Brad Schipke teaches the butterfly hug, a three-step tapping technique: cross your arms, tap alternately on your shoulders or thighs, and keep going. The alternating taps stimulate both brain hemispheres like REM sleep does, helping you process emotions fast enough to calm panic in minutes.
Your symptoms start to calm down simply from the tapping. One of the best tools to stabilize your symptoms is something called the butterfly hug. It's super easy. You do it in three steps: you cross your arms, you start tapping, and then you keep tapping. That's it. You keep doing that, and what it does—it sounds silly, it sounds stupid. I know. I didn't believe it in the beginning, but I tried it out of desperation. I was like, "This looks silly, and this looks stupid, but I'm gonna do it anyways because my life—I just—I need something." So if you just try this out. Your panic will reduce, your anxiety will reduce, because what the tapping does is it actually stimulates the left and right hemispheres of your brain, which simulates REM sleep cycle. In the REM sleep cycle, what your brain is doing is processing memories and things from the day and anything in the past, which is where all of our dreams happen. So when you're doing that tapping left and right, and it doesn't have to be under your shoulder blades here, you can move your eyes left and right, you can tap the top of your thighs, whatever works for you. But by doing that, you are hacking into that part of your brain and helping you process the emotions in the moment. So give it a try. It's free, nothing to lose.
