Yoga, meditation, massage, acupuncture, and herbal remedies; these are just some of Eastern medicine's contributions to our decades-long search for ways to live well with fewer pills and less-invasive health care. Toward that end, I'm excited to report that there are promising new findings in the field of energy psychology, specifically about a practice called Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), or tapping, that is taking our search for holistic solutions to an exciting new level.
What's unique about EFT is how it combines Eastern wisdom about acupressure, or "meridian points," in our bodies, with traditional Western psychotherapy. The practice consists of tapping with your fingertips on specific meridian points while talking through traumatic memories and a wide range of emotions. "Acupoint tapping sends signals directly to the stress centers of the mid-brain, not mediated by the frontal lobes (the thinking part, active in talk therapy)," explains Dr. Church, Ph.D., who has been researching and using EFT since 2002. Because EFT simultaneously accesses stress on physical and emotional levels, he adds, "EFT gives you the best of both worlds, body and mind, like getting a massage during a psychotherapy session."
In fact, it's EFT's ability to access the amygdala, an almond-shaped part of your brain that initiates your body's negative reaction to fear, a process we often refer to as the "fight or flight" response, that makes it so powerful. "By reducing stress," adds Church, "EFT helps with many problems. There's a stress component to sports performance, business and financial pressure, and most disease. When you reduce stress in one area of your life, there's often a beneficial effect in other areas."
Church estimates that 10 million people worldwide have used tapping, and what's so exciting is how incredibly quickly it's alleviating issues like depression, anxiety and insomnia, as well severe PTSD, physical pain, even illness.
At this point you're probably thinking what most intelligent and sane people are -- how is that possible? How can tapping on "meridian points" resolve serious health issues? As an EFT practitioner and the producer of the movie The Tapping Solution, it's a question I've been asked repeatedly over many years. In fact, you'll often hear me refer to EFT as "this strange tapping thing." Fortunately, there's very real science (and results!) behind it.
In partnership with Dr. David Feinstein, Dr. Church has been able to confirm that tapping on specific meridian points has a positive effect on cortisol levels. Cortisol, known as the "stress hormone," is integral to our body's "fight or flight" response. Originally designed to help us survive life in the wild, the "fight or flight" response was essential when our ancient ancestors were faced with sudden, brief danger like, let's say, a tiger. However useful in short bursts, releasing cortisol too frequently, as we seem to be doing in response to the ongoing or "chronic" stress of modern life, may have serious, even scary, impacts on our physical, mental and emotional health. In fact, living in this kind of biological "survival mode" may be making us more vulnerable to everything from cancer to heart disease, and more.
In Dr. Church's study, 83 participants were separated into three groups. One group was guided through an hour-long EFT session, the second group received an hour of talk therapy, while the third, the control group, received no treatment. The group that did an hour of EFT demonstrated a 24 percent decrease in cortisol levels, while the other two groups showed no real change. The EFT group also exhibited lower levels of psychological symptoms, including anxiety, depression, and others, as measured by the Symptom Assessment-45 (SA-45), a standard psychological assessment tool.
Research suggests that EFT may be so effective because of its perceived ability to balance out the nervous system, leveling off the activity of the parasympathetic and sympathetic regions. Responsible for promoting cell regeneration and relaxation, the parasympathetic region helps to slow your heartbeat, support digestion, and more. The sympathetic system, on the other hand, prepares you for vigorous physical activity by speeding up your heart, constricting your pupils, and so on. As noted in Church's study, imbalance between these two regions is associated with a long list of health issues, from high blood pressure and heart problems (most often seen in those with an overactive sympathetic region), to depression, fatigue, and weakened immune response (in those with excessive parasympathetic activity).
In his study findings, Church asserts that EFT, which he refers to as "acupoint treatments" produces "a neutral emotional state," which, biologically speaking, is the gold standard of health and wellness. It's also the state of well-being people have sought to achieve for millennia through meditation, prayer, yoga, and other mindfulness practices.
Dr. Feinstein, a clinical psychologist who uses EFT in his own practice, adds that EFT is an "unusually precise, rapid, and direct for shifting the neurological underpinnings of a range of psychological problems." In fact, he adds, "the number of therapists using EFT has been rapidly increasing over the past decade, and now peer-reviewed research is showing that their instincts have been right. Surprisingly rapid outcomes with a variety of disorders are being documented."
The results of that documentation can (and will!) impact millions of lives in incredibly powerful ways, which is why I'm excited to share a host of new studies with you here, in future posts. In the meantime, I look forward to hearing your feedback. Are you familiar with tapping? Do you use it yourself, or know others who do? Are there specific topics you'd like me to focus on in future posts?
