Tapping & EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique): Pseudoscience, Quackery or Wildly Effective Healing Modality?

Well, hello, it's Ben Greenfield. I got my buddy Nick on today's show. He's kind of weird. He's into tapping. Tapping, like emotional freedom, technique and pushing little buttons all over your brain and your body. It's actually pretty intriguing though, what he does. I figure it was high time we got somebody on to talk about tapping because I've actually used it. I've used it for sleep and I've used it for stress, and for some weird reason, it actually seems to kind of work.

So.

So call it what you will, kind of woo woo. But we're going to talk about it either way.

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Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And you may have heard of this thing called tapping before. I've heard of it. I've actually been kind of messing around with it for, gosh, like four years now. It was actually today's podcast guest that first kind of told me about it and I thought it was really stupid and woo woo tried it and, well, kind of, kind of keep it a mystery for you because I want him to tell you more about it. But tapping, it's also known as EFT, or emotional freedom technique. And it's just what it sounds like. Tap different parts of your body and then you say an affirmation. It's supposedly some wildly effective healing modality that combines like, ancient Chinese acupressure and modern psychology. So my guest is Nick Ortner. Ortner, O R T N E R. And he created this film called the Tapping Solution and wrote a book, multiple books really, on the same topic. I have two here in my bookshelf. The tapping solution, then also one that I actually used even more than the tapping solution. That's the tapping solution for pain relief. Because I do painful things to my body and I want to put Nick in the hot seat today to learn about how this stuff works. If it works, if it's all just placebo and I'm wasting my time smacking different areas of my body around. And so if you do want to learn more about Nick, I Mean, his Amazon page is pretty comprehensive. His Tapping Solution book as well as his Tapping Solution film are both available in the Show Notes. And you can grab the Show Notes, fittingly enough, over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com tapping. So, Nick, welcome to the show, man.

Ben, it is a pleasure to be on with you and a fellow skeptic, because I was a skeptic. So we can bash it and laugh at it and then see the results.

Were you skeptic, really?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, look, you know, I wake up almost every morning and this is what I do, right? I write books about this and it's my life's work. And I still laugh about it because, you know, it's, it's, it's strange. Why are we tapping on ourselves? Why? You know, this isn't something that we grew up with. This isn't something we saw on tv. You know, at least like deep breathing and yoga and meditation has been around a little longer. We have some reference point. So I didn't have a reference point. And yeah, I'm a skeptic. And, and I'll tell you, here's the other part of it. Every time I hear a success story, I'm blown away. They don't get old, right? I'll hear someone say, oh, you know, I had 20 years of pain and I did this and it went away. And it surprises me just as much as the next time as the first time, because it's just incredible that something could work this well.

Yeah, I asked you that skeptic question. Cause honestly, it's shocking how many people kind of like in our little health and fitness industry are not skeptics and just like, try everything. Some people say that about me. They're like, oh, Ben Greenfield just tries everything and endorses everything. While you would be shocked that the number of boxes of unused shit is out in the garage in the garbage can and the number of emails that I simply reply to with a no thanks, not interested. Whether that's like, people who want to, like, come on the podcast or people who have some brand new supplement, like, it's, it's pretty crazy. Like, my, my filter is developing a, a more and more microporous membrane when it comes to, to filtering through a lot of this stuff. And I'm, I'm incredibly picky and I, I take a pretty scientific approach to a lot of this stuff. Well, at the same time, keeping an open mind to the idea that sometimes thousands of years of Chinese medicine isn't wrong either. Even if there's not some double blinded clinical research, Western study behind it. So it's an, it's an art and a science, but it's an art and science.

It's.

Yeah, yeah. I'm curious though, for before I even ask you about the history of tapping, because I actually am curious. Like you make it sound like it actually isn't as old as like yoga or meditation or anything. So I want to hear a little bit more about how it came to be. But first of all, before we even start in that, let's just start here. Like, what is happening? Like, give me, give me kind of like the five minute elevator pitch. I guess that's a really long elevator ride, but.

That'S stuck in an elevator.

But I'm gonna, I'm gonna give me this, give me that. I'm stuck in an elevator with Nick Ortner and asking him what he, what tapping is.

Yeah, very good. Yeah. So, you know, you described it. The, the one minute short explanation is that it's a combination of ancient Chinese acupressure and modern psychology because we are literally physically tapping on these endpoints of meridians on our body while saying certain statements, while focusing on the anxiety, the stress, the pain in our body, whatever's going on and what the latest research is showing. The research that I'm really most excited about is that when we tap on these endpoints of meridians, we send a calming signal to the amygdala and the brain. And I know, you know well, and many of your listeners are so educated by your podcast and other work, they know about the amygdala, that fight or flight response. Right. It's the part of us that gets activated when we're stressed out. It's that ancient part of us that served a good purpose. You know, when we're being chased by a tiger or a lion, we want to activate that stress response. We want to fight, we want to flee. We want the blood to flow away from our forebrains into our arms and legs. The challenge, and I think one of the real challenges of modern life is that we're activating that fight or flight response all day, every day. So, and we're activating in situations where we can't do that, fighting or fleeing. So we get an email from our boss and it stresses us out. Really the best thing we could do besides tapping is to go for a run, you know, and like just get that stress response out in some way, have that physical activity, get that cortisol to actually be used and move through the body.

But, well, that, that or, or reframe our response. Right?

100%. But, but from the basic, you know, from the basic pathology of what our body was designed to do. Right, right. It was, it was designed to fight, flee or freeze is really the third.

Curl up in a fetal position and shit our pants.

