Burnout Prevention Through Tapping | Nervous System Reset Before Stress Spirals

Welcome And The Tapping Question

0:26 SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Work Stress Anxiety.

0:31 SPEAKER_01: I am Cheryl Harris.

0:35 SPEAKER_01: Now, can something as simple as tapping on a few points around your body really reduce stress and anxiety?

0:50 SPEAKER_01: It's a really funny question I know, but it's a question many people ask.

0:55 SPEAKER_01: And today Ari Vince joins me to explain the science, the psychology, and the practical side of emotional freedom technique or EFT short.

1:12 SPEAKER_01: Let's find out together.

1:32 SPEAKER_01: So, welcome Amy.

1:35 SPEAKER_00: Thank you.

1:35 SPEAKER_00: I'm so excited to be here with you.

1:39 SPEAKER_01: I'm so excited to have you here.

1:42 SPEAKER_01: As I said, it's one of my most favorite things, um, because it just is, in the sense that it's just it's just a great way to relieve anxiety and stress.

What EFT Tapping Really Is

1:54 SPEAKER_01: And that's what we're here for.

1:55 SPEAKER_00: Yes, I agree.

1:56 SPEAKER_01: So can I ask you?

1:58 SPEAKER_01: We're talking talking about what tapping is and why people should use it for stress.

2:04 SPEAKER_01: If I was to ask you to explain EFT in really simple terms, um, what would you say, Amy?

2:12 SPEAKER_00: I would say that uh tapping is a really great combination of three different modalities.

2:18 SPEAKER_00: The first of which is acupuncture, like just energy therapy, just like acupuncture, because you instead of using needles on your acupressure points and your energy meridians, you're just using the percussion of tapping.

2:32 SPEAKER_00: So it's almost the exact same thing, but using percussion instead of needles.

2:37 SPEAKER_00: So energy therapy, first of all.

2:40 SPEAKER_00: The second thing that it does, uh, that it incorporates is cognitive therapy.

2:45 SPEAKER_00: So just like traditional talk therapy, um, you are actively talking about what it is you want to release while you are tapping through the acupressure points, and that gives all of your um all of the tapping like an extra boost, and it makes it that much more powerful.

3:05 SPEAKER_00: And the third thing it does is it incorporates somatic therapy.

3:10 SPEAKER_00: And somatic therapy is all about getting our energy like back down in our body instead of constantly thinking and worrying about anything that's happened in the past or thinking and catastrophizing about anything that could happen in the future, it kind of siphons all of our energy down into this present moment where everything is typically fine.

3:33 SPEAKER_00: And that helps to really calm people down because we are in the present moment.

3:39 SPEAKER_00: So all three of those things are happening at the same time.

3:43 SPEAKER_00: Now, what's happening on a biological level is that when we get stressed of any kind, stressed, overwhelmed, anxious, it means that the stress center in our brain, the amygdala, has been triggered somehow.

3:58 SPEAKER_00: 99% of the time, we don't even know how it's been triggered.

4:01 SPEAKER_00: We just know that we feel anxious and stressed and we don't know what to do about it.

What Happens In The Brain

4:06 SPEAKER_00: And in those moments, our body releases a rush of the stress hormone cortisol.

4:11 SPEAKER_00: And so our body is flooded with this stress hormone, um, assuming that we need to like, you know, do something to save our lives.

4:20 SPEAKER_00: And so when when we're tapping on those acupressure points and talking about this stress, it is actually removing cortisol from our body.

4:31 SPEAKER_00: It's telling our amygdala over and over again to calm down.

4:35 SPEAKER_00: It's okay to feel safe and calm in this moment.

4:39 SPEAKER_00: So it's removing cortisol from our body 43% faster than if you had done nothing else, which is really significant.

4:46 SPEAKER_00: And it is lowering your heart rate, it's lowering your blood pressure, and it is increasing your immune system response.

4:54 SPEAKER_00: So while you're doing this simple and often silly looking thing, there is a lot happening underneath the surface.

5:03 SPEAKER_00: And over 300 peer review studies have shown how effective and how efficient tapping is.

5:10 SPEAKER_00: It's really a remarkable tool.

5:12 SPEAKER_01: Yes, I know.

5:13 SPEAKER_01: And just in case anyone, because I know what modality means, but just in case anyone's never heard of that word, how would you how would you describe what modality is?

5:24 SPEAKER_00: Uh modalities in my mind are just different ways to approach healing.

5:31 SPEAKER_00: So there's energetic healing, there's emotional healing, um, there's physical healing, spiritual healing, and you can approach those different things with all kinds of different modalities.

5:43 SPEAKER_00: A modality would be like sound therapy, or even uh a physical modality would be massage or nutritional therapy or something like that.

