The scale assesses the emotional or physical pain and discomfort you feel from your focal issue. In order for this technique to be effective, you must first identify the issue or fear you have. Focusing on only one problem at a time is purported to enhance your outcome. EFT tapping focuses on tapping the 12 meridian points of the body to relieve symptoms of a negative experience or emotion. You’ll find tapping sessions Matrix Reimprinting. Alternative Healing geared toward a specific goal or concern, such as anxiety and stress, focus, fear, relationships, and more. It was established in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012 to support projects that promote the use of EFT tapping for stress and trauma relief. Through The Tapping Solution Foundation, EFT tapping is being introduced into school classrooms to reduce stress and anxiety in students.
The improvements found in RHR and BP were clinically as well as statistically significant. If these were available to hospital patients as well as therapy group participants, medical services utilizations would be reduced. The savings in terms of financial cost and human suffering would be substantial.
As you tap, you’ll say a shortened version of your earlier statement. You can perform a brief tapping session before work meetings or presentations, after an argument with your partner or friend, or when you need to cultivate focus. The risks typically come with doing EFT tapping on your own, versus working with a trained professional.
Millions of people are settling for lives filled with poor health and emotional baggage. Gary Craig, trained under Dr. Callahan’s tutelage in the 1990’s, learning the procedures for TFT. He began to improve the process by creating a simpler sequence that could be easily learned and repeated, even by the patient him/herself, calling it Emotional Freedom Techniques, or EFT.
Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT)
Research shows that clinical EFT is an evidence-based practice for anxiety, depression, phobias, and PTSD. Clinical EFT differs from the EFT you might perform on your own; it follows a specific procedure and must be led by a healthcare professional who’s been certified in the method. Over time, clinical tapping sessions teach the brain to respond to stressful memories in a neutral way. After clinical EFT, people retain the details of the traumatic memory minus the emotional response, or they have a lessened experience of the emotional response, Church explains. If possible, choose to work with a trained mental health professional such a psychologist or social worker. Thus, grief has the same basic cause as trauma, guilt, fear and a baseball player’s hitting slump. So the same general method can be used for all these problems.
EFT tapping stimulates acupoints by touch rather than by the use of needles, making it similar to acupressure. Tapping draws on the ancient Chinese practice of acupuncture, which teaches that the body’s energy travels along specific pathways. Certain points on these pathways are stimulated to improve the flow of energy. The stimulation is done by inserting very thin needles or by applying pressure . Put simply, meridian points are certain points that can be mapped throughout the body. Energy circulates through your body along this specific network of channels.
Written aids to locating the EFT Basic recipe Tapping Points
Countering a negative thought with a positive affirmation also serves to neutralize it, theorizes the research article , which provides an overview of EFT and other energy therapies. And when you calm your brain and body by working with tapping, you may be more apt to accept these neutral statements as true. Research suggests that EFT tapping can relieve stress, diminish cravings, improve performance, and even help relieve symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder . There is no specific credential that all EFT practitioners have, and some practitioners do not have training or licensure in mental health treatment. Just pick an issue of your own and tap along with me in the next video. With a few practice rounds you will embed the process into your memory and will then be able to apply it to a wide variety of issues.
If you want to go further, our certified Trainers offer EFT training courses all over the world. You can visit the Training and Events page to find a training course or workshop near you. Medical News Today has strict sourcing guidelines and draws only from peer-reviewed studies, academic research institutions, and medical journals and associations. We link primary sources — including studies, scientific references, and statistics — within each article and also list them in the resources section at the bottom of our articles. You can learn more about how we ensure our content is accurate and current by reading our editorial policy. In addition, after three and six sessions, 60.0% and 85.7% of these participants respectively no longer met the PTSD clinical criteria.
As hypothesized, participants experienced significant decreases in pain, anxiety, depression, and PTSD. Physiological indicators of health such as RHR, BP, and cortisol also significantly decreased, indicating improvement. This tapping helps restore the balance of energy in the body and thus can help to alleviate physical, mental, and emotional issues, including healing trauma. You don’t necessarily have to be in the thick of an anxiety-producing experience to put it into practice. EFT tapping is generally considered a safe and effective therapy for many people. You can use it to help reduce everyday stress and anxiety, improve mental focus at work and in sports, get a handle on food cravings, and more.
While working through the sequence of taps, you will usually repeat an affirmation designed to counter the negative feeling or emotion you’re looking to release. In some versions, you might also state the intensity of your emotional reaction to your problem once at the beginning of the sequence and then again at the end, so that you can track your progress. Once you’ve resolved the feeling or emotion you’re targeting, you may move on to other target feelings. EFT is often used as a complement to other therapeutic interventions and is particularly common in conjunction with creative arts therapy or other modalities focused on self-expression. It doesn’t take long to learn and is sometimes taught in single-session workshops, but in other cases, you may work with a practitioner across multiple sessions for ongoing support.