Yeah, 100%. 100%. So the tapping is sending that calming signal to the amygdala that then, you know, and I love that you said to reframe your response because I agree with you. And the challenge for so many people, let's say that you get angry about something, so your boss sends you that email and you're angry. That can be such a primitive response. Right. And we've all had that experience where it's like, you know, like that cloud of anger where you can't even think straight and you're looking at it and you're going, okay, I got to do better. And what the tapping does, if we engage it in that moment or if we engage it preventively and start changing our response and our behavior, we send that calming signal to the amygdala. Then the brain, the body relaxes, we're telling it it's safe. And then we can reframe it. We can then have that conscious thought that says, hey, I'm going to take the higher perspective here. One of the things that people struggle with initially when they first look at the tapping, especially if they've been into, you know, positive psychology in the self help world is we usually start by focusing on the negative. Start by focusing on the truth is what I say, as opposed to the negative. Hey, this is how I feel. I'm going to take a moment to acknowledge how I feel, that, yes, I'm angry, yes, I'm anxious, as opposed to what people tend to do. It's like when they learn about positive thinking is they go, okay, I'm angry, I'm anxious, so I'm just going to bury it and swallow it because that's not positive thinking. You know, like I'm just, it's going to go deep down in my gut and I'm going to make believe I'm happy about life, but I'm really not. You know, we were talking just before we got on about Hay House, who's my publisher, and Louise Hay, who is the queen of affirmations. I'm sure a lot of people know her name, you know, best selling author. She just passed away a year ago.

Is she who's like behind Hay House? Louise Hay.

Louise Hay is behind Hay House. You know, she started her work in the 80s, working with people with AIDS. One of the first people to actually look at that movement and bring love to that community and compassion, that community. So I sat down with her. I had the honor of sitting down with her a couple years ago and interviewed her about tapping, because we had been doing some tapping together. And I said, so you're the queen of affirmations and positive thinking. What are you doing tapping on the negative? And she paused very sweetly. She was 85 years old at the time. She looked at me and she said, honey, if you want to clean a house, you have to see the dirt. And that really blew me away in that moment. It encapsulated what we tend to do with the things in our life that aren't comfortable. Right. We either think, well, we don't have a tool to change them or shift them, so we're just going to ignore them, or we're going to be positive and happy without addressing how we truly feel. Just for a moment, we ignore the dirt. So with the tapping, we're focusing on what we feel in our body, on our pain, our anxiety, the stress, the anger. We're acknowledging that dirt. We're doing the tapping process to send that calming signal to the amygdala, and then that reframe happens automatically. That's when someone says, you know, you can make a positive statement and actually feel that it's true, as opposed to having, you know, trying to say a positive affirmation and having that part of your brain going, well, that's total BS because that's not who I am.

Yeah.

So that's. That's your five minutes stuck in an elevator with me.

Okay. All right. What I want to do maybe later on is. Is really get into brass tacks, like where you tap and what it. What. What it's like. I know this is an audio podcast, but pretty sure you can. You can handle it.

Yep.

Anyways, though, so how did you actually learn about this? And before you dive into that, by the way, excellent book for people listening in Heal youl Body by Louise Hay. Have you read that, Nick?

And that's. That is. It's like the Bible of.

You know, I never heard of it till last year. Somebody sent it to me, and I actually, I gave it to my kids to kind of show them how when they have certain. Certain emotions or even certain physical issues, how saying certain things to yourself, you know, what I guess you would call an affirmation can help you with that. And it's actually a super, super, like, thin and easy read.

It's an easy read. It's, it's a great reference point. Yeah. Often use it with tapping with people. So you, because you see what the challenge is, she addresses like, okay, if you have this physical challenge, it may be related to this emotional experience and then you can actually use the tapping with that.

Yes. So for any of you listening in, grab the book. I think it's like, I don't know, it's got some cheesy cover like clouds or a rainbow or something. But anyways, it's good. Don't judge it by its cover. Yeah. What'd you call it, an 80s cover? Yeah, exactly. So, Nick, how did you actually discover tapping? What's the story?

Yeah, so I started using it personally. You know, this isn't a technique that I invented. I'm just sort of a user and a proponent of it and someone spreading the message out in the world. It was discovered you want to do a little bit of the history of it and then we'll get to my point in it.

Yeah, I actually am curious about the history of it too.

Yeah. So let me give you some background so, because, you know, there's a history before me that is really important and critical. So late, you know, 1979, 1980, Dr. Roger Callahan was a traditional psychiatrist, psychologist, I think he was a psychologist working with a client by the name of Mary. And Mary had an intense water phobia. So this isn't just like, I'm scared of swimming, this is scared of taking showers, drinking water. It was like a full blown phobia. And he was a traditionally trained psychologist, so he did what he knew to do. Right. Talk about it, tried exposure therapy. Hey, let's look at the water. How do you feel? Relaxation, do deep breathing. And after a year and a half of working with her, not getting anywhere, getting to the point where she would leave his sessions with migraine headaches from having to focus on the issue and being so stressed out about it, you know, he was frustrated, as you can imagine. And one particular day they were at his home office, sitting outside, looking at the pool that he had in his house. So that was exposure therapy. Hey, look at the pool. What do you feel? What are you thinking? And she said, you know, when I look at the water, I get butterflies in the pit of my stomach. And he had been reading about the Chinese meridian system and the acupuncture system and had read that the stomach meridian ends underneath the eye. So on a whim, on a moment of inspiration, he said, well, try, try tapping underneath your eye while you look at the water. So she did that. She tapped for about a minute, and in that moment, which is still astounding, in that minute, the water phobia completely cleared. She just wasn't scared of it anymore. So he was astonished, as you can imagine, if you've been practicing for 20 years, and all of a sudden, one minute handles this issue. So he started researching the meridian points, working on this topic, and he developed what's called tft, Thought Field Therapy. And with tft, there's a bunch of different points, and for different issues, you do a different sequence of points. One of his students by the name of Gary Craig said, you know, this is great, and it works great, but it's really hard to remember, and we're having to change things up all the time, and it's hard work. So let's hit all the main points every single time. That was one of his innovations, among many. And he developed eft, Emotional Freedom Technique. So that's its current form where we do all the points at once. And in. Right around 2003, I found Gary's material online, Patricia Carrington, other experts, and started using it for myself. I shared it with friends and family. The running joke at the time was, don't say anything is wrong around Nick because he will make you tap on it. I've gotten much better since then. I let people, you know, approach me, but then it was like, hey, you. You know, your shoulder hurts. Let's tap on it. I remember driving to a Yankees game right around then, 2003, 2004, with my friend Pete, and he's just a normal dude. We're going to a Yankees game about an hour and a half drive from here, and he was complaining about how his shoulder hurt. He had a football injury, and it just wasn't going away. And I said, hey, I just learned this thing. Let's try it. So we went through the points, this, that, and the other. He thought I was crazy. So, you know, that addresses some of the questions about, do you have to be a skeptic? Right? He. He was a skeptic. Or do you have to believe? And he thought I was nuts, but he humored me. We were stuck in the car, and the pain in his shoulder went away. I was so astounded. You know, one thing after another.

