EFT is a natural, safe stress relief technique.

• According to a study in Europe, 1 out of 3 workers said they were under stress.
• A study in the England in 2004 found that 1 out of 5 people felt their jobs were so stressful it made them physically sick.
• Work-related stress in England accounted for over 13 million lost working days in a year.
• According to a Boston University study, women who avoided conflict with their husband increased their chance of heart disease and early death by 400 percent. Avoiding their stress actually increased their stress levels.
• An article in the American Journal of Physiology Heart and Circulatory Physiology reported that prolonged exposure to certain stressors can result in permanent, negative changes to the body’s sympathetic nervous system, including blood pressure and heart rate. Those stressors include things like bullying, a stressful job and family-related issues.
• A Florida State University study found long term stress increased depression and anxiety disorders.

Stress manifests itself in many physical, psychological, and behavioral symptoms, which can include headaches, fatigue, feelings of being out of control, and insomnia. It has also been estimated that 75 to 95 percent of all illness are psychosomatic in origin. That origin is stress.Luckily for you, you can learn EFT and reduce your stress very quickly and easily.

It is important to limit the easily controllable elements that can cause or add to your stress. A bad diet creates physical stress. While sugar may give you a temporary boost in your mood, it ultimately causes way more problems than it solves. Lack of sleep also causes physical stress and lowers your ability to handle emotional stress. And then stress keeps you up at night so it becomes a vicious circle.

Once you have taken care of the lifestyle factors under your control, you will still probably find yourself needing stress relief. EFT provides quick, easy, natural, drug-free stress relief in seconds. Click here  and learn to tap. If you need more help, get the book, Super Tapping.

I have no ax to grind about religion. I wasn’t abused by nuns, priests, rabbis, monks or bishops. Most of the time, religion doesn’t even come up when tapping. But sometimes it’s a miserable obstacle. Religion trains minds to accept absolutes and fixed ways of thinking that subvert critical and logical thinking in ways that can sometimes interfere with mental and emotional healing. Tapping can lead to cognitive changes but those won’t happen when religious indoctrination stands in the way.

I spent many hours with a devout Christian who was troubled because he didn’t want to go to heaven. We talked a lot about his beliefs about God and heaven. He believed heaven was a place in the clouds where you sat around playing harps and praying all the time. He feared eternal boredom. By the way, this is not mentioned in the Bible anywhere. He picked up this concept of heaven through pop culture. He also believed none of his good friends were going to make it to heaven because they were all such sinners. He didn’t want to spend eternity without them. He could be good and go to heaven and be bored and lonely forever. Or he could sin and achieve eternal damnation and spend eternity with his friends. This was an enormous and vexing dilemma for him.

I asked him to describe God for me. He told me God is a loving father and creator. We tapped on “Even though I have this fear my loving God will sentence me to eternal boredom…” That didn’t produce much change.

We reframed the problem and reworded the setup phrase a number of times but he wasn’t feeling much better.

After a number of tapping sessions, (not rounds, hour long sessions.) he finally budged a little. Very little. We found some relief with the setup phrase “Even though I can’t trust an infinitely creative and loving God to do what’s best for me, I deeply and completely love and accept myself.” This created a bit of constructive cognitive dissonance. He realized the absurdity of the phrase by tapping on it. As he tapped, he began to trust God more although he still had his concerns about eternity and the boredom he was sure he faced.

The use of EFT should not in any way go against anybody’s religious beliefs. Very occasionally religious beliefs pop up in a session that impede progress. If you think your God doesn’t want you to be healed of your problems, tap on it. I have yet to find a religion where God doesn’t wants people to be happy and healthy.

The holidays are expected to be fun, joyful and full of love and presents. That is rarely the case yet the expectations remain. These unfulfilled expectations cause pain. The end of the year reminds you of all the things you didn’t accomplish. If you are alone for the holidays, the feeling is even worse because this is supposed to be a time for togetherness.

Since you can’t avoid December, dealing proactively with the holiday blues is the best way to get through the month. Doing a few simple steps will help you get through this time a little more smoothly.

Acknowledge your feelings. Admit to yourself that you feel bad for all the reasons you are mulling over in your head. Don’t fight the feelings. Don’t try to rationalize them away. Just accept them without excuses or justifications. They aren’t wrong or right. They just are.

Realize you are falling for the holiday hype. We all feel the pressure to be totally joyous and merry but people rarely feel this way to the degree we’ve been led to expect. We see so many movies and TV shows with happy, healthy and rich kids opening their Christmas presents while their loving parents look on smiling. Hollywood is lying to you. Life isn’t really like that. If you expect it to be that way, you are setting yourself up for never ending disappointments that extend way beyond December.

