Why It’s So Hard to Stop Touching Your Face

Oh, right, yes—I’m supposed to avoid touching my face, a task that I and pretty much everyone else have been failing at specularly. It’s hard to change habits, and that is exactly what public health advice for coronavirus has asked us to do. By definition, habits are things “we don’t put a lot of cognitive effort into making happen,” says Lynn Bufka, a clinical psychologist in Washington, D.C. Changing those habits does take cognitive effort. And it takes an ambient alertness about seemingly infinite tiny gestures that you might normally do on autopilot.

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You might, for example, expend mental energy remembering not to touch your face. Then your nose starts itching and you’re thinking about what you can do, but in that time, you’ve already subconsciously scratched your nose. (Face touching, ironically, is a stress response.) Now you’re beating yourself up about it, and your paranoid mind says maybe you’re already infected with the virus so why even bother? Now repeat this for dozens of moments throughout the day that would otherwise pass without thought.

Bufka suggests using positive reinforcement instead. Congratulate yourself when you remember to wash your hands for the full 20 seconds. Don’t be too hard on yourself about the time you forgot, as developing new habits invariably takes some time. “When there was the first public education campaign to sneeze to our elbows, that took me several weeks to make the transition,” she says. And coronavirus seems likely to still be around in several weeks, so these habits, ingrained now, could become even more important.

Also, don’t overthink it, as I almost certainly did when I started to worry about my counter and the insides of my pockets. (For perspective, the CDC recommends disinfecting phones and other highly trafficked hard surfaces everyday. Viruses are also unlikely to persist on absorbent materials like fabric.) As my colleague James Hamblin writes on the issue of disinfecting surfaces, “it’s very possible to become compulsive about this in ways that have their own risks. Any given surface is very unlikely to harbor a dangerous virus, so it’s possible to overdo this and waste a lot of time, resources, and concern.” And it’s possible to become so overwhelmed going down a compulsive spiral, that you throw your (unwashed) hands up and give up.

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The public health advice around coronavirus is about maintaining this balance. “We need to be careful with the risk-benefit ratio,” says Elaine Larson, an infection control expert at Columbia University. Significantly reducing the chances of your exposure to coronavirus is perfectly doable. Reducing it to absolute zero is pretty much impossible. You could drive yourself up the wall trying to track the the spot on your shirt that brushed against your coat sleeve that had brushed up against a subway pole, but you rapidly reach a point of diminishing returns.

Constant reminders of coronavirus can easily tip from mindfulness into anxiety. “You don’t have to read every piece of news,” says Bufka, the clinical psychologist. “It’s highly unlikely there is a piece of news that is going to so dramatically change in the next hour what we are going to do that we have to read it right now…You can make some decisions about when you’re done. I’m good with that. I can live with that.”

Sarah Zhang is a staff writer at The Atlantic.