So I'm gonna. I'm gonna interrupt your story. Dude. I know. I was gonna say this for later, but since you say the pain in his shoulder went away, can you tell me, like, what you guys did for his shoulder? Like, what did it look like that you did for. For his shoulder.

Yeah. And, you know, why don't we do it? You want to do a quick pain relief session right now. We do five minutes and people can have an experience. So they.

Let's do it. As long as people can operate heavy machinery because they might be in their cars. Driving.

Yeah. So if you're driving, you don't want.

To be responsible for the pile up on 101.

So pull over, you know, do whatever you need to do. If you have pain in your body, tapping is so powerful for it. It can work so well to reduce or eliminate the pain. So focus on that now. You might decide to work on that. And it doesn't matter what your diagnosis is. Just give it a shot. And if you don't have pain, just pick something that you're stressed out about. Anxious. You can also just tune into your body. You might tune in and say, you know, my shoulders are really tense. People hold a lot of tension in their neck. Or my stomach is painful. Just tune into a place where there's stress and anxiety overwhelm and what's happening. We want to pick one thing. So we want to know. You might have had a lot of things come up. Just pick one place where you want to focus that something that you want to release. Maybe you're angry about something that happened a week ago or you're anxious about an upcoming event.

My right hamstring's a little tight. That's what I'm going to focus on.

All right. And then as we tune into it, give it a number in intensity on your stress, your emotion, your pain from 0 to 10. So 10 being the most intense and most painful, 0 not being there at all. And just pick whatever number comes up.

Yeah, for me it's a six.

Alrighty. And then we're gonna start. So we have our. We have our focus, we have our number. We're start by tapping on the side of the hand. It's called the karate chop point. And if you take four fingers of one hand and tap on the outside below the pinky of the other hand, doesn't matter which hand you use. And you're just tapping gently on the side of the hand, tapping repeatedly. And repeat after me.

Below the pinky.

Below the pinky. Yeah. So that whole meaty part of the hand, the four fingers, you know, fit kind of perfectly there right below the pinky.

Okay.

On the outside of each hand. Yep. And maybe Ben, in the show notes, we can stick a diagram in there, some links that if people want to.

Refer to it a video of you in a cute sailor's outfit.

Well, I've got just the thing. How did you know?

I'm derailing it. Go ahead.

Tapping on the side of the hand, feeling that issue. Focusing on the stress or the pain or whatever's going on. Repeat after me. Even though I'm holding on to this.

Issue, Even though I'm holding on to this issue.

I choose to relax now.

I choose to relax now.

Even though I feel this pain in my body.

Even though I feel this pain in my body.

And you can change the language if you want to say this anxiety or the stress or whatever it is. I choose to relax and feel safe now.

I choose to relax and feel safe now.

And now still on the side of the hand. We're going to do it one more time. Even though I'm holding on so tightly.

Even though I'm holding on so tightly.

And it's hard to let this go.

And it's hard to let this go.

I choose to relax now.

I choose to relax now.

Now we're going to tap through the points. The first point is the eyebrow point. It's on the inside of the eyebrow, right where the hair ends and it meets the nose. And you can tap with two fingers of one hand on one side or the other side or both sides. The meridians run down both sides of the body. And we're just tapping gently. And I want you to just take a moment as you tap to focus in on that issue. We're bringing it up in order to send that calming signal to the amygdala in order to release that stress response. So if there's pain in your body, just feel into that pain for a moment. And now we go on to the side of the eye. It's not at the temple, right next to the eye on the bone. Again, one side or both sides. If something stressful happened, I want you to just think about it. If that hamstring got hurt in a particular event, something you were doing, just bring that to mind. Where did this pain come from? When did it start? Now we move under the eye. Maybe as you tune into that pain or stress in your body, you notice some emotions. So if I were to ask you if there was an emotion in that pain or there's an emotion in your body, what would it be? And some people will say anger or grief or sadness or anxiety under the nose, and just tune into those feelings. Now, being present with the pain, being present with your thoughts and feelings about the pain or about the stress. Or about the anxiety. And now we move underneath the mouth, below the lip, above the chin, and that little crease in there. Tapping gently, focusing on this stressful issue. Focusing on what you're feeling and what you want to let go. For the collarbone point, feel for the two little bones of the collarbone and go just right below it. You can tap with all ten fingers of both hands. Tapping and thumping away, focusing on that issue. What's this all about? What's this pain about? What's this stress about? What's coming up for you and how can you let it go? Two points left in this round. We go underneath the arm, three inches underneath the armpit, right on the bra line for women, either side of the body. Tapping gently, being focused on this challenge, this stress, this issue. Last point, right at the top of the head, right at the crown. Tapping gently, being present to this stressful issue. And now we'll do one more quick round back to the eyebrow. And just say out loud, it's hard to let this go.

It's hard to let this go.

Side of the eye, all this pain in my body.

All this pain in my body.

Under the eye, it's safe to feel it.

It's safe to feel it.

Under the nose, and it's safe to begin to release it.

And it's safe to begin to release it.

Under the mouth.

Letting it go, letting it go.

Collarbone. From every cell in my body.

From every cell in my body.

Under the arm right now, right now. Top of the head right now, right now. Take a deep breath in and let it go. That was a quick experience. And now we tune back in. So you check in on that anxiety. That was an eight. And where is it now? You check in the pain. Where is it now? And then you also ask yourself what else came up. Now, you know, I'm guiding people through a very general process, so using general language and cues, if you're working one on one with someone or working more specifically on something you can talk about, you know, people will say, I remember working with a lady, Kathy, who had a terrible toothache for two and a half years. Multiple root canals, you know, antibiotics. Nothing would do the job. And I asked her, when did this pain start? And she had never thought about that question or been asked that question because it's something doctors don't usually ask when it comes to a toothache. I said, what was going on in your life? And she said, my mom had just passed away. Like that weekend we went to Vegas. It was a total surprise. It was a total shock. And she made that connection that that horrible event happened right when her toothache happened. And when that infection happened. We tapped. This was actually live on stage for Hay House. And I think we were in Baltimore or Washington D.C. 3,000 people. She just came up from the audience. Her pain went from about an 8 or 9 to a 2 or 3 in those 15 minutes. And then my favorite part of it, she went home, got the book, did more tapping, got rid of the pain completely. And listen to this. Ben, this is like, this is my favorite part because this is what I know you and your listeners who care about the science and research and the reality of this, as they should. She had X rays from her dentist before the tapping. She had X rays because, you know, they do X rays with the root canal. And you could clearly see in all her X rays a huge infection around her tooth. So her tooth was infected and that's why it hurt. She took antibiotics, root canals, nothing worked. She did the tapping, pain goes away. And now people go, oh, well, is that in her head or whatever? She goes back, the infection's gone.

