EFT Tapping for Study Procrastination
WHAT’S UP: Listen to Eleni coaching a final year university student who was stuck in study avoidance behavior (procrastination – the Flight Response to academic stress). This was not the first time Eleni had assisted her through academic coaching and EFT Tapping sessions. The student was happy for me to audio record the session and turn it into this educational article for students new to Emotional Freedom Techniques. This deep dive EFT Tapping session (two 1-hour sessions back-to-back) took place on Zoom with both our cameras switched off.
MEASURING INITIAL LEVELS OF DISTRESS
The following audio snippets from our 2-hours session will get a sense of how working with a qualified EFT Practitioner can help a student turn their study stress and procrastination into genuine motivation to study.
In this first snippet, you hear us mapping out this university student’s stress response to her just thinking about how she’d been procrastinating on studying for her dissertation. Identifying what emotion was behind the stress was an essential first step in this EFT Tapping session. For EFT Tapping to work, we have to get more and more specific about what’s actually causing the distress. And so that is what we did.
In this case, the Uni student’s true feelings that were behind the initial awareness of her stress being a 6/10 was anxiety (which was a 7/10). At this stage in the session, the student experienced an anxious feeling like tension in the chest, and the anxious thought connected to that emotion was ‘What if I don’t have enough time?’ when she thought about how she’d been procrastination on studying for her dissertation.
In EFT sessions for procrastination, it’s common for the Subjective Unit of Distress (SUD) intensity to temporarily go up in the first few minutes of a session. After all, procrastination is an avoidance behavior. It’s a way of ‘numbing’ ourselves from feeling the full intensity of our distressing feelings. So it makes sense that we will be slightly out of touch with how stressed we truly feel when we start tapping on procrastination. EFT Tapping helps us become more aware of the truth of how we feel that so that they can work on it.
Often, there is a good reason why a student cannot overcome his or her study procrastination on their own without professional assistance, which the snippets that follow exemplify.
BREAKTHROUGH 1: ONE CAUSE OF HER DISSERTATION STUDY PROCRASTINATION IDENTIFIED (AN UNPROCESSED MEMORY)
This second snippet occurred after she noticed the anxiety had shifted from her chest to her stomach, which when reduced makes her aware of an old unprocessed emotion – sadness. There was still some old sadness left in her body from not getting the grades she had hoped for 3 years ago, in her final year of High School, accompanied by a new emotion – fear of failure.
Thinking of that memory from 3 years ago brings another layer of awareness to another old emotion she needed to process in order to learn from it and move forward – regret. We continue to tap to release the stress response that is being triggered in her body, when she thinks of that memory of a past failure from her final year of High School that was being triggered now that she was about to start her final year of Uni.
She realized she had overlooked the fact she still had a lot of regret (7/10, ‘like a faded bullet that’s still there under my heart’) left over from that painful experience. And that this may have been because she had tried to think positive and not think about it.
So in this stage what we discovered was that behind the stress, anxiety, and sadness was old unprocessed regret. That old regret that was stuck in the body was linked to a memory from High School.
BREAKTHROUGH 2: ANOTHER UNPROCESSED MEMORY IDENTIFIED THAT WAS WEIGHING HER DOWN
This is an example of how doing EFT Tapping within the context of a safe space can help college/university students face some of the old emotional ‘baggage’ they still have from High School so that they can process it and move forward feeling lighter. Notice how as we work on processing the student’s old regret that was stuck in her body (which by now had dropped to a 2/10 in intensity), she shifts out of a distress response to her dissertation? She moves from her ’emotional’ brain (regret) about the past to “feeling a lot more grounded” in the here and now.
As a result, you see her brain re-access the organizing, problem-solving, and decision-making part of her brain (the Prefrontal Cortex) showing up. And it shows up in the form of constructive, present-moment thoughts for helping herself overcome her study procrastination: “Tomorrow, I wanna buy a calendar and think: ‘This is what I’m gonna do today, and this is what I’m gonna do tomorrow'”.
BREAKTHROUGH 3: FINAL BLOCKS CAUSING HER DISSERTATION STUDY PROCRASTINATION IDENTIFIED AND TAPPED AWAY
In this final stage of this EFT coaching session, with the old regret now down below a 3/10, the student is resourced enough to be able to tap in and chose what changes she wants to make in life moving forward. Notice how as the old regret drops down to a 0, the student independently experiences what’s in EFT we call a Client Cognitive Reframe (meaning she thinks about the situation differently – without needing the therapist to tell her how she ‘should think’, for her).
As a result, her destructive Perfectionism Mindset towards her dissertation has now shifted to a constructive Growth Mindset! And in case you were wondering, this student went on to graduate with a good 2.1 in one of the UK’s Top 10 universities for teacher training and education. Not only did she NOT fail her undergraduate degree as a result of failing dissertation (the ‘huge fear’ we worked on in this session), but she actually reported enjoying the process of working on her dissertation!
PLACING THINGS IN PERSPECTIVE
Before wrapping up this educational article, I want to highlight the fact that the best EFT Tapping sessions are co-created. This student was ready to ‘go there’ and feel her painful emotions so that she could process and mindfully observe them as they moved through her body using Emotional Freedom Techniques.
She also felt safe going there because we had done many coaching sessions using EFT Tapping in the lead up to this, but on other goals that she wanted to achieve. So she had built up her inner resources as well as her body intelligence in order to be able to process more quickly than someone typically would who is just starting their EFT journey.
I hope you found this helpful for getting a better idea of how I combine my academic coaching skills with my EFT Practitioner skills to help university students. Want to learn about educational applications of EFT Tapping for helping students overcome fear of failing an exam? Listen to the audio recording of me teaching a final-year university student how to manage her exam stress by doing EFT Tapping.
Know a student who WANTS PROFESSIONAL ASSISTANCE?
About Eleni
Eleni Vardaki works online supporting school age and university level students. A UK-qualified teacher and accredited EFT Practitioner, she offers group coaching as well as private EFT Tapping sessions for stress management, performance anxiety, and procrastination issues.
