The first time somebody sees EFT being done, they usually smile. You are tapping your own fingertips against points on your hand, face and collarbone while saying something out loud about whatever is bothering you. It looks peculiar. There is no getting round that.
What keeps people coming back to it is much less exotic: it is free, it takes about two minutes, and you can do it standing in a corridor before a difficult conversation.
What EFT actually is
EFT stands for Emotional Freedom Technique, though almost everybody calls it tapping. It was put together in the 1990s and borrows from two places at once. The tapping points sit on the same lines as acupuncture points, which is where the physical side comes from. The spoken part — naming the problem out loud, then adding a phrase of acceptance — comes from the talking therapies.
You tap gently with two fingertips through a short sequence of points while keeping your attention on the thing you are unsettled by. Then you check in with yourself and, usually, go round again.
Why naming it matters
The instruction that surprises people most is that you say the difficult thing out loud rather than trying to think your way past it. Something like: even though I am dreading this meeting, I am all right.
Most of us do the opposite. We try to talk ourselves out of the feeling, or push it under and get on. Naming a worry plainly and then staying with it for a couple of minutes is a different move, and it is often the part people say made the difference — before you get anywhere near the tapping.
"You are not trying to make the feeling go away. You are giving yourself two minutes to be honest about it while doing something steady with your hands."
What the research does and doesn't say
EFT has been looked at in a number of small trials, mostly around anxiety, low mood and stress, and several have reported improvements. It is worth being clear-eyed about the limits of that: many of the studies are small, some are run by people invested in the technique, and there is real debate about how much of the effect comes from the tapping itself as opposed to the calm attention and the breathing that go with it.
For most people that debate is somewhat academic. Two minutes of slow, deliberate attention to a worry is a reasonable thing to do whichever mechanism is doing the work. What EFT is not is a substitute for talking therapy or for your GP if something is genuinely weighing on you.
Trying it once
If you want to see what it is like, pick something mildly irritating rather than the hardest thing in your life. A short version:
- Rate how much it bothers you, roughly, out of ten.
- Tap the side of your hand and say out loud what the thing is, and that you are all right anyway.
- Tap gently through a few points — eyebrow, side of the eye, under the eye, under the nose, chin, collarbone — saying a short version of the worry at each one.
- Take a breath. Rate it again.
Sometimes the number drops. Sometimes it does not move at all, and that is useful information too. A practitioner is worth seeing if you want to work on something bigger, or if you would rather not be alone with it.
Welvow includes EFT practitioners as well as counsellors, hypnotherapists and breathwork teachers who work with stress and anxiety in different ways. A short introductory call is usually the quickest way to work out which approach suits you — many practitioners offer one free, and see people online as well as in person.
Find your practitionerThe appeal of tapping, for me, has never been that it is remarkable. It is that it is small. It costs nothing, it needs no equipment, and it is available at the exact moment you need it — which is more than can be said for most of the things that help.