Really?

Yeah. I have the X rays in the pain relief book.

You see, it's like some Wim Hof stuff where he shuts down the cytokines from eating E. Coli by breathing and sitting, sitting, sitting in cold snow.

Listen, I love Wim. Yeah. She allowed her body to heal, right? The grief, the pain, the anxiety was continuing to stress the body. And then no matter what outside interventions she was given, the body wouldn't heal. And just from, you know, doing the tapping and people say, oh, so it was the tapping that cured the infection? No, what I think happened is the tapping allowed her body to relax about. Allowed her body to let go, allowed those healing mechanisms to turn on and then.

Right. Put her in a de. Stressed place where she actually could heal.

Exactly.

Yeah. It's like, it's like what people say about cancer. Listening to somebody talk about this earlier today, about how the body is not going to heal itself of cancer if you're just constantly moving and asking the body to be performing all the time, under stress all the time, traveling all the time. It was. What was it? Oh, it was my friend Brian Johnson. He has this thing called Philosopher's Notes where he'll do certain books and cover certain books. And he covered this book called Anti Cancer. And I think it was the author of the book eventually died. He. He went to relapse for a long time and beat his cancer. They eventually died. He said the reason was because, like, he. He wrote this book or he started speaking, and he just started making himself more available to the world and speaking and, and not giving his body a chance to just be unstressed and on its own and eventually relapsed. And that was how he died of cancer, because he didn't put himself into a state of where his body could heal or it could stay healed to really, really. And it's like culture, right? It's. It's like. So I got sick for the first time in seven years for four days ago. You can hear I'm still just a little bit congested. I got the flu. Like, I was down and out for two days in bed. But it was right at the tail end of having, like, a film team come to my house and film a documentary and a whole bunch of workouts to begin to prepare for this year's race season. And your. Your body will force you to stop at. You can either do it yourself or your body can force you to do it. And so it's. And, and you know, in my case, my body just put me into bed where I couldn't move. It was a. It was a good reminder of my own mortality and a good way to keep me humble and a good way to help, to remind me to slow down and to say no sometimes.

And, yeah, slow down. Seven years is a good run, though. Well done.

Yeah. As my friend Paul Check says, you know, you don't need to make yourself available to the world 24 7. Like, as. As cool as that is. And as much as it stokes the ego, there's. There's drawbacks. So anyways, I want to get back to your football player and shoulder story, but already I've got some, Some skeptic questions for you based on what we just did. First of all, how much of this is me just doing the effort? Like, could I just stand there and do those affirmations that you said and not tap? Like, has anybody ever looked into what if you just do the affirmations or. And I'm going to be a very advanced devil's advocate now, what if you just do the tapping without the affirmations? Like. Like, why do you do both?

Yeah, look, I mean, this is what I think it is my belief there's been some research studies that have, you know, they call them dismantling studies. Right. Try to pull apart the mechanisms and, you know, what's. What in the tapping action. You know, there are some mechanism papers that have shown specifically that, you know, the tapping is an active main ingredient that makes a difference. Now, if you Stand there and do those affirmations. That's good for you too, right? So I sort of think that all of it combines for the maximum effect. So if you say, great, we have the affirmations and let's call that 10% of the result or plus 10 points and what result you're going to get. Okay. And then you have the tapping and then. Yeah, that by itself can have something. Then you have working with someone who's good. So if you've got a one on one relationship with a competent practitioner who knows what they're doing, they're going to do a better job if you, you know. So as you stack all these different elements on, people always say the placebo effect. Is it the placebo effect? Yeah, of course it is. Everything has a placebo effect in it, right? Like everything. You know, modern medicine fights at 30% rib eye steaks.

Rib eye steaks are not a placebo at all, at all. You cannot tell me I've eaten a ribeye steak and make me feel better. But I can guarantee when I sink my teeth into a big juicy French cut bone in rib eye, there's zero placebo. It's just frickin 100% pure protein and ambrosia.

So everything. So, you know, we say the placebo effect as if it's a bad thing. No, it's a good thing. It's the power of the mind to heal. So we might as well use that placebo effect. If you're going to do something, I mean, really, whatever you do, whether you do tapping or whether you listen to another podcast and say, hey, I'm going to try this. If you go into it with that positive expectation, it's going to work better. If you pick up a supplement and you're like, and you just listened to 10 podcasts telling you how great that supplement is, its efficacy is likely to improve because we've shown that, we've shown that the body creates these healing chemicals. So, you know, my feeling is that it's all of it combined, that's where the magic really happens.

And, you know, but nobody's ever actually like just studied what happens when you tap these points or what happens when you just do an affirmation.

No, I mean, they have studied it. So let me, let me see if I can pull up, you know, a research study.

Well, you're pulling it up. I mean, I guess Louise Hay's book is all affirmations without tapping, right? Like that's an example of affirmations. I suppose I maybe tapping like an example of tapping without affirmations would just be like acupressure or acupuncture because you're putting pressure on certain meridians, right?

Yeah, well, 100%. And people, it's like, hey, if you want to do acupuncture with it, like, great. Yeah. There's been a couple dismantling studies, so one that I'm reading here now. I mean, there's over 100 research studies on tapping. I never memorize them all. I'm too busy actually doing the tapping.

Where are you finding them?

So the best link for everyone to check out, but some show notes, too, is. Let me give you the exact link. It's. Let me make sure I get it right. So it's research.eftuniverse.com that's my friend Dawson Church. We funded a lot of the studies through our foundation, but he's the guy who actually gets them done.

Okay.

And you can see on there, you know, anxiety, ptsd, like, one after another showing really consistent results.

You funded the research, though, Some of it.

You know, the ones.

