← What's That Rash?
What's That Rash?
Can tapping calm your nervous system?
00:19:59
There's a scene in the Devil Wears Prada 2 where a character is so stressed she starts "tapping" to calm herself down. What is this self-soothing technique, and should you try it out? Norman and Tegan talk through what Emotional Freedom Techniques, or tapping is and whether there's any evidence it lowers anxiety. References: How ‘tapping’ is dividing opinion in therapy circles Clinical EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) Improves Multiple Physiological Markers of Health Neural changes after Emotional Freedom Techniques treatment for chronic pain sufferers Emotional freedom techniques for treating post traumatic stress disorder: an updated systematic review and meta-analysis Commentary: Emotional freedom techniques for treating post traumatic stress disorder: an updated systematic review and meta-analysis A Randomized Controlled Comparison of Emotional Freedom Technique and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy to Reduce Adolescent Anxiety: A Pilot Study Food for Thought: A Randomised Con...
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A
This episode is brought to you by Google Health. Stop chasing someone else's definition of health. What matters is what's healthy for you. Google Health offers a new kind of coach built with Gemini for effortless tracking, sleep insights and holistic coaching tailored to you. Visit googlestore.com to learn more and start a new relationship with your health. Requires Google Account, Google Health app, Internet and Google Health Premium subscription. Features subject to change. Availability and results vary. Not intended for medical purposes or works independently of Gemiini apps. Check responses for accuracy.
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ABC Listen podcasts, radio, news, music and more.
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When the science show began over 50 years ago, Australia was seen as a strange leftover place.
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But local science transformed everything. Australia is full of treasures, from birdsong to perhaps the world's first engineers.
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That's why the science show is always full of surprises.
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In the sky, in the lab, and each even in your own backyard.
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The Science show anytime on abc. Listen. So, Tegan, you look pretty chilled. Always Do I?
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I'm like a swan. I'm serene on the top and paddling furiously underneath.
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C
Right. The animal version of the swan rather than the human version of the swan.
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B
The Norman swan.
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C
Yeah. Yeah. I think we're both the same. We're just outwardly cool, but inwardly, you know, we're just going that way. And, you know, sometimes you drum your fingers, sometimes you jiggle your legs. And some people tap.
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B
Tap like tap dancing?
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C
No, tap like.
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If you can't see Norman right now, he's thrumming his forehead with his finger.
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C
Yeah. Not to demean people who are tapping, but that's what we're asking in this week's what's that rash.
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B
It's the show where we answer the health questions everyone is asking. So today's question comes from David. David says, just stumbled across tapping.
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Where have you been, David? Where have you been?
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It's a therapy to reduce stress, apparently researched with fact based evidence by a pioneer at Bond University. David says, I'm very sceptical about these types of treatments. Any thought on their clinical effectiveness? Or is it placebo? So, Norman, you and me have obviously researched tapping, thanks to David's question. But before we tackle, had you heard of tapping as like a therapy before?
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C
No. The thing that I remember along these lines is the scene with Matthew McConaughey in Wolf of Wall street where he sort of. It's more than tapping. He sort of goes, I'm trying to. I'm not sure I remember it properly, but roughly it is.
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Norman is beating his chest like a gorilla right now.
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C
But I don't think it's to get over anxiety. It's to get him ready for the, for the bear pit.
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B
Oh, okay. So on that, on that note, I'm thinking of. Have you watched TED Lasso?
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C
Occasionally.
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So Hannah Waddington's character Rebecca says when she's trying to get herself, like psyched up for something, she makes herself really big and she snarls. So she's like. And she lifts her arms up really high and she like, like, like a lion. Like a big cat. Exactly. To sort of get herself ged up. Tapping is also in pop culture. Have you seen the new Devil Wears Prada movie?
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She taps.
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She does tap. So Emily, played by Emily Blunt, she's sort of trying to calm herself down. It's very, very stressful being beautiful and glamorous and working for a designer brand. And she sort of taps on her forehead and she taps next to her eyes and she taps on her chin while she's breathing. And it's obviously a self regulation thing. And ever since that, all these people who are proponents of this thing called tapping have gone, oh my gosh, like that's our thing. We're seeing it in pop culture.
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C
And that's what David's asking about.
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B
Yes, exactly. So this idea of tapping as a, as a neuroregulator, I guess, is that the right word? Well, it's kind of as an emotional regulator.
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C
It's a mind body thing. So it's this connection between the mind and the body. I'm always skeptical when people say mind body because the brain is part of the body. So there's no mystery here. Everything that you do is involving the brain.
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B
So this tapping, I don't think that any one person can claim to have invented the idea of like maybe tapping your face and breathing at the same time. I imagine, I imagine that humans have done this ad hoc over the years, but tapping in this particular context and in this sort of framework, it's systematic. Exactly. Like this systematic way of tapping is called Emotional Freedom Technique. Have you heard of this eft? Have you heard of this before?
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I have.
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What have you heard about it?
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So I've heard that this is a technique that's very controversial among psychologists. I don't want to give away too much, but I'm skeptical.
