EFT for Anxiety
WHAT’S THE ISSUE: While some professionals in the mental health sector are struggling to wrap their head around how a somatic therapy like EFT Tapping deals with anxiety so effectively, the NCCIH (National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health) has now recognized EFT as a “Complementary Health Approach for Anxiety” in the clinical guideline digests. The NCCIH is the U.S. Federal Government’s lead agency for scientific research on complementary and integrative health approaches.
There is a solid research base evidencing the effectiveness of clinical EFT Tapping for anxiety. According to Clinical Psychologist and EFT Researcher, Dr. Peta Stapleton, there have been 14 Randomized Controlled Trials (meaning high quality research trials) of EFT for anxiety to date. Cohen’s effect sizes for these EFT for anxiety research trials is large: 1.29. For context, an effect size of 0.2 is considered a small effect size. 0.5 represents a medium effect size. And 0.8 a large effect size. So a Cohen’s effect size of 1.29 clearly proves that EFT Tapping is a very effective modality for anxiety.
EFT for anxiety: 3 levels of depth
When we are using EFT for anxiety, we can go to three different levels of depth.
Level 1: EFT Tapping meditations for self-help when we are experiencing anxiety, in the moment. You will find educational resources below to help you get started.
Level 2: Using the full clinical EFT Tapping method in a targeted way to address a specific anxiety-inducing problem (e.g. lower back pain, food/alcohol/cigarette cravings, sleep deprivation) or anxiety that comes up when you think about how you want to achieve a specific goal (e.g. pass an exam re-sit, do well in an important interview/presentation, overcome a specific fear or phobia). For best results, find a good EFT Practitioner who can help you and who you can trust.
Level 3: Using advanced EFT Tapping techniques with an appropriately skilled EFT Practitioner whose scope of practice includes helping clients clear trauma wounds that are keeping you stuck in an anxious state.
General EFT for Anxiety Meditation
In EFT, we always start general and go from general to specific. So if you are experiencing an unhelpful level of anxiety, here is a general EFT for anxiety meditation that you can do for self-help to get you started.
EFT for exam anxiety
If, when you think about an upcoming exam, you feel an anxiety that feels like an 8/10, 9/10 or 10/10 in intensity, it’s probably best that you find an EFT Practitioner who you can trust to work on it together. But if you’re experiencing a bit of exam anxiety, but nothing major (meaning max a 7/10 in anxiety intensity), self-help tapping may be an appropriate thing in order to do to help you take the edge of.
Here is a self-help EFT for Exam Anxiety meditation that you can use as inspiration to help get you started. Start by giving the intensity of your anxiety a number on a scale of 0-10 (10 = as high as it can go).Then tap through the points, repeating to yourself the following thoughts, if they feel true to you. If not, just change the wording to whatever feels true to you.
EFT for Anxiety vs Depression
If you are new to EFT and you want to try self-help tapping to help yourself manage your anxiety, you can start by playing with tapping at different speeds to see what feels better for you.
Generally speaking, slowing down the tapping helps us feel calmer. And if we’re feeling down, picking up the pace helps us feel better. Although this isn’t a hard and fast rule – maybe one day you want to pick up the past to discharge anxious energy, and that helps you feel better. You can practice being mindful of what your body needs in that moment and adjust accordingly.
Anxiety AFFECTINg SLEEP
It’s common for elevated anxiety levels to affect our sleep. One way of adapting EFT to help not only relax but also drift off to sleep is to touch, rather than tap, the clinical EFT points. There’s also a technique in EFT called Touch and Breathe that’s good for winding down for bed.
Anxiety AFFECTINg our Decision-making power
Another area of life affected by high levels of anxiety is our ability to make decisions. When we are experiencing a lot of anxiety, we struggle with indecision. This makes total sense if you understand how the brain works – too much emotion, the frontal lobe, which is the decision-making part of our brain, goes off line. It’s simple.
EFT Tapping can solve that problem. One way to apply EFT for indecision is to literally just tap, and keep tapping, while focusing on whatever it is you are indecisive about.
Another way is to add some words into the tapping sequence in a way that feels true to you. For example, you may be experiencing indecision as a feeling of being stuck. In that case, you could create tap on “Even though I’m stuck right now, I’m OK.”
First measure how true “I’m stuck” feels before tapping. You can then do a couple of rounds of tapping as I show you in the video below. Then pause and notice if you get any ideas or solutions. And finally, go back and measure how true “I feel stuck feels”.
Anxiety CAUSING unhealthy habits
The best book I’ve read on the link between anxiety and unhealthy habits involving addictive behaviours is Dr. Judson Brewer’s Unwinding Anxiety: Train Your Brain to Heal Your Mind. Read it if you want to learn how unacknowledged anxiety can hide behind an addiction.
When we have unacknowledged anxiety, we can develop self-soothing strategies such as excess amounts of drinking alcohol or refined sugar drinks like Coca-Cola to help us feel better.
Other coping strategies for managing anxiety include smocking cigarettes, smoking marijuana, and a high carb diet filled with refined sugar, white bread, and white pasta. Even something as common as emotional eating /over-eating can be partly due to unacknowledged anxiety.
While these habits help us cope in the moment, which is good, so they aren’t ‘bad’ things to do necessarily, they can have negative long-term consequences on our health, productivity, and success. EFT helps work on the unhealthy habit so that
Tapping for Anxiety in Little Kids
Children under the age of 10 can of course experience anxiety when their nervous system is dysregulated. In the video below I go through the some of the benefits of using toys that I have found work well to make tapping accessible for the little ones.
Tapping play with stuffed animals benefits include:
- Helps builds rapport and psychological safety.
- A possible tool for helping children open up about their problem (distancing technique).
- Tapping on their chosen stuffed animal while they talk about their problem (externalising – distancing technique)
- Holding on to their stuffed animal while they tap (additional grounding, layers nicely on top of the tapping itself which is in and of itself a grounding technique).
- Option to consult their furry friend during an EFT session to ask them for advice or just see what they think.
Want to invest in some EFT sessions for reducing anxiety? Email me to book a 15 minute consultation so we can see if it’s a match: eleni@elenivardaki.com
ABOUT Eleni Vardaki
Eleni Vardaki was one of the higher performing teachers in the schools where she used to work. When the pandemic hit, she decided to change course, resigning from her teaching job to go all in on her dream of helping bridge the gap between the fields of education and psychology. She now works as a Therapeutic Coach in private practice and Educational Consultant for schools specialized in EFT Tapping for stress, anxiety, and academic performance.
