Of all the soothing strokes I learned during the year I spent training as a holistic massage therapist, tapotement is my favourite kind. Not only is the word satisfying to say out loud (ta-pote-ment), the techniques feel lovely.
A French word meaning ‘to tap or to drum’, tapotement in massage involves applying pressure in short, sharp bursts to relieve tension in the muscles where they’re directed. Sometimes they’re called percussive techniques because, well, they require the same rhythmic motion and force that playing a percussive instrument does.
Ever since I learned about them, I’ve been using one in my skincare routine, tapping my freshly cleansed face in the places where I now know there to be pressure points. Using both hands to strike my skin with my fingertips in rapid succession, I move from the centre of my forehead to the side of my eyes to under my eyes, to my cheeks then around my mouth. In the mornings, it’s revitalising. In the evening, a gentler version helps me decompress.
So when I first heard about the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) from a friend who explained it involved a series of tapping exercises, I could imagine how relaxing it would be.
It’s become hugely popular recently thanks to Insta-tappers. Even Happy Place founder Fearne Cotton has enrolled a ‘Tapping Queen’ to her entourage of official experts. It makes good Instagram content - the routines are short, snappy and can be performed in under five minutes. But, I want to see if the promoted benefits of this more formalised tapping sequence – improved sleep, lessened anxiety, lower stress – ring true for me.
By far the best guided EFT I’ve found (please pitch in if you know of others) sits on the Tapping Solution app.
A simple routine, the EFT tapping follows the same format each time. First - and this is quite an ask - you need to prepare a mantra or affirmation along the lines of: “Even though I feel stressed/anxious/worried because of - insert your worry here -, I accept how I feel.” Now these sorts of affirmations don’t roll off my tongue that easily but after a few rounds of this tapping routine, they do come with more ease. Here’s what the routine looks like, aim for around five to seven taps on each point.
Say (out loud or in your head) “Even though I feel stressed/anxious/worried because of - insert your worry here -, I accept how I feel,” while tapping the edge of your hand between your wrist and your little finger.
Repeat your mantra while tapping in between your eyebrows
Repeat your mantra while tapping on the side of your eye.
Repeat your mantra while tapping under the eye.
Repeat while tapping under your nose.
Repeat while tapping under your mouth on your chin.
Repeat while tapping the centre of your collar bone.
Repeat while tapping under your armpit.
Repeat while tapping the top of your head.
Now, start it all over again until you feel the intensity of the worry subside. After a few days, I find I’m getting the hang of doing this routine without needing to follow the app.
The nine tapping points that I now follow intuitively have been selected for a reason. In traditional Chinese medicine, where the meridian system maps the pathways through which our body’s energy flows, these points play a role in our emotional health. Each one helps to release an emotion such as fear, being stuck, anxiety or worry.
I’m fascinated by the way new research – with fresh insights and technological advancements – sometimes reinforces what traditional Chinese medicine has been getting at for centuries. In a roundabout way, with a few MRI scans and peer reviewed studies thrown in for good measure, it’s telling us the same thing: this tapping technique calms us.
Ask a scientist how EFT works and their explanation will most likely begin with the amygdala in your brain. Like tiny almond-shaped fire alarms, the amygdala is triggered by things our minds perceive as threats. Stressed at work? Your amygdala will be inflamed. Feeling anxious after a disagreement? Your amygdala will have clocked that as a threat, triggering a fight or flight response in your body.
When we’re constantly stressed, our amygdala is in a constant state of alert, becoming oversensitive. That’s when we can feel threatened by very small things and it can sometimes seem like an overreaction. This tapping technique is designed to take control of this by calming our amygdala - and it works.
MRI scans confirm what fans of EFT have felt for years. A study by Harvard Researchers found that when those tapping points are stimulated, there’s a reduced arousal in the amygdala, our internal fire alarm, lessening how much our fight or flight response is triggered. Another study published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease found that EFT Tapping lowered the stress hormone cortisol significantly.
Three weeks of swapping minutes of mindless scrolling for this healthier habit and it’s working well for me. Unlike breathing exercises which feel difficult to engage with when I’m feeling uptight, this is an active solution - you don’t need to be in a zen headspace to do it. At points where I notice a thought bubbling over into worry, I try to catch it with the tapping. It has been especially helpful on those occasions when I’ve struggled to fall asleep because my mind has been racing. It confronts the thought or feeling and puts it in perspective, acting as a good reminder that although that the worry, stress, anxiety is there - everything is fine.
And, that is, according to the science, exactly how I should feel. By inviting the stress in with the affirmation, I’m deliberately triggering my amygdala and setting off my internal fire alarm. A fight or flight response occurs in my body in response. But by tapping at the same time, I’m deactivating it, programming my internal fire alarm so that it knows this particular stress is not a real threat to me. Tap by tap, I am rewiring my brain. It’s tapotement in a form I never knew about before and it’s clever.
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