How To Use EFT Tapping For Stress Elimination?
EFT Tapping for Stress Relief
What is stress? What are it's symptoms, causes, and coping mechanisms for stress? How to let go of intense feelings, heal the root cause and how to overcome it with the help of the EFT Tapping method?
I was alone and away from my family when Covid-19 started, and honestly, it was a nightmare. The stress and anxiety I was facing on a daily basis, worrying about my health and that of my family's, knew no bounds.
With people losing their jobs and everything being so chaotic, I was overwhelmed, stressed, disturbed, worried and whatnot.
It's been more than a year since I went back home and it has been taking a toll on my mental health.
However, I was lucky to find an alternative therapeutic method to help me throughout this pandemic, to let go of my stressful emotions. Finally, my feelings aren't all over the place.
So, what did you do the last time you were stressed or traumatised? Did you hold on to it or just let it go? Did you suppress it and build on the layers of unwanted emotions?
At times suppressed emotions can lead to discomfort or even an intense emotional disturbance causing the natural flow of life to be disrupted in areas of health, wealth and even career.
As we already know, stress is caused by multiple factors.
There can be internal issues that lead to stress as well, such as a negative outlook on life, having irrational thoughts about situations, or even overthinking about things that are imaginary.
"Rule number one is, don't sweat the small stuff. Rule number two is, it's all small stuff."
ROBERT ELIOT
WHAT IS STRESS?
Stress is a natural physical and psychological response to life's events. Everyone experiences stress at some point in their lives. Our bodies' reaction to pressure is stress.
Stress can be triggered by anything from everyday duties like job and family to major life events like a new illness, war, or the death of a loved one.
When we encounter something new, unexpected, or that threatens our sense of self, or when we believe we have little control over a situation, it is frequently activated.
We all handle stress in different ways. Genetics, early life events, personality, and social and economic situations can all influence our ability to cope.
For immediate, short-term situations, stress can be beneficial to your health. It can assist you in dealing with potentially life-threatening situations.
When we are stressed, our bodies release stress hormones, which stimulate our immune system and provoke a fight or flight reaction. This enables us to react rapidly in potentially life-threatening situations.
This stress reaction can be beneficial in some situations, such as when we need to push through fear or pain in order to run a marathon or give a speech.
When a stressful incident is over, our stress hormones normally return to normal quickly, with no long-term consequences.
However, excessive stress might have detrimental consequences. It might put us in a constant state of fight or flight, leaving us feeling overwhelmed or helpless.
This can have a long-term impact on our physical and emotional health (1).
WHAT CAUSES STRESS?
Stress is different for everyone. It can be caused by a variety of factors.
Stressors are the situations and pressures that cause stress. We normally associate pressures with the unpleasant, such as a demanding work schedule or a complicated relationship.
Anything that places significant demands on you, on the other hand, might be stressful. Positive events such as getting married, buying a house, going to college, or gaining a promotion fall into this category.
External forces do not, however, create all stress. Internal or self-generated stress occurs when you obsessively worry about something that may or may not happen, or when you have unreasonable, gloomy beliefs about life.
The following are some of the most common external causes of stress:
- Work
- Parenting and family
- Financial situation
- Major life changes
- Relationship issues
- Loss of a job, loved one or possession
- Retirement and/or imprisonment
- Being too busy
- Injury or illness
The following are some of the most common internal causes of stress:
- Pessimism
- Low self-esteem
- Inability to accept uncertainty
- Lack of flexibility, rigid thinking
- Negative self-talk
- Perfectionism / unrealistic expectations
- All-or-nothing mentality (2)
These conditions are not permanent though and the right intervention can help you get rid of all the stress and trauma easily and effectively.
New to EFT? Learn how Emotional Freedom Technique Tapping heals.
Emotional Freedom Techniques (tapping) is clinically proven to lower stress, tension, anxiety, past-trauma to enable health, happiness and vitality.
SYMPTOMS OF STRESS
The most frightening aspect of stress is how quickly it can overwhelm you. You start adapting to it. It begins to feel comfortable, even typical.
You don't realise how much it's impacting you until it's too late. As a result, it's crucial to recognise the warning signs and symptoms of stress overload.