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B
Okay, well, let me tell you a little bit about its origins according to. And the main source I found of the origins of the Emotional Freedom Technique is unsurprisingly from the Emotional Freedom Technique website. So, like, proceed with a nice hefty grain of low sodium salt Basically, it was pioneered by this guy called Gary Craig, who actually died earlier this year, according to the website. But the. Basically, he's building on something from the 80s called Thought Field therapy, which there was an earlier guy, a psychologist, Dr. Roger Callahan, and he develops this thought field therapy. And the idea was that if you tapped on meridian points while you were in psychological distress.
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C
So acupuncture points, basically.
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B
Yes, exactly. So there's very specific points on your body, but it was quite a complicated thing. So there were different sequences for different problems. There were algorithms for anxiety, for phobias, for trauma, and then a practitioner had to sort of diagnose what the issue was and then prescribe the correct sequence.
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C
And you're kind of tapping on the points where you would normally put in the needles.
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B
Yes. So it's building on the idea of acupuncture. Anyway, Gary Craig, who claims to have founded the Emotional Freedom Technique, was like, what if we did this differently? So he was actually an engineer who went to Stanford. I don't really know what that has to do with psychology. But, like, he's a smart guy. Right.
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C
There are all these tech bros out there doing biology these days, so why can't Gary do it?
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Anyway, so Gary ran some experiments and was like, okay, I don't think we need to make this less complicated. I think we just tap and breathe and I think I'll just let it be free for everyone. And he created a website called the palace of Possibilities.
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C
Oh, lovely.
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Which. And it looks exactly as you imagine it would. It looks like. It looks like an AI generated Taj Mahal, if I'm being completely honest. Anyway. But he sort of had some mantras about radical self acceptance, focusing on your issue. For example, a sore shoulder, doing the breathing, doing the tapping. And it's basically like a combination of.
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So you've got to make a statement to start with.
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Correct.
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What's my problem? I've got a sore arm, I'm feeling anxious about my exam tomorrow. And you state that clearly.
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Yeah. So you're stating your problem, you're accepting yourself, you're breathing deeply and you're tapping. So there's actually quite a lot of things coming together with this therapy.
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And you go through, you remind yourself about that statement as you tap. So there's a couple of things going on here.
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Right. And so without too much foreshadowing, it makes it hard to unpick if it's doing something useful. What part of that might be doing something useful? Because you actually sort of layering a couple of different things on top of
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each other there, including perhaps mindfulness, where you're focusing on your statement and you're thinking about that and you keep on coming back to that you might be focusing on the tapping to the exclusion of other things. So there's mindfulness going on, there's maybe a bit of therapy going on because you've identified the problem to yourself and you keep on iterating that mind. You could make it worse, I suppose. And also there's a self assessment in it. You know, how much distress do I feel now and how much distress do you feel afterwards?
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So this is the thing. So I guess it'd be interesting to. Like I said, basically everything I've told you so far has come from the horse's mouth, so to speak. What do we actually know in terms of research into these different types of techniques and what they might actually be doing in the body?
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C
So David's right in that, you know, we're recording this in Queensland and Queensland is one of the epicenters of research into EFT emotional freedom technique, particularly at Bond University. And there have been lots of claims to this tapping technique which includes this self expression, identification, this process that we're talking about. So people talked about using it for ptsd, anxiety, pain, chronic pain. So it's been studied in a few
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B
different areas and it's like, that's a pretty broad spectrum. It's one thing to sort of be like, oh, this helps me calm down when I'm feeling a little bit stressed or even maybe calm down when I'm feeling acute anxiety. That's on a different scale to someone going, this is going to help your PTSD or this is going to help your chronic pain, like big long term
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issues, why they think it works. So here's their explanation. It's that your body influences what's called your autonomic nervous system. This is the nervous system that you've got no consciousness of, but there's feedback there. So they say that the autonomic system is in fight or flight mode and these actions such as tapping, self expression and deep breathing and so on, actually have an effect on the autonomic nervous system, which moves it from the stress response to a more relaxed response, the parasympathetic response.
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So that's the theory.
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That's the theory. So there has been research, some of it done at Bond University and published. And the research shows benefits, for example chronic pain. This particular research shows increased quality of life, reduction in pain severity, reduction in depression, increase in happiness, satisfaction in life. So, you know, really good Stuff. However, when you look at the evidence, such as it is small studies, not necessarily very well controlled, how do you have a placebo for tapping? It's hard to do and the way you deal with that is that you bring all the results of research together. It's called a systematic review and a meta analysis, where you analyze the raw data or bring together the data from different trials. And again, the paper suggested that there was a reasonable effect size from EFT tapping technique. However, that study, that review has been criticised for making inaccurate statements. For example, they claimed that it utilises techniques from cognitive behavioural therapy or prolonged exposure therapy. You know, the critique of the paper suggests that in fact it doesn't resemble either of those techniques. And the other problem with these studies is, well, they haven't got a placebo, so they compare it to doing nothing. There haven't been any studies comparing EFT tapping to, say, antidepressants or SSRIs, which can help anxiety. There have been some studies comparing it to psychotherapy, like cognitive behavioural therapy, but very small studies from which you cannot really take a lot of comfort. And also not a fully declared conflict of interest because one of the authors does actually have programs from which that person makes money. So not that's necessarily a bad thing, but it just needs to be properly declared.
