You shouldn’t do it. It’s a nervous tic. You’re bringing oils from the world and setting them directly on your face, which can cause pimples, growths, and all sorts of facial nastiness. But you can’t help it.

According to a recent study, your constant unconscious face touching, especially in your infamously troublesome T-Zone, is part of a complex distress signal sent out by your brain.

In a paper presented at the 2025 International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, researchers from the University of Houston and Virginia Tech report that they filmed ten researchers for four consecutive days.

Why We Touch Our Faces When We’re Stressed

Using AI-powered video analysis and thermal imaging, they tracked over 600,000 seconds of human behavior to find a pattern. T

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