You guys ever get called out for that, like, because he wrote a book and did a documentary and stuff?

No, honestly. And if people say that, first off, I can only fund a couple of them because they're so expensive. You know, they're so expensive. I funded the ones with cortisol, like the saliva test, because I want to prove it and show it. We're doing some with DNA and RNA because I want to prove it and show it. And look, I think the. Oh, you funded it, so it has to be biased thing. Every single study is funded by somebody. You know, we certainly don't. You know, we publish everything that comes up, whether. Whatever happens, and that's it, you know, And I. We need more of this research to show it.

Got it. Okay. So I'm gonna put a link to this research that you just mentioned in the shownotes. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com tapping it's research.com eftuniverse.com another question, like, what about this. This whole idea between acupressure and acupuncture? Have you done that before, Nick?

Have I done acupuncture?

Yeah. Like, not two other people, but, like, have you had it done to yourself?

Yeah, no, I've. I've. You know, I think the difference. I love acupuncture. My acupuncturist moved down to Georgia and made me very sad because she was fantastic. I think the difference is with the tapping, we're bringing in that emotional you know, response, that emotional equation. And one of the things that I love about the tapping period, like, there's a lot of psychologists, psychiatrists, who bring it into their practice, you know, from around the world, and they found that it makes a big difference. What I love is that. And what they often say to me is that they can give it to their patients to bring home. Right. So when you're. You know, there's a great story of my friend Scarlett Lewis, who lost her son Jesse in the Sandy Hook school shootings. Sandy Hook is 10 minutes from my house. I live in Newtown, Connecticut. It's the same town. So it really struck home when that happened. And that's when we actually formed the foundation to work with PTSD and trauma. And I had worked with Scarlett a couple times. She learned the tapping and found it very helpful. She woke up one day, one night, in the middle of the night, three in the morning, in the midst of a panic attack. And she had had panic attacks before, so she knew the physiology of it. She knew that she was unlikely to be able to bring herself down from that attack without medication. So she thought, all right, I'll call 911. The ambulance will come here. My son, JT, her oldest son, was sleeping in the room next door. Hopefully he doesn't see me leave. I mean, it's crazy talk, right? Take an ambulance in the middle of night, leave your other son. But that's what. She didn't know what else to do. She thought for that one moment, okay, let me try tapping. This worked for my anxiety before. And at 3 in the morning, she did 10 minutes of tapping by herself in the midst of that panic attack. And when she was done, she was asleep. She went right to sleep. So to me, that's one of the powerful things about it. As opposed to. And again, I love acupuncture. It's not one is better than the other. But as opposed to those other therapies where you have to go see someone, this is something where you're back in control, that you can wake up at three, three in the morning and have a tool to use in those situations.

Okay, yeah, that's what I like. So you can do it like on airplanes, when you're driving in your car.

You know, the airplanes are the only place I've seen people do it publicly because I just don't think they care at that point.

I do everything publicly on airplanes. I do squats and lunges and piss off the flight attendants by touching my toes back where they're trying to.

Yeah, you know, and you know, it's funny, Dr. Mercola, as you probably know, is a huge fan of tapping.

I know he was actually, he's a skeptic.

He was instrumental in us getting the movie made. He's in the Tapping Solution documentary film. He was a big supporter from the beginning and us getting our message out there. And he was out there clamoring about EFT long before we were. He found that in his clinical practice he saw a huge difference and saw that so many things really, when people weren't getting better, if they followed his advice and didn't get better, it was likely because of an emotional issue, because of trauma, because of something they weren't letting go. So, yeah, yeah, he's a big fan.

Okay, so one other question before we get back to your story. How did you choose those points that you were tapping? Like why the top of the eyebrows on the side of the eyebrows underneath and the chin and the collarbone and below the armpits and to the top of the head, like why those and why that sequence?

Sure, that's great question. So that's eft. That's what Gary Craig.

Of course, it's a great question. I'm a professional podcaster.

Professional podcaster. Did you get. Do you have a license in that, Ben? Are you licensed to do this?

Yeah, I do. I do.

Otherwise, the podcast.

Just like a plumber. Just like a plumber. I'm licensed.

Yeah. So that's the EFT sequence. That's what Gary Craig developed from tft. Those are the major endpoints of meridians of the body. There are other points. So for example, the inside of the wrist, people will tap their two wrists together. That's another endpoint. There's a point on the back of the hand that's really good for trauma. So it's the back of the hand in between the pinky and the ring finger, sort of that slit of that little bone here. The reason we do the same points all the time and keep it simple is that when you start incorporating a bunch of other points, people just get confused and then they don't do anything. So that's the basic sequence that when you have a panic attack at 3 in the morning, that's sort of your go to. And then if you are doing other things and it doesn't seem to be working, you can research and incorporate some of those other points and strategies.

Okay, gotcha. So in terms of the history of this, it's always been those points and kind of like that style of tapping.

Yep.

Was it just discovered through Self experimentation.

You know, Roger Callahan did it through a lot of muscle testing, self experimentation. And then, you know, working with those, looking at those Meridian ancient systems and Chinese textbooks and things like that to see where those main endpoints were. But muscle testing was a big part of what he was doing to test that out.

Muscle testing, like, describe that.

So kinesiology, which, you know, I believe in it. I can never do it properly, so I don't personally use it. The most basic thing is the idea that, you know, the body stays strong. So if I say a certain statement like my name is Nick, I put out my hand, you press down on my hand, that deltoid muscle stays strong because my name is Nick. And if I say my name is Ben, that subtle shift in the energy system because it's not true, my hand goes weak. People who are trained and know how to do it can do it really well. I always feel like people are making it up. But that's what Dr. Callahan in part worked on to develop that.

Interesting. A lot of people are pretty skeptical at muscle testing stuff.

Yeah. Have you done any of it?

