Why Tapping Isn’t What You Think It Is

Why Tapping Isn’t What You Think It Is

By Annette Burke, Founder of BodyTap Method

Let’s be honest about how this looks from the outside.

Someone sits down across from you. They start tapping their fingertips on their face, their collarbone and the top of their head. You know they are talking to themselves - what are you thinking? What in the name of … is this and how is poking yourself in the eyebrow going to help with anything?

I get it. The first time I saw EFT Tapping demonstrated, my inner scientist - the part of me that spent years in research and development - was skeptical to say the least. The idea that this could shift decades of emotional patterns - hmm?

That was before I understood what was actually happening.

Your Brain Has a Burlgar Alarm

Here’s the bit that changed everything for me, and it’s pure biology.

Deep inside your brain sits the amygdala - a small, almond shaped structure that functions as your personal burglar alarm. It’s entire job is to scan your environment for threat and, when its find one, flood your system with stress hormones so you can run, fight, or freeze.

The problem is, it can’t tell the difference between a lion coming for you and a difficult email from your manager. To the amygdala, a stressful thought is a stress thought. And once it fires whether the danger is real or imagine, present or twenty years in the past, your body responds as if its happening right now.

This is why talking about your problems only goes so far. Talk therapy works through the thinking of the brain - the logical, rational part that you can anaylse and reframe. But the amygdala isn’t listening to that conversation. It’s sitting in the basement on your nervous system, running it’s own little programme, completely unbothered by your insights or awareness.

EFT Tapping has the alarm code for the amygdala directly.

When you tap on the meridian points of the face and body - the same points used in acupuncture for thousands of years - you send a direct calming signal to the alarm system. You’re essentially saying, in a language the nervous system actually understands: this is safe, you can stand down.

And the alarm quiets.

What the Research Actually Shows

So let’s talk about the science because there is a significant amount of it, and it’s getting harder to ignore.

Research has shown that EFT Tapping reduces cortisol (the primary stress hormone) by up to 43% after just one hour of tapping. To put that in context, cortisol is the hormones that keeps you wired, reactive, unable to sleeping, and reaching for things you don’t need. A 43% reduction isn’t a subtle shift. That’s measurable biological change from tapping on the side of your face.

Dr Stapleton, a clinical psychologist at bond University in Australia, took this further in 2019 with her brain imaging study scanned participants before and after a hour week EFT Programme. Before Tapping, the parts of the brain that trigger cravings were clear lit up and active. After four weeks of Tapping, the activation had dramatically reduced. She was literally watching the brain change on the screen.

I personally used EFT Tapping around my addictive behaviour with chocolate. Check out of TEDx talk on this topic.

Then there’s the work of Dr Dawson Church, who has dedicated decades to bring EFT into clinical research settings. In a randomised controlled trial with post war soldiers diagnosed with PTSD. 86% recovered from PTSD after just six sessions of EFT Tapping - with 80%still recovered at their three and six month follow up appointments. These are people who had often been through years of conventionall treatment with limited results. Six sessions of EFT!!

There are 1000’s of published research studies on EFT Tapping. Conducted across multiple countries. Published in peer reviewed journals. Convering anxiety, depression, PTSD, chronic pain, phobias, sleep, athletic performance and more.

The Small Animal Study - My Personal Favourite

And then there is this one, which I adore for the sheer specificity of it and also because I have witnessed so many clients achieve this in one session.

Researchers tested EFT Tapping specifically for phobias of small animals - spiders, mice, wasps, insects - that kind of thing and found it to be highly effective in reducing the fear response.

Why do I love this study? Because it’s so concrete. This isn’t a vague sense of feeling a bit better. This is moving from terrified of spiders, tapping on the issues, and now you’re not. The fear isn’t been managed or suppressed. It’s being cleared, at the root, from the nervous system.

That’s what makes EFT different from most approaches to emotional health. It doesn’t just help you cope. It shifts the underlying problem.

So Why Does It Still Look Strange?

Honestly? Partly because we’re not used to the idea that healing can be simple. We’ve been conditioned to believe that if something is going to work on deep emotional pain, it needs to be complicated, expensive, and take a very long time.

EFT Disrupts that assumption entirely. You can do it anywhere, you just need to know the points. You need your fingertips and about ten minutes.

And I think that’s the thing that makes people most sceptical. We’re suspicious of things that seem too simple.

But the nervous system doesn’t care about complicated. It cares about the right signal, derived in the right place. And that’s exactly what tapping delivers.

What It Feels Like From The Inside

The embarrassment, by the way, is real. I won’t pretend it isn’t. The first time most people tap in a. group setting, there is a moment of feeling absolutely ridiculous.

And then something shifts.

The anxiety, the anger, the grief, the low level dread losses its grip a little. And then a little more.

That’s when people stop caring how it works.