Student Stress and EFT Tapping
WHAT’S THE ISSUE: Student stress is on the rise, and more and more students are trying the tapping technique for stress relief. Tapping, which is also known as EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) is a simple stress management skill that students of all ages (Prek- adult students) can use to self-soothe.
EFT tapping has helped kids and adult students who want to:
- Improve their study and emotional self-care habits
- Get a good night’s sleep after suffering from insomnia or problems falling asleep from stress.
- Get a natural boost of energy and motivation to finish their assignments (without having to down unhealthy quantities of coffee…just to be able to concentrate on their work!)
- Overcome negative beliefs (i.e. ‘I’m not good enough’, ‘I’m gonna fail’)
- Overcome emotional blocks (i.e. fear of failure, academic-related anxiety, panic attacks in tests or exams)
The information I share in this article is based on my experience of doing EFT therapy with college students and teenagers as a professional EFT Practitioner during the Coronavirus pandemic. I hope you find it helpful.
TAPPING AWAY STUDENT STRESS: FIRST, A BIT OF CONTEXT
One of America’s successful entrepreneurs, Marie Forleo, who is the founder and CEO of B-School, courageously shared her story of how the tapping technique helped her navigate the stress that came from experiencing a serious car crash.
For many people all over the world, including our students, the Coronavirus crisis feels like an emotional crash of sorts. Students all over the world are still recovering from the shock of being hit by the sudden collapse of our traditional, face-to-face system of education and the move to e-learning and a new day-to-day reality at home.
The tapping technique has already started to spread to many schools all over the world. For example, you’ve got the Cairo American College, where in a Primary School teacher called Bonnie Greene saw an improvement in students’ emotional self-regulation and self-soothing skills when she taught her 5th Grade class how to tap before a test that they were worried about. Then over in Australia, you’ve got the Secondary Schools on the Gold Coast over in Australia that saw improvements in their students’ academic results and a reduction in reported school-related stress as a result of a one-year intervention where students were taught the tapping technique.
In addition to helping reduce school-related stress, tapping can help with student stress from the long-term effects of the pandemic. Here’s why.
1) STUDENT STRESS: Tapping IMPROVES STUDENT HABITS
More and more studies are coming out showing that the tapping technique reduces your stress hormones. There is a growing body of scientific research that shows how tapping technique lowers your cortisol levels. Tapping meditations help you reduce your stress levels, because cortisol is a stress hormone that runs wild when you are stuck in a state of chronic stress.
The coronavirus crisis, with it’s unknown end-date, has created a situation of chronic stress that is leaving many students paralysed in fear and anxiety of the unknown, as they try to navigate the uncertainty and dramatic changes in their life and way of learning.
The tapping technique is like a two-in-one approach to reducing stress and overwhelm. You get the benefits of making changes in your biology by reducing your cortisol levels, thereby reducing your stress in the here-and-now, plus you get the long-term benefits of coping better with stress in the long-term as you work on eliminating blocking beliefs that have been keeping you stuck in stress and overwhelm. So you get both a short-term benefit and a long-term benefit of starting to re-wire your brain so as to replace negative thoughts with more empowering, helpful beliefs.
When you use tapping to help you replace your old beliefs with new more empowering ones, you can replace bad self-care and study habits and with healthier and more productive ones with less struggle and stress.
2) STUDENT STRESS: tapping helpS STUDENTS sleep BETTER
It helps you break the bad habits of spending too much time on social media, or on Netflix or YouTube, or talking to friends online before trying to go to sleep.
Spending too much time on your phone or computer during the day, and especially if that’s the last thing you do before you try to get to sleep will start to mess with your ability to fall asleep, let alone get good quality, uninterrupted sleep. If you find a tapping professional who you trust, you can work on breaking your bad sleeping habits by replacing them with a healthier, wind-down routine at night
If you read Arianna Huffington’s book, The Sleep Revolution, you will understand why getting a good night’s sleep is essential to protect your mental health and emotional wellbeing. This is particularly true now that we are living in a time of crisis, as the coronavirus affects more and more people and communities all over the world
The students who come to me seeking professional help already know that sleep is important. The problem they have is that they can’t seem to fall asleep. They feel like they’ve exhausted all options and tried everything, from drinking chamomile tea before going to bed to adding lavender essential oils to trying free meditations for sleep and anxiety. Until we do some tapping together to help them figure out exactly what it is that was keeping them stuck. I love seeing them get unstuck by processing the pent-up stress and anxiety that had been keeping them stuck in a viscous cycle of not being able to fall asleep and exhaustion thanks to the tapping technique
3) STUDENT STRESS: TAPPING FOR PROCRASTINATION
By the time the students I mentor come to me for help, they tend to feel like they’ve lost their energy. They feel like they’re struggling complete school work or university assignments on time, and they sometimes they’ve already started to fall behind. They’ve tried to fight it on their own, but it was starting to get too stressful and overwhelming.