5:54 SPEAKER_00: So there's all just different kinds of modalities to approach healing with.

5:58 SPEAKER_01: Brilliant.

5:59 SPEAKER_01: And it's it's quite interesting you saying because while you were talking there, you were actually tapping on some of the points.

6:06 SPEAKER_01: Yes.

6:06 SPEAKER_01: And it's so interesting because it I wanted to start tapping too while watching while watching you.

6:13 SPEAKER_01: Yes.

6:14 SPEAKER_01: Um, but it it's because I know how such a healing thing it is.

6:20 SPEAKER_01: Um, what I was gonna um ask you was can you imagine for a moment we've got someone, they're sitting at their desk, they're experiencing maybe some overwhelm, and they're trying their hardest to look normal.

6:37 SPEAKER_01: What would what might be the first uh tiny tapping they could do that could help steady themselves?

A Fast Desk Stress Reset

6:43 SPEAKER_01: So rather than explaining the whole the whole map of tapping around the body, what's something that someone could do in that moment to help them relieve their stress?

6:58 SPEAKER_00: So there are many, many like shortcuts you can take with tapping.

7:02 SPEAKER_00: You don't have to tap through all the spots, you can just do a few.

7:06 SPEAKER_00: But I think I'd like to just offer your listeners something which is a little bit more um just simple in those moments.

7:16 SPEAKER_00: And really, it's just to feel the emotion.

7:22 SPEAKER_00: Studies have shown that if you feel the stress or feel the worry or feel the overwhelm, like really lean into it and feel it where you feel it in your body.

7:33 SPEAKER_00: Um, and if you know why you're feeling those things, you can think about that.

7:38 SPEAKER_00: But really, it's mostly the feeling that you want to intensely lean into.

7:42 SPEAKER_00: Studies have shown you only need to do that for 90 seconds and it starts to go away.

7:48 SPEAKER_00: This is what we have never been taught.

7:51 SPEAKER_00: We have never been taught to engage with and process our emotions properly.

7:58 SPEAKER_00: And the simplest way is just to feel it.

8:01 SPEAKER_00: And it starts like getting less and less intense.

8:05 SPEAKER_00: Like the moment you lean into it a little bit, it will get less intense.

8:09 SPEAKER_00: So without engaging in a lot of like complicated explanations of tapping and where you can tap, you can just lean into the emotion itself.

8:18 SPEAKER_00: A lot of times people will feel it somewhere in their body, whether there's like a tightness in their heart or there's tension in their belly.

8:28 SPEAKER_00: Um, sometimes they their throat will feel constricted.

8:32 SPEAKER_00: Um, you just center in on that feeling and lean into it and just try to feel it, and that will make it start to go away.

8:39 SPEAKER_01: Brilliant.

8:40 SPEAKER_01: Okay.

8:41 SPEAKER_01: Um, is it possible for us to do like a one-minute tapping routine that someone could do at their desk?

8:49 SPEAKER_01: Now, I I I must admit I'm a bit of a fidgeter at my desk.

8:54 SPEAKER_01: So if no one would know that I'd be I was tapping because I'm always touching my hair or do you know what I mean?

9:00 SPEAKER_01: Touching my body.

One Minute Tapping Sequence

9:02 SPEAKER_01: Um I and I kind of was hoping we could do something like that, something that someone could easily disguise.

9:08 SPEAKER_00: Absolutely, sure.

9:09 SPEAKER_00: Um, let me go through.

9:11 SPEAKER_00: I'm not gonna do all of the tapping points that I normally do because if we're just talking about a one-minute routine, we want to keep it short and sweet.

9:17 SPEAKER_00: Um, I don't know about disguising it, but I do know that you can just, you know, if somebody, a colleague walks by, you can easily explain it away by just saying, I'm rebooting my nervous system.

9:30 SPEAKER_00: And you can make it a little bit of a lighthearted thing and just, you know, explain it away like that, um, which I think a lot of people would understand.

9:39 SPEAKER_00: So the first tapping point I would uh highlight is the eyebrow point, which is right at the beginning of both of your eyebrows.

9:46 SPEAKER_00: And I like to tap on both sides of my body, and um so just make sure you're tapping right in that exact spot.

9:53 SPEAKER_00: You don't want to be upward somewhere in the middle of your forehead because that won't be as effective.

9:57 SPEAKER_00: So right at the beginning of your eyebrow, and then on the side of your eye at your temple, and then under your eye, right on your cheekbones, under your nose, under your mouth, and then call your collarbone point.

10:16 SPEAKER_00: So if you find the beginning of your collarbone, you're gonna go down about an inch.