It is quite simple to identify stress in others or ourselves. Some common signs and symptoms of this unpleasant feeling are:
- Loss of appetite
- Inability to think straight
- Have problems getting to sleep or staying asleep
- Experience sexual problems
- Be tearful
- Headaches
- Memory problems
- Isolation and anxiety
- Substance use and/or abuse
- Racing pulse and feelings of fatigue
- Moodiness and/or irritability (3)
Anxiety and stress are usually used interchangeably since their symptoms are almost the same. However, the two conditions differ.
When you realise the difference between the two, it will be much easier for you to manage your stress or anxiety appropriately.
How To Self-Heal & Become An EFT Practitioner
Discover how EFT Tapping can help you to self-heal or to become professionally qualified as a Certified EFT Practitioner. Emotional Freedom Techniques (Tapping) is clinically proven to lower stress, tension, anxiety, past trauma to enable health, happiness and vitality.
WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN STRESS AND ANXIETY?
Often, we confuse stress with anxiety, and even though they are our body's natural fight-or-flight response, they are different.
The fine line of difference between them is that stress happens to be a short-term response to recognised threats, while anxiety is a long-term response to sometimes unidentifiable threats.
Another thing that sets them apart is that stress usually takes place as a response to external events, whereas anxiety is mostly because of internal pressures.
It is very common to face problems relating to the two, but as they say, too much of anything is not good for us.
Dealing with stress and anxiety can be quite unpleasant, but recognising the intensity of the problem and identifying the root cause of it, can be very helpful since it will help you deal with issues accordingly (4)
WHAT ARE SOME WAYS YOU CAN COPE WITH STRESS?
Although you cannot avoid stress or run away from it, you can practise or resort to certain coping strategies to help you deal with it, before it escalates.
Here are some ways you can keep your stress at bay:
Prioritise:
Learn to prioritise situations in a way where you control how you allow them to affect you. Once you realise that something is not worth stressing over, you'll be able to live a much-relaxed life.
Communicate:
Reaching out and contacting people who make you feel good about yourself is also a good stress reliever. Quite a lot of times, we feel like no one understands us whenever we get stressed, but communicating with loved ones will help you feel calm and soothe your nerves.
Take A Break:
Since stress can take place due to burnout, taking a break is a must. If you continue the same routine and do not stop to just take a breath, it will affect your mental health negatively. Taking a 15-minute break every two to three hours will help to avoid burnout stress.
Take Rest:
Resting is very important when it comes to stress. It is like a circle - if you don't rest well, you feel stressed, but you're unable to rest if you are stressed. Even though this vicious cycle is dreadful, it only gets worse with time, and the only thing you can do is meditate and allow yourself to relax for a while, get into a calm headspace, so it will help you get the sleep you require.
Self Care:
Spending a few minutes daily for meditation and some type of exercise can help immensely in managing stress. A great deal of research has shown the benefits of meditation in maintaining sound mental health. Also, when we exercise, we feel good and productive, because dopamine and endorphins, the feel-good hormones are released into the blood. Hence, exercise is a great way to deal with mental health problems like stress, depression and anxiety.
New to EFT? Learn how Emotional Freedom Technique Tapping heals, including Anxiety.
Emotional Freedom Techniques (tapping) is clinically proven to lower stress, tension, anxiety, past-trauma to enable health, happiness and vitality.
HOW DOES STRESS AFFECT YOUR HEALTH?
Stress is not just a mental state; it is an internal condition that challenges homeostasis. Homeostasis is the state of physical, emotional & mental balance.
When we are stressed, the cells go into protection-survival mode and the body shifts its resources from maintaining homeostasis, to protecting itself.
The body's stress response, often referred to as our fight or flight mechanism, are the two of the body's instinctual, automatic reactions to stress. When we encounter a threat, the amygdala, which is the brain's fear centre, lights up.
Upon activation, this area of the brain then sends messages to the rest of our body that we are under attack, prompting the various systems of the body to mobilize the necessary resources to help us survive. (5)
When we are in a chronic flight or fight state, our adrenal gland releases cortisol and other stress hormones such as adrenaline, continuously.
