Have you been in those situations where you feel the symptoms of stress suddenly consuming your system?
Your blood pressure rises, your heart rate quickens, you become a little pale and clammy. You feel emotion surging up inside of you and your neck and shoulders may feel extremely tight or your breathing becomes shallow.
This is an example of what you might experience if you are feeling fear or anxiety. Your body is responding with a “fight or flight response”, or otherwise known as The Stress Response.
What is Stressing You?
In our modern day times, it’s not usually the tiger chasing you, but it can be
- the boss giving you a deadline for something
- dealing with the kids, the dinner, email, phone calls, cleaning up – all at once!
- doing way too many things for others TOO OFTEN, and not allowing your own needs to be met.
While it is extremely important to look at these things on an ongoing basis and to get to the bottom of what is causing YOU stress in your life, it is also important to have a collection of tools that you can use in the short term, to help halt the severity of the stress and subsequent increase in cortisol levels that are not doing you any good.
Over the long term this ongoing stress from all the supposed little things (and big things) is extremely hazardous to your health.
Enter Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT)
A couple of years back I heard about this tool called Tapping or Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) but I just didn’t get around to really looking into it more deeply.
Over the last couple of months however, it seemed that wherever I turned, I was hearing about tapping, EFT, tapping, EFT and eventually when I walked into a local bookshop and had the book The Tapping Solution, practically jump off the shelf at me, I realised that I had to look into this more deeply.
I encourage you to look into this yourself as well and make up your own mind. However, I would like to share my experiences of the last few weeks as I have learned about tapping and come to incorporate it into my life every single day.
A Last Remaining Adrenal Fatigue Symptom Sent Packing
A few years back as the adrenal fatigue symptoms I was dealing with became more severe, I began to experience extremely severe hay fever symptoms, and I wrote about this recently. Over the years, the symptoms had slowly improved, but it was still something I was dealing with on a very regular basis and it was one of the last adrenal fatigue symptoms that was still hanging around.
So, I started tapping. I tapped on the 9 meridian points as talked about in Nick Ortner’s book, The Tapping Solution (and there is also much information on the web about Roger Callahan and Gary Craig’s techniques – the founders of tapping).
I focused on a specific issue as Nick suggested to do, and talked through what I was feeling as I was tapping. There were many tears and bouts of anger that came up very quickly as I engaged in the tapping sequence. There really seems to be something about the tapping that brings emotions to the surface very quickly.
These emotions also passed very quickly and what followed each time was a greatly improved feeling in the area I was tapping on and my general well-being, and also an incredibly deep feeling of relaxation, deeper than I have experienced in a long, long time.
This depth of relaxation I have felt after each tapping session is one of the most profound things I have noticed and it has also resulted in a deep, quality sleep every night since I have started tapping.
The really crazy thing, is that I hadn’t been tapping specifically for the hay fever issue, but the effect of tapping for all sorts of other things had addressed this as a very welcome by-product 🙂 . My symptoms are now almost non-existent, and they are disappearing more and more every single day.
I wanted to understand a little more about how this could be so and I came to understand some really major benefits from tapping.
1. Tapping turns off the amygdala’s ‘fight or flight response’.
Much research has confirmed that the stress response which is usually associated with the emotion of fear or anxiety begins in the amygdala, and from there it sends the message to the hypothalamus and in turn the hippocampus (other parts of the brain) to alert the body to prepare to fight or flight.
Nick Ortner in his book, The Tapping Solution, explains that “tapping on the meridian end-points sends a calming response to the body, and the amygdala recognizes that it’s safe.” And so, it would seem that the stress response is averted.
Nick backs this up with a section in his book talking about some studies that have been done. One with Dawson Church Ph.D which I wrote about in a previous post (scroll towards the bottom of that post) and also research at Harvard University over the last decade which “has shown that stimulation of selected meridian acupoints decreases activity in the amygdala, hippocampus, and other parts of the brain associated with fear”.
Wow, that is great news!
2. Tapping provides a tool for processing your emotions and addressing subconscious patterns
I am often talking about the need to get to the root of why you are stressed. To really address what patterns (especially emotional patterns) have created this stress. And while I highly recommend working with a counsellor to help you over an extended period of time, I have discovered that tapping is also a wonderful tool to change your old subconscious patterns. Releasing these old subsconsious patterns and creating new healthier ones is such an important part of your healing from burnout process.
As you work with old issues, what you begin to find is that your emotional attachment to a person or situation becomes more of a memory, rather than a thought that is filled with huge emotion.
I have been using tapping for a specific emotion I have been feeling wiith a past friendship and I feel like each time I tap about it, I feel less and less emotional attachment to all that went on.
Tapping is really something that you need to experience for yourself, so you can feel the changes within your system.
Whilst there are reports of some quick changes (as I have certainly experienced with the drying up of the old hay fever symptoms), I encourage you not simply to see this as a quick fix, but to see it as a tool that will help you over a long period of time as well.
I am realising that some issues are a little more “sticky” than others.
For example, I have had a burning pain in my right shoulder on and off for the past year, after a tough situation, and while it has definitely decreased substantially with the tapping, I know there is still more emotion in there that I need to keep clearing.
I truly believe (and from what I have experienced) that the changes tapping can help you with in terms of lowering your stress hormones and increasing your “feel-good” hormones, will greatly improve your health and your quality of life.
It is weird at first, and you feel a little clunky when you first do it, but stay open, give it a go.
I think you will find that you too will experience unexpected benefits as I did and still am.
If you would like to see tapping in action, check out this video of Nick Ortner with Louise Hay talking about her tapping experience. Louise was also fairly new to it when they spoke about it.
Good luck with your tapping experience, and I would love to know how you go with it.
Love and best wishes on your continued healing journey.
Lisa.