10:19 SPEAKER_00: There's a little valley in between your collarbone and your ribs on either side of your sternum, and you're gonna tap right in that valley.

10:27 SPEAKER_01: Yeah, almost like a soft spot.

10:30 SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and then the last one will just go to the top of the head.

10:34 SPEAKER_00: That's kind of a shortened version of what I typically do.

10:38 SPEAKER_00: And yeah, so in those moments, in those stressful moments, you can just tap through those spots and start on your eyebrow point and say something like, I feel so stressed right now.

10:49 SPEAKER_00: And then you move to the side of the eye right at your temple and say, Um, for whatever reason, and then move to under your eye and say, or for a million reasons.

11:00 SPEAKER_00: And I feel the and then you go to under the nose, and I feel this stress in my body, and you can name the place and name how it feels, and I don't know how to let it go.

11:12 SPEAKER_00: But I want to honor that I have this feeling at all because it's there for a good reason.

11:20 SPEAKER_00: My body is trying to protect me somehow.

11:25 SPEAKER_00: It sees something in my environment as a str as a threat.

11:30 SPEAKER_00: And I want to remind my nervous system that I am okay in this moment, that nothing is outwardly dangerous, and it's okay to feel safe and calm in this moment.

11:45 SPEAKER_00: It's okay to let this stress go.

11:47 SPEAKER_00: And you just keep going, you know, um, allotting the amount of time that you have to dedicate to it.

11:53 SPEAKER_00: You just keep going through those points over and over and over again, and just honoring them the important thing is to honor and acknowledge that you have the stress, that it's there for a reason instead of judging and criticizing yourself for it.

12:09 SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of people, including me, that have a loud inner critic and that would love to kind of put you down for feeling stressed or feeling insecure in a moment at work.

12:22 SPEAKER_00: Um, but there's a good reason that the stress is there.

12:24 SPEAKER_00: And so we just honor and acknowledge over and over and over again, and your body will start to feel more calm.

12:31 SPEAKER_00: Your blood pressure will get lower, your heart rate will get lower, and so will your cortisol, and you will be able to kind of re-engage.

12:39 SPEAKER_00: So I want to say too that when that amygdala, that stress center in our brain is engaged, it takes the prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that can make logical sound decisions.

12:51 SPEAKER_00: It takes that part of our brain offline.

12:54 SPEAKER_00: It takes it offline.

12:55 SPEAKER_00: And we can't like really calm ourselves down until we calm down that amygdala.

13:03 SPEAKER_00: So we focus on the amygdala, the stress itself, and then we'll be able to bypass that and get to those logical sound decisions again.

13:12 SPEAKER_01: Sometimes people might be listening and they they're a bit skeptical of why EFT works.

13:18 SPEAKER_01: What would you say to someone who's skeptical?

13:21 SPEAKER_01: Because I know it works and you know it works.

13:23 SPEAKER_01: And we we both know how powerfully it works.

13:26 SPEAKER_00: Yes.

13:26 SPEAKER_01: So what would you say to someone who's skeptical about EFT?

13:30 SPEAKER_00: Well, I would say that I don't blame them.

Handling Skepticism With Evidence

13:32 SPEAKER_00: Uh I would say that it looks silly.

13:35 SPEAKER_00: I certainly felt really silly when I was just learning tapping, and it doesn't seem like something so simple could be so powerful.

13:46 SPEAKER_00: Um and I would say also that it goes against everything that we have learned about emotions because we have only been taught to outwardly show the shiny, happy emotions and never show the uncomfortable ones or the ones that you know outwardly people call negative.

14:09 SPEAKER_00: I don't think there are any negative emotions.

14:10 SPEAKER_00: I think there are just some that feel really uncomfortable.

14:14 SPEAKER_00: Um, so engaging with them and honoring them feels really foreign to some people.

14:22 SPEAKER_00: And it can even feel toxic in a way because you're actually leaning into something that doesn't feel good.

14:28 SPEAKER_00: But it's the only way to move through and process an emotion so that you don't have to deal with it ever again.

14:38 SPEAKER_00: Most of the time, we don't process these emotions and they just get set aside, and they and your body and your mind will demand that you deal with it at some point in the future because it doesn't go away until we move through it somehow.

14:57 SPEAKER_00: So this is just a way to very quickly process your emotions, and the entire time you're telling your that stress center in your brain that it's okay.

15:07 SPEAKER_00: It's okay to feel safe and calm.

15:09 SPEAKER_00: So um I would just say that it's it's a counterintuitive modality, and people have to kind of suspend their judgment and take a little bit of a leap of faith and lean into it.

15:24 SPEAKER_00: But once they do, you can't argue with the results.