Eat properly. Food affects your mood. Instead of burying your feelings in sugary treats, elevate your feelings with foods that actually nourish you. This has the added benefit of keeping you from gaining weight which you will have to take off before bathing suit season.

Exercise. Even a walk as short as twenty minute a few times a week will get your blood moving and lift your spirits.

Take time to feel gratitude for all the things you do have. Instead of ruminating over what you don’t have, think about the good things you do have.

Learn The Emotional Freedom Technique. It’s a gentle, fast method for relieving unwanted emotions.

The Holiday Blues are truly a seasonal phenomenon.. The feelings will fade even if you do nothing about them but realize you do have options. You can be happier over the holidays if you want to be.

The Eyebrow point is located under the inside corner of your eyebrow right on the eye socket. Run your finger along the bone until you feel a little notch. That notch is the spot.

The side of the eye point is just along the outside corner of the eye socket. That little depression in the bone is where you tap.

The under the eye point is at the edge the bone under the center of the eye.

The Under nose point is the little depression between the nose and upper lip.

The Chin point is slightly above the middle of your chin.

The Collarbone point is actually under your collarbone. Run your finger under the collarbone until you reach a tender spot right where the sternum (breastbone) starts. That tender spot is the tapping point. Most people use their whole hand and lightly slap the general area to make the tapping routine go faster.

The Under Arm point is usually said to be located along the tendon that forms the front border of your armpit. On men the point is even with the nipple. On women, it is in the center of the bra strap. Tap with your whole hand to make it easy. I believe the correct point is actually two inches lower than that but if you tap with your whole hand, you will hit both points.

From my experience, I think he’s got it very wrong. Learning the exact points is every bit as important as learning the other steps. If any step can be fudged, it’s the second step, finding the SUDS rating, but that’s a topic for another article. What’s more, learning the exact spot to tap takes as much time as learning the general areas. It’s really a non-issue from a time standpoint.

I have my family and friends to thank for teaching my how important finding the exact point is. When I give them phone sessions, I explain the location of the tapping points in very explicit detail. I make sure they know exactly where the points are. If they don’t get good results, I will talk to them about it the next time I see them in person. What I find invariably is the ones getting the poorer results have been tapping on the wrong spots. When I show them the correct points and run them through the process a few times, they finally get the results they’ve been wanting.

The general consensus among EFT practitioners is that if you get within a half inch of the prescribed tapping points, you’re fine. I haven’t found that to be quite the case. Getting within a half inch will yield positive results. Getting within a quarter inch is better still. I have found the best results come when you are tapping on the exact points.

Using two fingers or the whole hand in the case of the collarbone and under arm points, helps insure that you do hit those exact points because you are covering more area. If you are at all energy sensitive, you can feel the difference between hitting the right spot and just getting close. When you get the exact point, it’s like hitting the sweet spot on your tennis racquet. It just feels so right.

When I teach EFT, I have my clients or students go through a number of dummy rounds on imaginary issues just to get them to the point where they can do EFT without looking at a tapping chart.

Being able to find the exact points quickly and getting them memorized is important if you want to get the most out of the Emotional Freedom Technique.

It is unnatural and unhealthy to live in a state of constant stress. The body just can’t handle it without serious repercussions. Eventually you will try to do something to relieve the stress. But will your attempt really be a solution or create another problem.

Unhealthy ways people deal with stress include

• Alcohol consumption
• Illegal drugs
• Internet addiction
• Gambling
• Sex
• Shopping
• Overeating

While these may serve as pleasant distractions, they do not solve the problem. They only mask it.

In some cases, you might need to seek medical help for your stress. If you’ve let your stress get to the point where it’s caused you heart damage, high blood pressure or any other serious medical problem, seeing a doctor should be the first thing you do otherwise not going to the doctor could be the last thing you will ever do. Too often doctors will simply give you a pill to relax you but these don’t solve the problem and like almost all medicines, you may have unpleasant side effects. And once you are on these kinds of drugs, getting off them can be very difficult.

On the other hand, if your stress is hasn’t created any major physical problems yet, you can avail yourself of natural treatment that won’t cost much if anything and have no harmful side effects.

Exercise is a very good way to reduce stress. Not only will you burn up your nervous energy, you will also make your body stronger and more able to handle daily stress. You don’t have to have a stressful, exhausting workout. Walking every other day for twenty minutes will do you a lot of good.

Meditation is a time-tested way to quiet your mind and your body. It isn’t difficult to do either. You don’t even need to be limber. Sitting in a chair works as well as sitting cross-legged on your floor. Meditation isn’t hard to learn. The trick is to just do nothing.

Changing your diet is another way to ease your stress. If you eat a lot of junk food and sugary treats, eating a better diet will make it easier for your body to handle stress.

