocin, which is a neurochemical that puts people at ease and loosens tension. It has even been shown to help lower blood pressure simply because of how well it soothes emotional stress.

In fact, extended hugs (ten seconds long or more) have been shown to take this even further, simply because the brain has a longer amount of time to release the endorphins that cause the happy feelings. It can also be argued that allowing your body to touch someone else’s in an embrace helps humanize them and cause increased tenderness (especially when you can feel their heart beating).

I don’t think we really need science to tell us that hugs are good for us, but if it helps convince someone hugging is worth trying, so much the better. I’ve found that hugging opens the door to deeper conversations and the growth of nonverbal emotional closeness. It helps people learn to let down their constantly activated walls and trust that the person they’re hugging genuinely cares about them.

We live in a world where the love of many has seemed to grow cold, and when a chance to express or receive warmth is offered, people will often jump in line. Hugging is often also seen as inappropriate in certain social situations (such as workplaces), and I understand why, but sometimes I wish a hug could just be seen as a hug. No ulterior motives, just a display of respect and positivity. Of course, some people also resist hugs because of neurodivergence or mental health struggles, but even those conditions don’t have to have the final say.

This isn’t to say hugs are uncommon. But I do think they’ve been sanitized, commodified, and sometimes labeled as “too much,” especially among men. I know very few men who would be comfortable with a ten second or longer hug unless you explained first that you intended to embrace for that length of time. A ten-second hug feels like an eternity, like it’s briefly stopping time and breaking some arbitrary social boundary.

Also, since our culture likes to imply that every form of physical affection is a gateway to potential romance, platonic hugging is an idea that tends to get tossed out the window. Most hugs I give are either second-long side hugs or “man hugs” that start with a crisp handclasp followed by a close-up, testosterone-filled back clap or two. There’s nothing wrong with those, but I wish more people were comfortable with longer frontal hugging, even for a duration of five to seven seconds. The longer and tighter the embrace, the more affection I feel like I can convey.

Maybe I should get one of those “free hugs” t-shirts.

Anyway, I just wanted to convey that, while our world is consistently divided, isolated, and individualistic, we don’t have to let those culture traits spoil our displays of affection for one another. What if we offered to hug each other more often and for longer periods of time? Maybe we’d actually start to see each other as more than faces in a crowd and remember that we’re all humans who need to show and be shown love and respect.