Adrenaline increases our heart rate, and elevates our blood pressure. Cortisol increases sugars (glucose) in the bloodstream, enhances our brain's use of glucose and supplements the availability of substances that repair tissues.
Cortisol curbs functions of the immune system by altering its responses and also suppresses the digestive system, the reproductive system and other growth processes.
The overexposure to cortisol and other stress hormones that follows can disrupt almost all your body's processes.
This puts you at increased risk of many health problems, including anxiety, depression, digestive issues, headaches, muscle pain and tension, heart problems, high blood pressure, sleep disturbances, weight problems, and impairment of cognitive functions like thinking and memory. (6)
HOW DOES EFT TAPPING HELP IN REDUCING STRESS?
When you think about an experience that produces negative emotions, such as an embarrassing incident, a fight, or a miserable childhood event, you increase stress.
Negative emotions like anger, guilt, resentment, fear, or shame come up. When you use EFT Tapping, the intensity of those emotions reduces, often to nil, and sometimes in just a few minutes.
This is because when you tap on the specific points, the unresolved negative emotions that disrupted your body's energy system, no longer remain stuck.
This decrease in emotional intensity indicates that your stress level is going down. As we saw above, stress affects the entire body, from your heart rate to your breathing to your blood pressure to your degree of muscle tension.
EFT Tapping puts the body back into the parasympathetic (relaxation) nervous system. As EFT Tapping reduces stress, all our body's resources become fully available to us.
When your emotions are positive and peaceful, your body no longer receives those stress signals, even though your life circumstances may not have changed.
As you become calm, all the systems in the body start functioning at a relaxed state. (7)
EFT Tapping is proven to reduce stress, lower cortisol, improve sleep, reduce anxiety, relieve pain, increase productivity, and much more.
A study published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, in 2012, found that EFT Tapping lowered the stress hormone cortisol by 43%. Research also shows that Tapping calms the amygdala in the brain, by sending it a signal that it is safe to relax. (8)
EFT TAPPING FOR ELIMINATING STRESS
EFT Tapping for Stress Elimination is a clinically proven therapeutic method. Since people go through this unpleasant feeling daily, tapping is very effective in relieving their stress and helping them calm their nerves.
EFT Tapping is also quick to administer and is long-lasting.
This technique also helps you come in tune with your emotions and allows you to get rid of negativity residing in your mind and body.
Identify what you are stressed about.
Explore the physical sensations in the body associated with stress, and use the physical tension tapping process to reduce the sensations.
Then use the EFT Tapping Points Process taught in detail during EFT Practitioner Training Online.
Uncover the memories or past events related to that feeling.
Explore memories related to the physical tension and use the Tell the Story & the Movie Technique to clear it.
To uncover the memories linked to the symptoms of stress, you can ask questions like:
- When have you felt these sensations before?
- When did the sensations start? What happened?
- Was there ever a time when you did not experience these symptoms?
- What can trigger and bring on the symptoms?
You can ask the following questions:
- When did the sensations start? What happened?
- What do these sensations remind you of?
- When have you felt stressed before?
- What happens to trigger the stress?
These questions will identify your past experiences associated with stress.
Use the EFT tapping process to clear the past stress.
- Identify past events linked to the feeling of stress and resolve it with the help of tapping therapy.
- Connect with the stress and notice where do you feel it in the body.
- Then use the Physical Tension taught in detail during EFT Practitioner Training to clear the surface feelings and feel calmer.
You can then begin the process by asking the following questions to explore further:
- Where in the body do you experience the stress?
- What is the colour, texture, size, shape of the stress in the body?
- What are the sensations like?
Stress can sometimes be felt in a specific location like the heart and/or chest. The symptoms can involve migraines, racing pulse, irritability.
The important thing is to use your specific words to describe the stress.
Measure the intensity of your stress by asking yourself:
"What number is the stress at, where 10 is really high and 1 is not high at all."
Just go with whatever comes up spontaneously, without overthinking it.
Begin by Tapping on the Karate Chop or Side of the Hand EFT Tapping Points:
"Even though I feel stress and I feel it in my chest and it's at a number 6 and it's red in colour and it feels rough, I deeply and completely love and accept myself (Repeat 3 times)."