Let’s not forget, one of the most important ways to deal with stress is to minimize or eliminate it if you can. Try to simplify your lifestyle and minimize your expenses. Stress is a signal that something is going wrong. Listen to it and heed what it tells you.

One of the fastest stress relief methods is the Emotional Freedom Technique. This simple method of tapping on acupressure points produces almost instant relief. You can learn about EFT here. But to really get the most out of EFT, buy the book Super Tapping.

• Rapid heartbeat.
• Headaches.
• Stiff or tight muscles.
• High blood pressure
• Sleeping difficulties
• Back and neck pain.
• Difficulty breathing.
• Profuse sweating and sweaty palms.
• Stomach pains

Here are five tips to find relief from stress.

Turn off the TV: Sitting in front of the TV might seem like a great way to veg out but if you are watching the news, cop shows or even medical dramas, you are experiencing stress into your body. The shows wouldn’t be any fun if you didn’t have some emotional response when you watch them but that emotional response is actually stress. When you watch a stressful TV show, you r body produces, cortisol, the same hormone as you do when you go through a stressful experience yourself.

Take a walk: Exercise is one of the best ways to reduce stress hormones is by walking. A twenty minute walk a couple times a day gives you the chance to burn off stress. Exercising also strengthens your heart, lungs and immune system which strengthen your ability to handle stress in the future.

Meditate: Taking time to quiet your mind and empty of thought is one way to give your body a break from stress. It’s is easy to learn and costs nothing to do beyond a class or book that teaches you the techniques. And you can even learn how to do it on the web. The benefits of meditation are well documented and go beyond simple stress relief.

Help somebody: Like meditation, making someone else the focus of your attention takes your mind off your own stress. Volunteer somewhere. Teach inner city kids how to read. Walk dogs at your local animal shelter. Coach your son’s little league team. Find a cause and give your time to it. You can be sure some charity or organization in your city or town is looking for your help.

Have an active social life: Happy people spend more time with their friends than unhappy people. When you are happy, you won’t feel stressed. And when you get together with your friends, don’t spend the evening bitching about how much life sucks. Have fun.

Dance: Getting yourself lost in music and movement combines the benefits of walking and meditation into one activity. Dance your heart out when nobody is watching . You could also take a dance class which would combine the benefits of meditating, walking and having an active social life.

And a bonus sixth step.

Learn to tap: I don’t mean tap dancing. I mean learn the Emotional Freedom Technique. This simple method can significantly reduce the amount of stress in your life as well as how you react to stress-inducing situations. You can learn the basics of EFT right here. If you want to learn more than just the basics, get the book Super Tapping.

I had a client who had a very ingrained belief that it was wrong to have more than two pieces of toast with breakfast. Since the belief didn’t cause him any pain and probably saved him from gaining a couple pounds, he never really examined it. But he mentioned his belief in session one day. He didn’t even realize his belief was a problem. Nor did I.

EFT turns dysfunctional beliefs into toast.

He was telling me about his day as we tried to zero in on what to work on that session. He casually mentioned that he had a couple pieces of toast for breakfast and that the bread was so good he wished he had more. I asked him why he didn’t have more. He told me it was because you can’t have more than two pieces of toast with breakfast. He said it with the same casual certainty as if he had told me the sun rises in the east.

I didn’t question his belief outright but I asked him to tap on “Even though I can only have two pieces of toast for breakfast, I deeply and completely accept myself.“

He thought it was an odd request but he humored me and did it. The amount of anger and tears tapping brought up from that setup phrase astounded both of us.

When he was a kid, his mother was probably trying to get him to eat a balanced diet when she told him he could only eat two pieces of toast with his breakfast. But the little four year old didn’t see it that way. He mistook it for an inviolable rule. His mother had inadvertently programmed not to eat more that two pieces of toast ever at one meal.

As he suddenly realized the stupidity of that belief. We tapped on his feeling foolish for believing this. Then we had to tap on the anger he felt towards his mother for inflicting this lie on him. Then we had to tap on forgiving her for inflicting that lie on him. Then we had to tap on all the anger and sadness he felt about all the times he denied himself a third or fourth piece of toast when he really wanted one.

I never met anyone before or since who had so much emotional upset connected to toast.

This session opened up the floodgates of unexamined beliefs about himself and his abilities, most of which were lies or at the very least based on nothing substantial. As we tapped, he saw how much he was unnecessarily restricting himself for no good reason in areas beyond toast.

The takeaway lesson is to question everything you believe. And I mean everything. If you find yourself trapped in an unpleasant or restrictive situation, ask what beliefs you have that are keeping you there. You can try tapping on, ” Even though I believe I must have this unpleasant situation in my life, I deeply and completely accept myself and my situation.”