Like, like Ben Kinesio tested? Oh, yeah. I haven't tested myself, but I've been. I mean, I go to some of these fitness conferences or people like jump out of the woodworks holding some bracelet or, you know, dangling some essential oil at front of, you know, like, hold this in your hand and hold that in your hand and see whether you test stronger. And it's all I, you know, I actually kind of. This sounds mean, but I, I kind of enjoy effing with those people a little bit. And, you know, I'll pretend to be super weak in some cases than super strong in other cases or, you know, not let them get the leverage advantage on me. And yeah, it's. Dude, I, I realize that there's something to the concept of certain things affecting your physiology to the extent where muscles can become weak or muscles can become strengthened. But, you know, for example, if someone were to give me like 20 grams of a really great fish oil and 20 grams of really crappy fish oil and they have me go do a back squat workout or maybe even muscle test me, you know, eight hours later, okay, I'll give credence to the fact that that could be a decent N equals one evaluation of what's going through muscle. But somebody puts a post it note that says vitamin C in my hand and then a post it note that says vitamin D in my hand and I'm weaker with the vitamin C or the vitamin D and they say, oh, you need more vitamin C or less vitamin D. Like, that's why I do get a little bit skeptical.

I don't disagree with you. And also, if you're at a conference and someone has an agenda, right, Then that's a real issue. If you're trying to sell the bracelet. Now there's. The person doing the muscle testing really has to be unbiased. They can't be selling their supplements and their cerd or whatever.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So I want to get back to this guy with the shoulder. So he worked on him with the shoulder. But at that point, you weren't that familiar with tapping.

No, I just knew the basics, which is what's so amazing about it, right. That someone. You know what will happen from this podcast? I've seen it time and again. There will be people who experience pain relief in the five minutes that we did, and they'll just be like, wow, I can't believe it. There'll be people who experience relief and then go tell their uncle about it the next day and say, oh, let's watch this video together. The points are like this. And, you know, it doesn't take a high level of expertise to get some results. I saw a comment on our Facebook page about a week ago. You know, we're in the midst of our 10th annual Tapping World Summit. It's an online event, and there was a comment where someone said, you know, I just learned about this. I'm. I think they were a physiotherapist or something like that and said, I had a client who came in with fibromyalgia. Been in pain for so long, we did this tapping video together, and they walked out of there pain free. And they were just like, you know, 10 exclamation marks. Just didn't even know what happened. It's the kind of thing that you see with pain relief. It unlocks something. It allows the body to relax it. You know, it addresses that. Turns off that fight or flight response, that muscular tension, you know, as you know, Ben, part of the problem with pain, too, especially when it's chronic, is that it's. It's not just the injury. It's so psychological, right, that there's the expectation of pain, there's the fear of pain. You know, it's like you see that football player, like that lineman who gets hurt again and again, and, you know, yeah, you could. It's easy to say, oh, well, he's got a weakness here, a weakness there. But half the time I think is that they go Unscared, you know, they're like, it's the first game back, and boom, they get hurt again because they have that fear. I remember working a couple of years ago with a lady by the name of Bobby on her knee pain. And this was at a live event on pain relief. We tapped on her knee pain. We went back to a childhood event that was really traumatic for her, her pain.

What do you mean you went back to a childhood event?

Yeah, we explored together a childhood event that, and we tapped on it, right? So what that meant was she talked about her fifth birthday where her father came home probably drunk, and said to her, I wish you'd never been born. So that's the kind of imprint that on a five year old is, you know, beyond shocking. I mean, it's a, it's a turn the world upside down.

Can't imagine, you know what I get guilt. I got guilty of the night I was helping my kids make a. They're making a paleo ketogenic bread for their podcast and I felt like I was riding them too hard by, by, by interjecting during the podcast too much. And I was sleeping that night. I was like, I was like, guilty. As a father, I couldn't imagine telling my child, never been born.

Geez, it's, it's beyond awful. And she, and she carried the burden and the weight of that and you know, especially in that time period, zero to seven, when we just download everything and we need our parents for safety. So what we did is we, we replayed that event. And you know, when we look at childhood traumas, if we think about something from our past and we still feel that tension or that anxiety or that anger, it means it's still affecting us. So we went back, we tapped on it, she replayed the scenario, she created some new scenarios. So, you know, as a five year old, you're helpless. As an adult woman, she was able to take the cake and throw it in her dad's face, right? To have like some sort of fight back for that kind of situation and then release that anger from her body and try to find some understanding and some forgiveness. So we went through this whole process. Knee pain goes away. And this is, you know, the point for the psychological part of it. And the next day she says that when she got out of bed, she turned and she made a groaning noise, just like, ugh. And then she realized she didn't have any pain, that she was just making the noise that she always made when she got out of bed. So, you know, that's Just an example of these patterns that we establish in ourselves, in our lives that can really, can really dictate us. You know, she's groaning just because that's what she knew how to do, even though the pain was gone.

So you got so into this stuff after seeing your friend get healed that you just started writing books on it.

So the first thing I did was make that documentary film. It was 2007. I was in real estate. I was buying, fixing up and selling houses. 2007 was a terrible time to be doing that, as you can imagine. So right when I made the decision, you know, when I made the decision to go make the film, the business was actually going okay. I left that business with my dad and brother. I still had, you know, responsibility for it, but I left it to make the movie. And then the real estate market crashed. So as I'm making the movie, you know, we're hundreds of thousands and then eventually almost a million dollars in debt with that real estate business, as I'm making this film that cost me 150 grand to make on credit cards and credit lines. You know, we set out across the country with cameras and film people like Dr. Mercola, you know, in his office in Chicago. He was a big fan of tapping. You know, you mentioned right at the start of the podcast that there's so many people in this field who are huge fans. That was a big advantage to us because we knew that, you know, he was a huge fan, that Jack Canfield from the Chicken Soup for the Soul series was a huge fan. Joe Vitale and Bob Proctor from the Secret were big fans. Cheryl Richardson used it. So all these people, experts, were using tapping in their lives. And what we did in the movie is we had them sort of frame the issue and talk about tapping in their experiences. And then we brought 10 people from around the country together for a four day retreat to do tapping. We went to their house beforehand. So we filmed John, who had 30 years of chronic back pain, Vietnam veteran, multiple surgeries, medications, everything. We go to his house in Minneapolis. You see him in massive pain, on meds, groaning. And then he comes to the event. He wakes up the second morning pain free for the first time in 25 years or whatever it was. And that's what the film does. It follows these 10 people with pain, with anxiety, with all these other challenges. And we showed, because that was the thing for me with tapping, right? And it's still the thing. Hey, just first off, try it if you're skeptical, because you'll see that it either works for you or doesn't and then you're done with it. But you can see the results, they are just there. We've had a lot more research since then, but 10 years ago we didn't have that much research. So in the movie I wanted to say, hey, let's get these 10 people and see what happens. And that's what the movie did and it did well. And that's what I spent the last 10 years doing and talking about.

