Ryan Light teaches EFT tapping, a technique where you tap acupressure points on your face and body while repeating affirmations to reduce anxiety and emotional distress. He walks through the full sequence from eyebrow to top of head, aiming to lower your distress rating from a 10 down below 5.
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Hey guys, how you doing? I wanted to share with you a pretty cool modality I use for times in which folks have really any type of emotion or feeling that they're feeling. This can work for anxiety, panic, loneliness, even pain. This modality can be used really, really effectively for a number of ailments that are feeling-based. So if you feel this emotion, use this technique. I know it's pretty funky. It took me a long time to get to a place where I felt comfortable doing it myself. And then another time that I felt comfortable actually coaching it. And then another time it took me to feel comfortable actually doing it with people. So I'm actually at that pinnacle in my journey here. Anyway, it's it's an EFT modality, and EFT stands for Emotional Freedom Technique. And basically, what it does is there's what it does is it's you're tapping on you're tapping on points of your body, and while you're tapping on points of your body, you're identifying with what you're feeling. So you're acknowledging what you're feeling by. By doing the tapping, what it does is you're verbalizing what you're feeling, and then the tapping, what it does is it helps stimulate the amygdala that is overreacting. The amygdala is under our brainstem that kind of spits out all the neurotransmitters that make us feel the way we feel. Now, that has a gut reaction. Typically, let's say you're in a high anxiety state and you are in the middle of a panic attack or coming to a panic attack, or you feel lonely, or you just have that icky feeling. It typically— you typically feel in your stomach. A lot of people feel in the chest. That's the amygdala. That's what's called the amygdala kind of sparking, and it's causing the neurotransmitters in our stomach to fire off. And norepinephrine is in that, dopamine is in that. We can have a feel-good neurotransmitter called dopamine, norepinephrine, adrenaline, all types of different neurotransmitters that are signaled from the amygdala. So as you're tapping, you're actually stimulating the amygdala and you're accepting the way you're feeling. Now what's interesting about this is if you do it correctly and consistently, it will bring down that level of feeling that you have and ultimately, hopefully, um, have the feeling subside. And so how I do this, I did this, I showed this to someone, um, earlier today on a video. So I thought I'd do a quick video and kind of show you how I do it, um, and, and how to do it, how, what to do and how to do it, if that makes sense. So anyway, let me do this. Basically, let's say I have a feeling of inadequacy, right? And people are like, what do you mean? Well, the heaviness of my— I got a kind of heaviness that happens. I feel heavy in my chest. I just feel kind of blah. Just, I feel down, all those types of things. And so what I do is I start tapping right here. Just tap right here. This is called the karate chop point. I start tapping. And I verbalize the feeling that I'm struggling with. So I basically say, even though I feel inadequate, I deeply and profoundly love and accept myself. Even though I feel inadequate, I deeply and profoundly love and accept myself. Even though I feel inadequate, I deeply and profoundly love and accept myself. That's like the starting point. Um, the, what you want to do next after you do the tapping there is you want to tap through these various points of your body, verbalizing the emotion. So, um, I feel inadequate, something like that. So you want to tap right here on the edge of your eyebrow, right here. Move from here to the kind of the corner of your eye here, under your eye, under your nose, like right here, under your chin, right here, the collarbone, like right where that V's at. You want to hit like both— not really both, but you just want to hit somewhere about 3 to 4 inches from that where that V's at. And then right here is where you want to tap, like 3 inches under the armpit, typically where the, where the woman's bra strap is, like right here. And then the last point is right here. So you do the karate chop saying, saying what, saying that, um, startup phrase, even though I blank, I deeply and profoundly love and accept myself. And then after you do that, you start with I feel so inadequate, right? This adequate feeling, this adequate feeling, this adequate feeling. I feel so inadequate. This inadequate feeling or inadequate feeling. Inadequacy. I feel so inadequate, whatever it might be. And then the top of the head, I feel so inadequate. And then what you wanna do is you wanna check in, take a deep breath. Blow it out. Check in with your body. And I kind of, when I do this with somebody, I kind of gauge it between 0 and 10. 0 is I feel nothing, I feel fine. 10 is I can't take this, I'm like going to lose it. Anything above 5, you want to, you want to tap on that particular emotion until you, until, until you get lower than a 5. Okay. Again, this is very effective in times in which you're not at a high kind of state, where you're kind of in a panic state. By that time, you're already in state, so to say, so that it won't become that— it won't be that effective. So it won't be that effective because you're already in that panic state. So what I would encourage you to do is try this when you are not in state, and then try to visualize yourself kind of being in that state. That's why this technique is so hard to do with a video. And it's, it's more— I can show you kind of how it's done and work you through the process if I was working with you on this. But I wanted to at least give you a feel of what you say, what you do. Again, you could probably look on— I got a— I think I did a blog post or on my website talking about EFT. And the science behind it. I see this technique as totally somatic. There's nothing spiritual about it for me. Some people might put a spiritual context to it, but it's totally somatic because I'm trying to get my amygdala calmed down from a physical perspective so that feeling has somewhere to go, right? So I can calm the amygdala down and then the feeling— I'm letting out the feeling by verbalizing and accepting and acknowledging what I'm going through. So if you have any questions or this is, you know, you want to learn how to do this more effectively, reach out to me. Obviously you can reach me on social or you can go to my website at beatanxiety.me and I'd love to show you, um, how to do this more effectively on maybe some other deeper seated issues you might have. So anyway guys, thanks. We look forward to talking with you guys soon. Take care. Bye.