Nick Ornter is the creator and executive producer of the hit documentary film, "The Tapping Solution." His new book on EFT will be published by Hay House in April 2013. To get a copy of his free eBook, "Tapping Your Way to Health, Happiness and Abundance" visit TheTappingSolution.com
For more by Nick Ortner, click here.
For more on mental health, click here.
Follow Nick Ortner on Twitter: www.twitter.com/nortner
Hyla Cass, M.D.: Trauma Release For Enhanced Health And Happiness
EFT Home - World Center for EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques)
EFT | Dr. Mercola's Emotional Freedom Technique
Emotional Freedom Techniques - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hope this link also will help others more about EFT
http://www.fastereft.com/eft-solutions.html
From applying it as a 'first aid in one's own hands tool', to a therapy to address long term issues, EFT has been remarkably beneficial and effective in my experience.
Gary Craig said also that 'toxins' can interfere with the way EFT works and had a whole range of ways to address the effect of 'toxins' to improve the efficacy of EFT. While self applied EFT is very useful, working with a skilled practitioner may be of benefit for some issues. Different EFT practitioners have different skills, so again, trying different practitioners may also be beneficial.
But science all too often discounts and even attacks beliefs and experiences that are outside its limited ability to sense and measure things in the physical world. Yet as science and technology advance and become able to detect and measure effects at smaller and smaller scale, ideas that were once dismissed as foolish and dangerous become part of the accepted scientific mainstream. Cosmologists, in particular, seem to have become more able in recent decades to put a question mark on such notions as energy influence, leaving them open to further scientific probing while not essentially curtailing or eliminating thoughtful research by slapping on the label of "unscientific."
To me, Nick's article here attempts to present a specific study which was conducted under double-blind conditions and which seems to bear out some valuable conclusions. Those who dismiss the whole notion while never specifically addressing this study do themselves, science and the public no good by perpetuating the highly limiting belief that if something can't be finally proven by the scientific method and double-blind studies it is obviously wrong.
Thanks for your post, as usual great wisdom -
Mary Sue Abernethy, LMFT
BTW, given the recent rampant reports of fraudulent reporting and sloppy fact checking in national scientific peer-reviewed journals (NPR had a 15-minute segment on this in the last two weeks), I'm not sure we can hold out that sort of research as the Gold Standard, either.
With EFT, as long as practitioners don't encourage clients to abandon other medical treatments and advice, it seems to me the downside risk is nearly zero to giving it a try, particularly when more conventional techniques have failed.
Also interesting, the unusual number of first-time posters who promote the method and their own services.
I am a physician in private practice who ocassionally uses EFT, and a version of acupressure tapping I derived from EFT, in my office practice. I would like to make several points in response to several comments I have read that responded to your excellent article. First there is research into the effectiveness of EFT and other "energy medicine" therapies that are ongoing with some already published. Second, it is very, very hard to get research funding for these studies and even harder to get peer reviewed scientific journals to fairly consider them for publication. Lack of such publication does not equate to lack of efficacy. Perhaps most important, I can attest to very remarkable results with my patients in using these treatments that cannot be explained by the scientific training I received in medical school (Univ. of Pennsylvania) nor by accepted scientific theories. I am here to unequivocally say that our current mainstream medical theories and practices are missing some hugely important understandings of human health and disease processes. This is not to say that we should stop using what we currently know about healing using "conventional" medicine. I use everything I was taught, all the time. We just need to realize that there is much more to learn and a very materialistic approach to medical care is failing to take advantage of very important insights. It is time to approach these energy concepts with a more open mind.
Chuck Gebhardt, MD
LindaLouise Haines, M.Ed.
Thanks for your lovely reply to my comment. What I did not elaborate on in my comment was how completely astounding some of the results are in my office. Just one example was a woman with a five year history of chronic pain from a hand injury. She could not touch anything with that hand without excruciating pain. She rarely slept for more than an hour at a time despite a lot of pain meds and sleep medications. After 5 minutes of acupressure the pain was completely gone. That was 2 years ago. She remains off all pain and sleep meds. It is very common for me to solve problems with "energy" techniques where I would have used medications in the past with only partial success.
My purpose was to treat general emotional state and whatever was blocking me from experiencing treatments for various physical conditions. For 25 years I had tried more treatments than I can even remember for digestive problems with no results from MD's and ND's. The person who recommended me felt strongly that the resistance to treatments was psychological in nature and is why she felt strongly that EFT would help. Unfortunately, I've had to had EFT to the very long list of things that didn't work.