Yeah. Wow. Amazing. Now with the exercises and the style of tapping, forgive me if this is redundant, but this style, like what you said in your books and the documentary, this is the same style as was originally invented. So you didn't put any twists on it, you just basically learned it and figured out how to teach it for specific situations.

Yeah, for specific situations. And certainly put on, I guess, my flavor on it, which every practitioner does. Some people focus on different things. Over the last decade, I've seen more and more of what works and what doesn't work for people, both in the style and the languaging. You know, how we approach the issues. You know, the last book that I wrote, the Tapping solution for manifesting your greatest self, was sort of shorter chunks. It's a 21 day process. It's little wins every day, little tapping every day to build something bigger. One of the things that I found, you know, the last couple of years as opposed to right in the beginning, is that people are really busy, right? We know this and that even if the tapping works, they forget to use it or they say, look, I can't sit down and do this for an hour with a practitioner because I don't have the money or I don't have the time or I don't have the commitment. But what can you give me in seven minutes? What's the experience that you can do? So what we've been doing a lot in the last couple years is finding ways to fit it into people's lives. And finding ways too, with the research that we're funding and the things with the Tapping Solution foundation, one of our big initiatives is how do we get this accepted on an institutional basis. You know, it's been a self help tool, it's been in this field, it's been used, you know, by Dr. Mercola and Jack Canfield. Now how do we get it into a VA hospital so a veteran with PTSD gets access to this technique?

Have you done that?

Yeah, you know, we just got approval, like official approval by the VA for EFT tapping as an approved therapy, which is Huge. People have been doing it for ages in with veterans because it's so effective. But what would usually happen. And there was, you know, I remember a story three or four years ago that was heartbreaking. Somebody doing the tapping at. I think it was at Fort Hood getting amazing results. And since it wasn't approved, once someone found out they were doing it, they had to stop. So now it's approved. Now we can actually do it officially and out there. And, yeah, we're continuing to do. To do that work.

Congratulations, dude. That's cool. All right, so I want to. I want to get into some brass tacks for people because I know. I know some key pain points my audience has that might go beyond just the shoulder thing that we were talking about or the hamstring thing. You know, I was going to ask you about, like, chronic injuries or nagging pains, but it sounds like the key there is to do a style of tapping and a sequence like the one that you described where you're going to release tension and release stress, which a lot of times is what's actually causing an area to be in a state of spasm or in a guarded state. It's kind of similar to the way that John Sarno talks about back pain. Right?

Yeah.

And addresses low back pain. How a lot of it really is. It's not in your head because it actually really does exist, but it's manifested by more or less what's going on in your brain than, you know, let's say like an intense muscle tear or tissue hypoxygenation or something like that.

100%. 100%. And just on pain relief to that point, you know, the other places to look at, where I find a lot of results for people is asking yourself questions. Like what I said earlier with Kathy with the tooth pain, what was going on in my life when this happened? Oftentimes the injury itself. So if it's a car accident, for example, tapping on the trauma of the accident, the fear and the pain and all that stuff that can make a difference on it. So, you know, not looking at it, we tend to say like, okay, well, that was the accident, so that happened and that's it. And now, you know, especially when we go to Dr. And we get a diagnosis, you know, like the amount of people who have said to me, oh, well, my doctor told me I have, you know, this disc that is degenerative or this inflammation, or they get that diagnosis. So then they go, that means it's not in my head. Right. So then this won't Work for it. And time and again, if they, you know, give it a shot, you know, we show in the movie Patricia, who fractured her L1 vertebrae in a boating accident. She had rods and screws in her back, like the whole thing. And her doctors told her she'd be in pain the rest of her life. That's just the. The way it goes. Again, she shows up at the event, second morning, she's pain free. She goes on to do yoga. She even says, and this is pretty cool, Ben. She said that. You can see her saying in the movie when she came in, she could feel the rods and screws in her back. Like, she felt it. She described it as a battery pack. And then after the tapping, she could no longer feel it. So something happened in her musculature and the tension in her back and potentially the trauma from the accident that was holding on tight. And when it let go, blood could flow in and the body could heal.

Interesting. What about for sleep? Let's be even more specific. I wake up at 3am I can't get back to sleep. And I can either go smoke a bunch of weed or take a Valium or do tapping. And I want to do tapping. So fill me in.

That's great. Just two nights ago, I did. On Sunday night, I did a Facebook live on sleep. And I did it in particular because I was reading about these kids in Parkland with the Parkland shooting, how they're having trouble sleeping and nightmares. And we're sending a trauma team down there to help them out. So I want to do a Facebook Live to frame that. And then we reached all these other people. And someone even said, I woke up at 3am I wake up at 3am every night. So what did I do? And I did. It was like a 15 minute tapping. It wasn't much. You know, just the best place to start before bed. You tap, you think about your day. You just go through the points and, you know, if your wife or husband's up for it. Like, you know, my wife and I, not always, but, you know, once in a while, we'll tap together for five minutes and we'll just talk about the things that are stressing us out. You know, like that download of the day and this, that and the other. So just tapping through the points and do that, you'll often find that when you tap, even during the day, you'll yawn. People say, what does that mean? It means that your body's relaxing, all right? That often most of us need more sleep than we're getting or you're not breathing deeply enough or you're not breathing deeply enough. No, you're absolutely right. So just tapping through the points, thinking about your day, thinking about what's stressing you out, it's going to help you let that go and sleep more deeply. And if you have dealt with insomnia before, just like the pain, insomnia is the kind of thing where if you expect to wake up at three in the morning every night, and you've done that for 10 years, your body's going to wake up at 3 in the morning and you're likely to be anxious about it or angry about it. So before bed you can tap and say, you know, even though I'm sure I'm going to wake up and I'm so frustrated with this and I'm anxious, I choose to relax now and then. If you do happen to wake up at three in the morning, you just tap for a few minutes then on what you feel. You know, people are always looking for the magic word and the language. It's really, what do you feel? Are you angry that you're up at 3 in the morning? Are you pissed that that new supplement that you tried didn't work? Like, what is going on in your body? Tap and let it go. And I think you'll find it very effective.

