What is ‘tapping’ and how can it be used to reduce stress?

Tapping, also known as Emotional Freedom Technique is a tool where you use your fingers to ‘tap’ on a sequence of acupressure points on the body.

I know it does sound a bit crazy, but think of it as acupuncture without the needles. It’s a tool that has been shown in different studies to reduce cortisol (stress hormone). In one sense it’s a form of active meditation.

I was first introduced to tapping many many years ago through my naturopath, Sharon Wilford. I did some private sessions about 8-10 years ago with Dr Peta Stapleton around food addiction and then came across Brad Yates through Jessie Reimers who is a leader in doTERRA. I’ve tapped along with Brad quite a bit on and off over the years, watching his videos so it was a real honour and privilege to have him on the show. You’ll find him to be generous, caring and kind in his approach.

In this episode of Let’s Talk Thyroid, I’m chatting with internationally renowned ‘tapper’, Brad Yates about the technique which really is quite simple, so once you know how, it’s easy to use anytime and anyplace on pretty much anything!

Stress can be a trigger for auto-immune thyroid diseases (Hashimoto’s and Graves). Stress also creates inflammation which wreaks havoc on thyroid (& much more) health, so the more tools we have in our stress relief toolkit the better.

As Brad says, if our bodies aren’t constantly dealing with ‘ambient stress’, all the time, there is more bandwidth for the body to heal. So whether tapping directly or indirectly helps our thyroid health, it doesn’t really matter!

We are emotional beings and tapping/EFT is a tool we can use to help process emotions. Brad describes emotions as being like a smoke detector – we can use them as an alert. We don’t want to remove the smoke detectors (emotions) but learn how to process them better.

There are times of course when it’s best to seek professional support or to even tap with a friend. If you’re dealing with some really big emotions, stress or trauma, please get support. Brad does offer private sessions.

You’ll find it easier to WATCH the actual tapping sequences. We go through 2 in the episode. They can be found:

Intro stress sequence: @ 31 min

Longer thyroid sequence: @38.45

Here is an image of the tapping ‘points’ and a more detailed document here.

Info referred to in our discussion.

Brad’s Perfectionist tapping video

Brad’s links to the tapping research

Dr Peta Stapleton’s fMRI study

Dawson Church – links to his research

Here is a good visual summary of some of the benefits of tapping that I found.

related podcast episodes

If you enjoyed this episode and are looking for more discussion around reducing stress, learning to unwind and self-care, check out these episodes:

#6: What causes Hashimoto’s?

#18: How to say no: tough love.

#21: How to calm your nervous system with Meredith Edwards

#34: Stress, Trauma & Thyroid with Justin Janoska

Plus pretty much every person who has shared their story on the show has talked about the impact of different degrees of stress on their thyroid health and healing.

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