We wash our hands every day, and more than once. This is usually done as needed - if your hands get dirty and, of course, before eating, after going to the restroom … However, as it turned out, we do this hygiene procedure not only when it really is necessary.
Mania for purity
Frequent hand washing for no reason can be a sign of an obsessive condition, such as a pathological fear of disease-causing microbes. This ailment even has its own name - verminophobia. People who have this phobia especially strongly wash their hands a hundred times a day, constantly clean the house and try not to touch various objects outside their home, for example, stair railings, subway handrails.
Well, how could it be otherwise? After all, they could be touched by sick people or simply unkempt people! God forbid you still get infected!
Manufacturers of detergents make a fortune out of such fears, offering consumers a special "antibacterial" soap, which supposedly destroys microorganisms better than usual.
Verminophobia is rarely associated with real-life situations. Usually a person is held captive by the imaginary danger of contracting some kind of disease.
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Mental mud
American psychologist Stanley Rahman believes that the compulsion to wash hands can develop as a result of emotional trauma. Verminophobia can be suffered by people who have been abused (say, in childhood) or those who have experienced some unpleasant situations: humiliation, betrayal of loved ones. They may feel the urge to wash their hands whenever they come into contact with the person who is the source of their psychological trauma, or even at the mere mention of him. At the same time, hand washing is a kind of cleansing ritual that is performed completely unconsciously.
Stanley Rahman claims that by placing his hands under a stream of water, a person gets rid of doubts about the decisions made (remember the procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate, who washed his hands after sentencing Jesus Christ to death). There is also an opinion that the desire to wash your hands arises when you remember your immoral acts.
So, the heroine of Shakespeare, Lady Macbeth, after the murder of King Duncan, complains that she cannot wash her hands in any way. Probably, each of us has come across the fact that sometimes we want to perform a hygienic procedure after communicating with unpleasant people.
Stanley Rahman introduces the concept of "mental pollution"
“This is a persistent feeling of inner pollution caused by a psychological or mental disorder,” he says. - And the point here is not ordinary dirt or dust, which you want to immediately wash off, but in the influence of an unsympathetic person.
Typically, these obsessions are treated by contacting their cause. For example, verminophobes and those suffering from Lady Macbeth's syndrome are forced to touch any dirty objects, say, trash cans. But, according to Rahman, this technique is not very effective. A quarter of these patients refuse further treatment after the first sessions, and of those who undergo the full course of therapy, a third do not experience any improvement.
Victims of sexual assault are particularly difficult to treat. You can convince them to turn over even a whole garbage dump with their bare hands - the effect will be, rather, the opposite of what was expected. The psychologist believes that such patients should be treated on a mental level. After all, they are really afraid not of material dirt, but of mental. Now Stanley Rahman and his colleagues are developing new methods with which it will be possible to heal such patients.
Wash away the failure
But German psychologists believe that the process of washing hands can have a beneficial effect on a healthy, but tired or distressed person. It allows us to increase our optimism and self-confidence, and also helps to cope with negative emotions that are caused by some kind of failure. Such conclusions of scientists were recently published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.
The study of German experts involved 98 volunteers, who were divided into three groups by the organizers. For the first two, such a test task was specially selected that none of the participants obviously could cope with. After that, the scientists assessed the mood of the subjects and asked them to perform another test, a simpler one. At the same time, after completing the first task, volunteers from the first group were asked to wash their hands, and those from the second were not. Participants from the third group received only the second, simpler task.
- The scientific literature describes cases when hand washing gave people a feeling of moral purity. - the head of the study, Kai Kaspar from the University of Osnabrück, comments on the situation. “So I decided to test the relationship between bodily experience and abstract knowledge. I wanted to find out if hand washing could restore mental balance after a failure and what the consequences of this hygiene procedure would be when the task was repeated.
It turned out that those who washed their hands were very optimistic about their chances of success in the second "round" if they failed the first. Those who did not wash were more pessimistic. The third group was set up in the same way as the first. In fact, the second and third groups coped better with the second task.
According to the researchers, hand washing allows us to wash away unpleasant memories, as it were. However, at the same time, it does not contribute to the application of great efforts to solve the assigned tasks.
“Although cleansing the hands helps a person get rid of unpleasant memories and increase his self-esteem, it also“washes away”the desire to make efforts to achieve a goal, that is, it reduces motivation,” says Kai Kaspar. - The fact is that hand washing is a ritual that we often use after completing the work done, and this, in turn, leads not only to the removal of dirt, but also to consequences on the mental level.
Of course, in some situations, this procedure can play a positive role. For example, if you have a public appearance, a job interview, or if you know the material well before the exam, but you are worried … But if you are incompetent in some area, no matter how much you wash your hands, psychologists say, this will not help you achieve good results.
Ida SHAKHOVSKAYA