We build our lives around beliefs that have little or no bearing in reality. Then we build other beliefs around a sense of reality that has no real basis to it other than our belief in it. We get into a self-perpetuating, vicious cycle that keeps us glued to dysfunctional beliefs and corresponding dysfunctional lives until we take a moment to examine what’s really going on.

As you do more tapping, you will start to see what beliefs you have that are total nonsense. You will probably have more than a few beliefs to tap on.

You can’t control when this will happen. These occurrences happen with no warning. I wish I could make them happen more predictably and more often. I also haven’t found the one setup phrase that works on everyone. What makes one person feel the presence of God does nothing to someone else.

Another problem is that these feelings eventually fade. Eventually you will come back to Earth.

This leads to another problem; like a good drug high, you can become addicted to spiritual highs. They feel so good and life seems so right and perfect when you in them. And when you come down, you want another. This is how cults and religions get and keep new members.

You may know some people who attend every workshop their budget and time allows. They are often referred to as “energy junkies” or “workshop addicts.” They’ve experienced that rare and natural state of bliss and want it again. It’s like their souls have been starved all their lives and they suddenly have a spiritual Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings. They don’t want to leave the table even when the dinner is over.

Of course, the obvious way to treat that is to tap on it. You can tap on the feelings of longing if that’s what you are experiencing but I’ve found that many people can avoid feeling that way if they just tap regularly. If you can’t tap every day, tap at least a few times a week. It doesn’t have to be about anything specific either. Tapping on your run of the mill issues is good enough. While not bliss inducing, having just tapped is a pleasant enough state for most people to not crave the spiritual highs.

And if you can’t tap every day, tap on that. I mean really. A round of tapping takes less than a minute once you have the method memorized. You can’t do a couple rounds before getting out of bed? Of course you can. Or you can even do it while on the toilet or driving on the way to work. Tapping at the stop light might look funny to the people in the cars next to you but what do you care?

Heartbreak is a mixture of feelings and emotions that meld into a deep, dark despair that does not go away quickly. While you are experiencing it, it feels like it will never go away ever. No two people’s reactions to heartache are the same. Every case heartbreak is difficult in its own unique way so there isn’t a standard way to go about treating it. EFT will definitely help but there aren’t likely to be many one-minute wonders when it comes to treating heartbreak.

Heartbreak encompasses, among other things, loss of love, friendship, companionship, touch, pleasure and hope. One also experiences the loss of an expected future. Heartbreak completely changes the roadmap one was using to guide their life. Actually, it totally shatters the roadmap along with the life.

It’s horrible if it’s sudden and out of the blue. It’s only slightly better when it’s been a long time coming and inevitable as in a drawn out breakup. In drawn out, inevitable break ups, the heartache is sometimes balanced by a feeling of relief because the hovering axe has finally fallen.

On the SUDS scale, tapping will not take heartache from a 10 to a 1. What is most likely to happen is that tapping on heartache will initiate a process whereby one can unravel, examine and tap out all the components of the problem. One may start with heartache being a 10 but as the feeling is tapped, the heartache changes to sadness, anger, despair, loneliness or just about any other feeling.

Whatever feeling arises needs to be treated. Don’t skip treating any feeling just because it seems trivial or doesn’t seem like the right feeling or the crucial feeling. If it comes up, it came up for a reason. Treat it then and there. What seems like an unimportant or trivial feeling may mushroom into something much deeper and more significant as you tap on it. But if you tried tapping on the deeper issue right away, you’d feel overwhelmed.

Treating heartache and heartbreak almost always requiring a lot of tapping on forgiveness issues. I had one client that spent a lot of time working on forgiveness for his friends who knew the girl he was dating was sleeping around but didn’t say anything. He also had to tap on forgiving the one friend who did tell him about his roaming girlfriend. Then he had to tap on forgiving himself for chewing out his friend for telling him such preposterous lies. Then he had to tap out feelings of regret for not believing his friend who had never lied to him before and didn’t lie to him then either. Forgiving his ex didn’t even come up until a later session.

Time is also needed when dealing with heartbreak. It’s not the time is the healer, either. What I’ve seen is that clients will be doing fine after a break up and then “their song” will come on the radio which triggers some buried feelings. The anniversary of their first date or the passing of a weekend where they were supposed to go away together may also put them in a funk that requires tapping.

In addition to tapping, you need to be patient when going through heartbreak. You will get better but it isn’t going to happen overnight. Unfortunately there is no magic pill, silver bullet or “easy” button to help you get through it.

EFT is definitely useful for finding relief from heartache and heartbreak but it’s probably not going to be an easy or quick treatment. But it will help you get better faster than doing nothing which is a much worse alternative.