Tapping Away Anxiety – The Holiday Season

Anxiety Tapping Stress Cures

Fränzi Ng – Transformation Specialist, Centre for Extraordinary Living

Do you remember the days when thinking about the Holidays filled your heart with excitement, your eyes with brilliance, your mind with expectation, and your tummy with dancing butterflies?

You may be wondering: what happened?!

If the same thought now fills you with more anxiety than joy, you are probably not alone. Crowded malls, company dinners, short daylight hours and the swine flu dread don’t help to lift the mood and cause that feeling of anxiety.

If you wish to experience peace of mind and balance even in the weeks to come, you will find the following three simple tips, from the amazing world of Thought Field Therapy, most useful:

* Watch what you eat. My primary concern here is not that you might gain weight if indulging in too many treats. Instead, I caution you to be aware of the Food-Mood Connection. When delicacies of every sort are amply available it is only too easy to overindulge in food stuff that may not agree with you. This can manifest physically in discomfort, even pain, as well as breathing and sleeping difficulties. Emotionally, too much of a good thing can show up in irritability, anxiety and depression. The Food-Mood connection is very real. It is not uncommon for clients to tell me that they feel sad and down after too much chocolate, or hypersensitive and angry after eating yet another cookie. Therefore, limit your food indulgences. Notice what you eat. Your waist line and your balanced, content mood will be your reward.

* Nip stress in the bud: Don’t let stress build up. Don’t wait until you reach the breaking point before you do something. It is so easy to eliminate all stress and anxiety with TFT. Just follow my TFT workout video, “The TFT Power Ritual,” below. Use it under the following circumstances.

* Tap in the morning. Think about the day/s and week/s ahead and tune into all your responsibilities, expectations and past experiences (e.g. traumas). Rate your level of upset on a scale from 0 to 10 (0 = no stress, 10 = extreme stress) and tap along with me on the video.

* Tap before going to bed. Think about the day you had, everything that was said, everything that happened and rate your level of upset, tension or anxiety. Now tap by following the video.

* Tap before you eat. Never, never eat from a place of anxiety. If nothing else, commit to yourself for the next few weeks that you will only eat when you are stress and anxiety FREE. Become aware of the tension in your body or the conversations in your head. Rate their intensity, then tap with the video.  By doing so, you will be able to eat from a place of peace so you can actually notice what you are eating. People tell me that the food tastes better and that they need less of it to feel satisfied. Remember it’s not what you are eating – it’s what’s eating you. Get that out of the way and your meal becomes again a nourishing feast for body, mind and spirit.

* Food or Addiction? If you use Holiday treats as fuel to keep you going (similar to caffeine), you are probably under a lot of stress. There may even be an underlying addiction to these foods, an addiction you may not be aware of – not until you stop eating the treat. If you experience strong cravings, if you feel you just can’t do without a certain food, rate the intensity and use “The TFT Power Ritual” to eliminate the craving.

Implementing these ideas takes a bit of discipline. I know. And it is this discipline that will set you free. The Bible says that the meek shall inherit the world. Unfortunately, the word “praos” (meek) was translated incorrectly. A much better translation is “disciplined.” It is the disciplined that shall inherit the world, those who just do it.

These simple steps, when followed consistently, allow you to move from survival mode to thrive mode, despite whatever might be happening around you.

Creative Commons License photo credit: bionicteaching

“Memory Erasing Drug” Is Unnecessary With TFT

Henry Markram: Brain research & ICT futures

Johns Hopkins researchers who last week announced they are laying the groundwork for a drug that erases traumatic memories have created a storm of controversy over whether the drug will involuntarily erase other useful memories or even alter a person’s life experience. Rather than wait for a controversial drug in the future, today’s trauma victims will find a simpler solution to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in “tapping”—a therapeutic treatment developed 30 years ago by Dr. Roger Callahan.

With Thought Field Therapy, tapping removes the negative emotions tied to the memory—but not the memory itself.

By tapping on various body touch-points in a specific sequence—under the eye and on the collarbone, for instance—TFT stimulates the body’s energy pathways similar to acupuncture, releasing stress, anxiety and emotions that are “stored” in the brain’s “thought field.”

Thousands of years ago, the Chinese mapped the body’s energy pathways and developed ways to eliminate pain and promote physical healing by using acupuncture to manipulate energy flows along these meridians. In the same way, TFT shows that these pathways can be accessed in order to heal emotional distress.

When using TFT for post-traumatic stress disorder, patients really don’t know how they have changed. They only know they are no longer bothered by the memory.

In other words, a patient’s life experience remains intact—but gone is the emotional wound, sometimes undetected, that causes lasting psychological and physical aftereffects such as anxiety, depression, a continual feeling of illness, even nightmares and hallucinations. In layman’s terms, TFT affects how the brain compiles information about the traumatic event by changing the coding system the brain uses to store the negative emotions.

Most importantly, TFT does no harm—while the idea of a “memory erasing drug” gave mental health professionals and ethics specialists pause. Quoted on their opinion of the Johns Hopkins research in The Baltimore Sun, some said loss of other memories—which can be called dementia when someone loses too much of their past—could occur if scientists produce a drug designed to selectively eliminate a single traumatic memory.

“Pills aren’t necessary to remove the negative effects of trauma,” says Dr. Roger Callahan, “and could even be dangerous if they accidentally erase other memories that are needed to function.”

Rape victims, war refugees, victims of traumatic surgeries, Haitian earthquake survivors—even soldiers returning from Afghanistan—have used TFT to get relief after all other methods have failed.

The International Journal of Emergency Mental Health reported on a 2006 study by PhD psychologist Caroline Sakai who used the tapping treatment with orphans of the 1994 Rwanda genocide. The outcomes of Sakai’s study, summarized in the Journal, exceed those of any previous peer-reviewed study of PTSD treatment in terms of speed, degree of effectiveness, and percentage of subjects who were helped.

And Guy Marriott, who trains British Special Forces in the Congo and provides security for international aid organizations in places like the Sudan, Zimbabwe and Haiti, trains his entire force in TFT as a fast, effective, cross-cultural technique for hostile environments.

The technique is also used by professional practitioners around the world who recognize it as an ethically sound, long-term solution to PTSD. Not only that but the technique is inexpensive and does not require patients to spend weeks in a therapist’s office.

If you would like to explore how TFT can help you please visit our home page and start with our free guide on beating stress and anxiety.

Creative Commons License photo credit: centralasian