Okay, got it. So you just basically wake up and you do it. What would be an example of an affirmation?

So, you know, again, speaking the truth of it. So if it's three in the morning, even though it's three in the morning, and I'm just so annoyed and I can't stop thinking about this, I choose to relax now. And then you can tap through the points and just say, I choose to relax now. I choose to let this go, it's safe to go to sleep. You know, sleep is a very vulnerable, like, situation for a man. Right. We're like man or woman. For humankind, we're vulnerable. We're open to danger. So if we feel that we are in danger in some way, if we don't feel safe in our bodies, it can affect sleep in a big way.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, cool. So you wake up during the night, you can tap. I know you probably have a rule for everything, like you want to make a smoothie, just tap.

Yeah, yeah.

High cortisol or stress. I wanted to ask you about that, but obviously we kind of, kind of address that and the amygdala. What would be something that has surprised you in terms of a use that someone has had for tapping oh, that's a good question.

Well, there's always like the, the funny, you know, which they're funny to us, but they're not funny to them. Like the ridiculous phobias, you know, like the clown phobia. You know, I worked with a, with a friend of mine probably seven or eight years ago. I was just terrified of clowns. And you know, we can all laugh about it, but it was uncomfortable for her and she, you know, whether it showed up on TV or she walks in store and there's a clown balloon, it just brought anxiety to her. So, you know, we did tapping on that, like any sort of weird phobias. And that's, that's an encoding in the brain with, you know, the bodies that says this is dangerous, whatever it is, and people have some weird stuff that they say is dangerous and we can turn off that encoding and then maybe not so surprising, but potentially what I'm, you know, maybe most excited about now is tapping for kids. We, you know, through our Tapping Solution foundation, we're bringing this into schools.

Do you mean like kids tapping or tapping to enable you to be able to have children?

Well, yeah. I mean, look, fertility stuff is, that's a different one. No tapping, not tapping. 4.

Gotta be careful with your semantics, dude.

You are absolutely right, Ben. You can do both. And certainly the stress around fertility is.

A huge issue, but definitely don't call it tapping kids.

Tapping kids. Yeah. So we put out this video about two months ago, just a two minute video of our work in schools and it's been viewed 43 million times as of this morning, shared almost a million times. So showing that there's a demand and a desire to give our kids a different experience at school, at traditional schools where they're stressed, they're anxious, they're overwhelmed and the tapping can help calm their bodies. A lot of teachers are bringing it in just as a way to, you know, it's not like you're going to do an hour of psychotherapy with kids in that situation, but just to start the day, they come in with stress from home, you know, especially in, you know, difficult situations at home. Just to let go of the day. Prime the body and the mind for learning.

Okay, got it. Interesting. You know, you probably should create another title soon about Tapping for Scary Clown Phobias.

You think that's the next big.

I could imagine, I could imagine cover the red wig and like the wicked smile, you know, the leering clown peeking out from underneath the COVID You could even combine that with the kids, like tapping for scary Clown phobias. And kids.

And kids.

Yeah. There you go. I just made you a million bucks, baby. You and your friends at Hay House. Yeah. You and your friends at Hay House.

Yeah, they're gonna be pumped.

There you go. There you go. If you get a book deal before I do, then I hate you.

You know, just real quick on that sleeping, I just pulled up that Facebook Live. There's a ton of comments, but this is what I love. So this lady, Carolyn, she says I have horrible insomnia. Tried everything, going to try this now, have heard of it and sort of tried it, but trying it now. And then she comes and comments. The next day she says, nick Ordner, I don't know whether it was your tapping or not, but I slept better last night than I have in quite a while. So I'm going to try it again tonight. You know, someone just having a quick experience.

I like it. It's not a double blind clinical study, but I don't necessarily need those to know that something works.

We have both, thankfully. But yeah, look, I mean, there's so many user cases and you know, when I first got into it a decade ago, I would have said like, oh, look, forget the studies, just try it. What do you need to study for? But since then I've really learned more about, especially when it comes to institutions, understandably, you know, the VA can't allow everybody and anybody to do any therapy they think of or any crazy thing they think of. So there have, there has to be some standards. And I'm willing to jump through the hoops to get the research done to, you know, pass those standards so we can help people research.

Eftuniverse.com is where those studies are for those of you who want to go check them out. And then as a reminder, you just get the books. But it's eyebrow, the side of the eye, under the eye, under the nose, chin, collarbone, under the arm, top of the head. And I recommend you get Nick's book, Tapping Solution. But then also the one tapping solution for pain relief I think is really good. And actually while you're over on Amazon, support Amazon, they need the money. So also get Heal your Heal your Body by Luis Hay. That's a really good one too.

We've got a bunch of stuff if people just want to see the tapping points and, you know, some basic videos, just the tappingsolution.com like there's, there's plenty of things. We also have a lot of science and research there where I took some of those research studies that, you know, can be hard to make sense of and wrote some blog posts about them. That way we can make sense of them for those that aren't, as, you know, scientifically inclined.

Yeah. Cool. I dig it, man. I dig it. And for those of you listening in, I've hung out with Nick and he's, he's, he's a cool, honest dude. And I, I know he's not a, he's not a physician and he's not like a white lab coat wearing fella who's, how do you know I'm not.

Wearing a lab coat?

Hunched over a tiny mouse, tapping on the mouse. You might be wearing a lab coat. You might be wearing pasties in a sailor outfit or a scary clown mask for all I know, because this is an audio podcast. However, either way, Nick's a good dude and his books are actually really good. Very practical, easy to understand. I've given them to family members, I've given them to friends. His books for kids, my kids have read. They actually have two of them on their bookshelf and they read them, they understand them, they like them, they've used them as well. So, you know, they were tapping when they were 7 years old based on the books that Nick sent over. So it's good stuff and it's stuff that I've tried and I recommend you add it to your toolbox of cool things that you can do to your body to enhance your health. So, that being said, Nick, thanks for coming on the show, man.

Hey, Ben, it is a pleasure. You know, I'm a fan and I listen to many, many of your podcasts and thanks for the good work you're doing in the world.

Thanks, man. I'm honored. BenGreenfieldFitness.com Tapping is where the shownotes are. Links to everything we talk about. Meantime, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Nick Ortner signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.