All of these students have been holding on to a lot of chronic stress from the shock and sudden changes that have occurred in their life since schools and universities shut down. So much has changed in their life in such a short space of time, and while they’ve been trying everything they can to help cope with the stress – free meditations on YouTube, free self-hypnosis meditations, yoga, you name it, they’ve tried it.
Tapping can help you get a boost of energy. When you’ve got your energy back, you can stop procrastinating and falling behind on your assignments. You can catch up on the work you’ve fallen behind with more ease and confidence. You can stay focused and productive in the face of uncertainty. You can get your life back and get your schoolwork done with less struggle and stress. If you want something different, you’ve got to do something different!
4) STUDENT STRESS: TAPPING FOR STRESSED OUT THOUGHTS
One of the most powerful ways in which the tapping technique can help you get unstuck is by helping you figure out what the root cause of your problem is.
Let’s say you’ve developed a problem of struggling to fall asleep at night, this may be because you’ve developed an unhelpful belief that “I’m never going to be able to fall asleep tonight”. Guess what’s going to happen if you hold on to such a belief? You’re going to really struggle to fall asleep tonight! It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Your belief is keeping you stuck. That’s why we call these blocking beliefs, because they block your way from being able to move forward and thrive.
What I love about the tapping technique is that it helps you reconnect with your body, so that you can listen to your body what it has to say. If you’re struggling to fall to sleep at night, there’s a tremendous amount of wisdom you can gain for how to overcome this problem by tapping into (literally, and metaphorically – pun intended!) what it is that your body is telling you needs to happen for you to get unstuck.
That’s why, a lot of the time, what you want to achieve when your using the tapping technique is to dig deep into these root causes of what’s causing you stress and keeping you stuck, these blocking beliefs, so that you can get unstuck.
5) STUDENT STRESS: TAPPING FOR NEGATIVE EMOTIONS
Before I start talking about tapping for stress-related cravings and tapping for emotional eating, I want to make a very important distinction between tapping for stress relief and tapping for mental health problems.
It’s important for all teenagers and university students to understand that if you are suffering from a mental health problem, such as anorexia or clinical depression, you’ve got to get professional help with a Clinical Psychologist or a Child Psychologist. In serious cases were the problem has escalated, you may even need to be referred to a good Psychiatrist. Emotional blocks that reach the point of psychological distress in the area of mental health require the attention of professionals who have been trained and certified to deal with these kinds of problems.
It’s normal in a time of shocking, rapid change, such as we are going through right now with the Coronavirus epidemic, to experience anxiety, and even panic. In fact, it’s wise to panic soon rather than panic too late, as has been shown by the success in Greece’s response to the virus where the government and population understood the value of panicking sooner rather than later to take preventative measures sooner, and thus prevent the spread of the virus to happen so quickly that hospitals and the medical system would collapse and be unable to cope.
It’s normal to be stuck in a generic kind of stress and overwhelm, and it’s okay to need to reach out for help in order to get unstuck. I’m a big believer in preventative measures. I love it when I work with someone understands the values of taking action to reduce their stress before the chronic stress of these new circumstances potentially escalates into a serious mental health problem such as an anxiety disorder.
However, if you have a pre-existing mental health problem such as an anxiety disorder, you must reach out to a licensed mental health care professional. For emotional blocks related to a mental health crisis, I can’t help you overcome the emotional blocks you’re experiencing using the tapping technique. There are, however, loads of accredited EFT Practitioners who are Child Psychologists and Clinical Psychologists working online right now who can help students who are suffering from a mental illness to cope with increased psychological stress of this global crisis. There’s even an EFT Practitioners Directory where you can have a look and find a suitable, accredited tapping professional who could meet your needs.
My area of expertise in helping students with tapping for stress relief is in helping the students who’re experiencing the typical kind of school-related stress you would expect from the stress of transiting fully into an e-learning environment, after their school or university has shut down.
In my work with students during this first phase of this Coronavirus crisis, I’ve seen a rise in emotional eating and cravings for sugar and junk food related to stress and overwhelm. I’ve discovered that by processing these emotional blocks that are causing these stress-based habits to form as soon as they start, we can nip them in the bud and help students overcome the anxiety, panic, fear and uncertainty in a healthier, gentle way than by suppressing their emotions through emotional eating out of boredom or a craving for comfort food.
I’ve discovered that the tapping technique is a gentle and effective tool that helps students discover what lies behind their routine sugar cravings and the emotional eating, by tapping into their body, and processing the emotional blocks they discover, whatever that suppressed emotion may be: fear, bitterness, loneliness, anxiety, boredom, worry, or anger. With tapping, they can clear these suppressed emotions so that they can they can think more clearly and get the energy boost they need to make decisions about how to improve their study and self-care routines.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eleni Vardaki works with individuals and schools. She is a certified and accredited EFT therapist specialized in stress, anxiety, and academic success. Her mission is to help bridge the gap between mainstream education and the well-being skills we need to thrive.