Then Tap on the facial and upper body EFT Tapping Points for Stress using the phrases:
- Eyebrow: This stress
- Side of the eye: So stressed.
- Under the eye: I feel it in my chest.
- Under the nose: It's ____ in colour.
- Chin: At a number ____.
- Collarbone: So ____.
- Under the arm: This stress
- Thumb: I feel it in my chest.
- Index Finger: So stressed.
- Middle Finger: Really stressed
- Little Finger: It's the colour ____
Close the sequence by coming back the EFT Karate Chop Tapping Points and repeat once:
"Even though I feel stressed and I feel it in my chest and it's at a number 6 and it's red in colour and it feels rough, I deeply and completely love and accept myself."
Relax:
Take a gentle breath in and out and take a sip of water
Test Yourself.
At the end of the EFT Tapping for Stress Elimination, you can ask yourself the following questions:
- What number is the stress at now?
- What colour is the stress now?
- How does it make you feel?
You can repeat this process by going back to Step 1 if you feel like the number could come down a little more. If not, you can stop the process.
Close the process with love and acceptance, better yourself here:
Identify positive tapping sequences to close the EFT Tapping Therapy for Stress Elimination.
An example of positive tapping is "Even though I was stressed, that was then and this is now, I choose to be calm now."
Then hold the thumb to calm the body and mind and release any residual stress. You can also use the Jin Shin Jyutsu finger hold process to eliminate stress.
The steps are simple and easy to use when learnt from a qualified EFT Practitioner and while any form of a healing technique is sometimes viewed with a little bit of scepticism, our alumni have had the most dramatic results:
- Mahalakshmi helped her mom clear her back pain in 15 minutes.
- Jayant increased his income through clients.
- Mallika overcame her fear and phobia of cockroaches.
- Nihal & Marie Christie became free from fear of confined spaces (Claustrophobia).
These are some success stories where EFT Tapping for Stress Elimination effectively helped individuals get over their problems.
Although Emotional Freedom Techniques can be administered on the self, it is recommended to consult a professional EFT Practitioner to get help for physical and/or emotional issues you may be facing (9).
One of the biggest causes of stress is the pent-up feelings that we keep inside instead of expressing them.
Short-term stress can turn into long-term stresses depending on our stress management skills and our ability to cope with difficulties coming our way.
Using EFT, you can express your emotions in the most effective way without hurting the feeling of others.
Expressing your feelings can save you from the unwanted feelings that you are carrying within you.
Love,
Dr Rangana Rupavi Choudhuri (PhD)
P.S. Want to discover if EFT is right for you? Book a Complimentary Discovery Call.
How To Self-Heal & Become An EFT Practitioner
Discover how EFT Tapping can help you to self-heal or to become professionally qualified as a Certified EFT Practitioner. Emotional Freedom Techniques (Tapping) is clinically proven to lower stress, tension, anxiety, past trauma to enable health, happiness and vitality.
In summary, one of the biggest reasons for stress is the pent up feelings that we carry unconsciously. You need to identify the feelings associated with stress and resolve them. Avoiding this negative feeling is just going to make things worse, so if and when you realise you're going through stress and it's not getting better, consider trying EFT Tapping for Stress Elimination since it is one of the clinically proven techniques to resolve those underlying emotions.
References
- https://www.healthline.com/health/stress/effects-on-body
- https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/a-to-z/s/stress
- https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/a-to-z/s/stress
- https://www.healthline.com/health/stress-and-anxiety
- How To Do The Work by Dr Nicole LePera
- https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/stress-management/in-depth/stress/art-20046037
- https://books.google.co.in/books?hl=en&lr=&id=bx8mDwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PT15&dq=eft+manual&ots=X_yB46eBYY&sig=8P6SF4bfrMwDbJhRvlQIjJN-i1g&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
- https://www.thetappingsolution.com/
- https://vitalitylivingcollege.info/training-seminars/eft-training-course/eft-practitioner-training/
Disclaimer: The information on this website is purely for educational purposes and does not in any way replace the requirement for medical and psychological diagnosis and treatment. Please seek professional medical and psychological diagnosis and advice for all medical and mental health conditions. It is advised to always book any consultations with qualified professionals.
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