EFT Tapping: When Anxiety Won’t Budge With Thinking

You can be a very sensible person and still, at 11:40 p.m., be holding a conversation in your head that won’t actually take place until tomorrow. You’ve already delivered your line at least six times, come up with three possible replies from the other side, and on a particularly good night you’ve even got as far as conversation No. 2, which nobody has planned yet. Your mind knows perfectly well that nothing is happening right now, but your shoulders are almost up to your ears, your stomach is tight, your breathing is shallower, and every time you glance at your phone, it all comes back. Apparently the body wasn’t at the meeting where the mind decided the matter was closed.

This is exactly the reaction EFT works with — the Emotional Freedom Techniques. The method became popular through Gary Craig in the 1990s and combines focusing your attention on a specific problem with gently tapping your fingers on certain points on the face and upper body. At first glance it sounds a little odd, because we expect anxiety to be solved by thinking, by talking, or at least with coffee, and here someone is suggesting you tap your eyebrow and talk out loud. The exercise itself, though, is very simple, and most importantly, it doesn’t ask you to convince yourself of something you don’t feel at all right now.

What you actually do

You start with one specific situation, because “I want to sort out my life” is a lovely ambition, but a little big for three minutes. Maybe tomorrow you have to talk to your boss, and just thinking about the conversation you feel tension in your throat. Maybe you’ve had a message from someone and you still don’t want to open it. Or maybe someone made a remark last week, has probably long forgotten it, while you’re still running the trial in your head, complete with prosecution, defence and closing speech.

The more specifically you name what’s happening, the easier it is to follow your own reaction. So before you begin, you ask yourself one simple question: “When I think about this now, how strong is my reaction from 0 to 10?” Zero means you can think about the situation and almost nothing changes in you; ten means the reaction is very strong and it’s hard for you to stay with it. You’re not looking for the right number, and you’re not doing bookkeeping on your feelings. If the first thing that comes to you is 7, you start from 7. In a few minutes you’ll come back to the same question, and that’s exactly when this number becomes interesting.

The first phrase

Before the round itself, you tap lightly with two or three fingers on the outer edge of your hand and say, three times, a phrase about the specific situation. For example: “Even though I tense up when I think about tomorrow’s conversation with my boss, I accept myself and the way I feel right now.” The sentence doesn’t need to be pretty, and it’s even better if it doesn’t sound like something printed on a positive-thinking mug. If what you really feel is “I’m so angry that once again I’m the one who has to start this conversation,” that is the more important sentence, because it describes what is actually happening in you.

The tapping points

After the setup you go through eight points in turn — the start of the eyebrow, the side of the eye, under the eye, under the nose, under the lower lip, by the collarbone, under the arm and the top of the head. On each one you tap lightly with your fingertips and say a short phrase about the same situation. You might start with “Tomorrow’s conversation,” then move through “This tension in my throat,” “I’m scared of how they’ll react” or “I keep picturing what they’ll say.” The phrases change, but the topic stays the same.

The idea is not to convince yourself that everything is wonderful while inside you’d like to escape through the window. If you’re worried, you say you’re worried. If you’re angry, you name the anger. If you’re afraid of what you’ll hear, you work with that fear, instead of telling yourself over and over how happy, confident and radiant you are. In EFT it makes far more sense to start from what is actually true for you in this moment.

Then the number comes back

After one round you stop, let your breathing go on normally and picture the same situation again. If your reaction was a 7 before, you ask yourself what it is now. It might be 5, it might be 3, and it might still be 7 — and that last one has something to show you too. We often start with one sentence and realise during the round that the real reaction is about something slightly different.

“I’m afraid of the conversation,” for example, can turn into “Actually I’m furious, because last time they didn’t listen to me at all.” “I’m worried about whether I’ll get the job” can lead to the much more accurate “What if they turn me down again?” Then you have a different sentence, and you can do the next round with it. You don’t need to have uncovered every layer of your reaction in the first minute. One round may simply help you name more precisely what until now you’ve been calling “anxiety” in general.

What if you start yawning?

If you start yawning during the round, you simply yawn. You might sigh more deeply, feel your shoulders drop, get warm, want to cry, or suddenly remember something you had never connected with the situation. There may also be no special effect at all, except that when you rate it again you notice a change. You don’t wait for bells, white light and the Universe personally confirming that the round is over. You go back to the same situation and check how you react now.

Why someone else’s phrase isn’t always yours

If you search for EFT online, you’ll find countless ready-made rounds for love, money, fear, confidence, work and probably twenty more topics you didn’t even know you were supposed to worry about. The trouble is that a generic “Even though I feel anxious about the future…” may have almost nothing to do with what is happening to you.

Your sentence might be “On Friday I have to pay this bill and I don’t know where I’ll find the money,” “He read my message and didn’t reply” or “In two hours I have to walk into that office and since this morning I’ve been thinking about what I’ll hear.” That is the specific situation that sets off your reaction. When you picture the same thing again after the round, it’s much easier to notice whether anything has changed, instead of trying to measure whether you’re worrying less “about the future” in general.

How it works in FatedWays

In the room “The Tapping” you don’t need to remember the order of the points or invent suitable phrases while tapping your face and wondering which point came next. You describe in your own words what’s happening and mark how strong your reaction is from 0 to 10. From what you tell it, your personal setup and the phrases for the round are created, so you work with your own situation instead of a general text that could belong to anyone.

Then you simply follow the screen — you see which point is next, you tap and say the phrase. When the round is over, you rate the same situation again and see the two numbers side by side. If you started at 7 and after the round you’re at 4, you see the difference straight away. If you’re still at 7, you can go back to whatever came up during the round and carry on with a more accurate sentence. Further rounds on the same situation are free, because one round isn’t always the whole story, and if a few days later you decide to come back to the same topic, it’s saved and you don’t start from a blank page.

And if an old event surfaces during the round — that time at school, a conversation from ten years ago, words you still remember word for word — there is a separate room for it, “The Scene”. There you work with one specific memory: you go through rounds on it, and then a new story of the same place is created from your answers.

What I would use EFT for

I would use EFT for the conversation I’ve been rehearsing since breakfast, for the tension before an exam, an interview or a meeting, for the message I’ve read five times and manage to get angry about all over again each time, or for yesterday’s argument, which is formally over but in my head has apparently been renewed for a second season. In other words — for a specific situation where the mind has already said everything it has to say, while the body still reacts as if the conversation were still going on.

EFT is not medical or psychotherapeutic treatment and does not replace the help of a doctor or specialist. If your anxiety is strong or lasts a long time, if you have recurring panic attacks or traumatic experiences, or you feel it’s hard to cope on your own, working with a specialist is the more suitable path. For that one specific thing that has kept coming back to your mind since this morning, though, you can try a small experiment: give it a number, do one round, and then go back to the same situation.

What is it now?