15:29 SPEAKER_00: And like I said earlier, there have been over 300 peer review studies done that showed incredibly how effective, how efficient.

15:37 SPEAKER_00: And in fact, I've got some stats here for you if you think your listeners would like to hear it.

15:43 SPEAKER_01: Yes, yes.

15:44 SPEAKER_01: I'm a big fact-finder kind of person.

15:47 SPEAKER_01: So yeah, anything, anything that proves what we're doing is always of interest to me.

15:53 SPEAKER_00: Okay.

15:53 SPEAKER_00: Um, there was a recent study done and at an EFT training, and they did a uh questionnaire before and after.

16:03 SPEAKER_00: And tapping participants said that they reported anxiety decreased by 40%.

16:10 SPEAKER_00: This is over four days.

16:11 SPEAKER_00: Anxiety decreased by 40%, depression decreased by 35%.

16:17 unknown: Uh-oh.

16:18 SPEAKER_00: PTSD symptoms decreased by 43%.

16:22 SPEAKER_00: Pain, physical pain decreased by 57% over four days.

16:28 SPEAKER_00: Cravings, like if you had food cravings or cravings for cigarettes, anything, decreased by 74%.

16:37 SPEAKER_00: And happiness increased by 31%.

16:41 SPEAKER_00: So those are such significant numbers that I, you know, you can't argue with that.

16:47 SPEAKER_00: And while it might feel really foreign to engage with your emotions, like if I know that my pain is gonna decrease by 57% without taking medication and without doing any kind of radical surgery or anything along those lines, I'm gonna try that.

17:04 SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna try that, especially since it costs nothing and I can do it on my own in my own time.

17:12 SPEAKER_01: Cool.

17:13 SPEAKER_01: Okay, now I'm gonna make a a confession.

17:15 SPEAKER_01: When I was a little girl, I I really thought that um all of our intelligence was in our head and all of our love was in our heart because we used to have you know draw little heart shapes.

17:30 SPEAKER_01: And I know for a lot of people, even though intellectually they they probably know it's not true, they still believe that stress is just in their head.

Stress Lives In The Body Too

17:41 SPEAKER_01: What would you what would you say to someone who still believes that and why EFT is such a good way to reconnect with your body and your emotions?

17:54 SPEAKER_00: I I think stress is thrown around as um a really big blanket term, and and uh people don't understand what's happening in their body when they feel stressed.

18:08 SPEAKER_00: Um stress is a biological response to an emotional trigger.

18:15 SPEAKER_00: So the emotions are underneath the biological response, and it is really in our benefit to engage with those emotions in order to stop the emotional response, but also prevent it from continually happening in the future.

18:32 SPEAKER_00: So the emotions are underneath it, and what's happening is our subconscious mind is constantly scanning the horizon for threats, constantly looking for something that could be dangerous.

18:44 SPEAKER_00: We don't know intellectually that that's happening, but that's what our subconscious mind is doing.

18:48 SPEAKER_00: When it spots something, it again, the stress center in our brain gets triggered, cortisol rushes through our body, and we feel that stress.

18:59 SPEAKER_00: And we just think it's a biological thing that's happening because we feel that our palms are sweaty or our heart is racing or something along those lines, and we don't know what's happened.

19:08 SPEAKER_00: But what happened is that prior to that, we felt an emotion of fear, we felt an emotion of um overwhelm or something along those lines, and our body biologically responded to it.

19:25 SPEAKER_00: So it's not just in our brain, it's happening as an emotion in our bodies.

19:32 SPEAKER_00: So the emotions are really the important thing, the the thing that needs to be paid attention to and the thing that needs to be processed in order to stop those biological responses from continually happening.

19:47 SPEAKER_01: Thank you.

19:47 SPEAKER_01: You know, it's really interesting because I think when I think of the word emotion, I actually I literally think of it as energy in motion.

19:56 SPEAKER_01: And that's why I think EFT is such a powerful way of believing, like you say, not only stress and anxiety, but cravings, like you said, and other emotions that we feel that oftentimes we should we feel we shouldn't be feeling, and so um I just want to thank you very much, uh Amy, for explaining all that to us, explaining why tapping is so useful for stress.

20:22 SPEAKER_01: Um, thank you very much for your time today.

20:25 SPEAKER_00: You're welcome.

20:26 SPEAKER_00: Love being here.

20:27 SPEAKER_01: It's so interesting that conversations like today's remind us that managing work stress isn't about pretending that we're fine, it's about understanding what's happening in our nervous system and finding more practical ways to support it.

Key Takeaways And Share The Show

20:47 SPEAKER_01: You know, if you found today's episode helpful, please follow the podcast and share it with someone who might benefit.