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B
On the idea of placebo, I want to pick up on something in David's question, this idea about placebo effect, because at least in lay terms, the idea seems to be that, you know, your body or your mind is sort of tricking yourself into feeling a certain way or interpreting the way you feel in a certain way. Isn't that kind of the whole point of a technique like this, that you're trying to tell your body something to calm it down or to make it feel differently? Does it matter if it's a placebo or not? It's doing something well.
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C
So it depends what you talk about placebo. I thought where you were going with that is that this has all the hallmarks of something where you'd get a big placebo effect, right, because there's a whole lot of shtick around it. There's the tapping, there's the self expression, there's the confident therapist saying, this is going to be good for it really does work. And look at all the research and we've got systematic reviews and so on. So what tends to trigger the placebo effect is high expectation. And in a sense, the more shtick, the more you get the chat from the therapist. The surgeon says, I've done 300 of these operations, I know it works and is incredibly confident, the more you're likely to feel a benefit. That's kind of the placebo. Where compared to just somebody telling you the same shtick with a different technique, do you get the same effect? That research hasn't been done, but the belief amongst the experts is this is possibly no better than placebo.
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B
But this is what I'm saying. If you're like, I'm confident in this technique to help me calm myself down in this moment because I'm feeling anxious right now, then it's done the job.
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C
It's done the job. And if it's just occasional anxiety, you've got a situation coming up which is making you feel anxious and you find it helps, why not? But if you've got disabling anxiety, which pervades all the time and it really is affecting your work and your life, it's unlikely that an intermittent therapy like this, which doesn't leave you with anything lasting, you can kind of imagine that while you're tapping, while you're expressing yourself like Devil Wears Prada 2, it's preparing you for an anxious situation. But if you've got disabling anxiety, you actually need therapy to readjust your thinking, readjust the way you're responding to the world. And if it's still too much, some medication to help you through, maybe even temporarily. But you need something that's just a bit more fundamental and longer lasting to sort out the anxiety. Because you can't go through life every five minutes tapping your forehead.
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B
I mean, you could, you'd get little bruises on your throat after a while, I'm sure. So what you're saying is it's not that this in itself could be harmful, but it perhaps is a red herring or it's delaying people getting treatment that has better evidence and maybe longer term effects.
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C
Yeah, I mean, if you get anxious, I'm repeating myself now. But if you get anxious over a particular situation and you find this helps, great. But if you've got disabling anxiety which stops you going out, stops you meeting people, stops you working, then you need more than this. Because even if this worked, it's only going to be temporary.
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B
Well, let's talk about what we do know works for these sorts of things. Because if you were listening to this going, help me with my anxiety, and we haven't given you the evidence based tools or the strongest evidence yet, what would we be looking for?
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C
Depends on what sort of anxiety you've got. It comes in various forms and the treatment can often be tailored to that situation. So for example, if you've got a social phobia, then you need psychotherapy at the core of this, which is identify what you're frightened of, not rationalize it, but expose your thinking and the illogicality of your thinking. And sometimes a graded exposure to what you fear eventually diminishes the anxiety and you learn to deal with that and so on. With post Traumatic stress disorder that there is evidence based therapy which involves careful exposure and sometimes exposure which brings back the memory of the traumatic event, which is what you're trying to avoid. So avoidance is a big part of anxiety and if you succumb to that avoidance and avoid what you feel you're anxious about, then the anxiety can get worse and you're not helping yourself. So evidence based psychotherapy finds out what your avoidant behaviour is and tries to deal with that.
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But part of psychotherapy often is finding these tools that help you reduce stress in the moment, to help you get yourself down to a place where you're then able to access the rest of
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that, which is what relaxation is all about. And there are processes for doing that which can involve in fact physical things like squeezing your muscles, relaxing them, deep breathing, steadying your breathing. So, so relaxation therapy can help.
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B
So bottom line to David then, for
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the anxious moment, you know, try it, it's not going to do you any harm. But if you've got pervasive anxiety which is affecting your life, I think you need to seek help.
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Well, David, thank you so much for the question. We love getting your questions. You can email them to us. Our email address is thatrashbc.net au what's
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in the meal bag?
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Well, we've had quite a lot of feedback.
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It's a bit windy in the mailbag.
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B
It sure is. We've had a lot of feedback to our farting episode. If you haven't heard it, press pause on this immediately and go back and listen to it. It was the show that. It was one of the shows we did as part of our live show at World Science Festival Brisbane. Alan says if our internal gases include hydrogen and methane, then we must be heavier than we think we are. If these gases can make airship. See where he's going. I'm like, those are light gases. No, Alan says if these gases can make airships defy gravity, then surely they must be adding buoyancy to our bodies in a tiny way. We float.
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That's an interesting concept, isn't it?
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Why not? Shelly says I was. Shelly is being so nice to us, Norman. We're pretty impressed with our own humor a lot of the time and I'm not sure if other people but Shelly says, I was fully convinced I was listening to a comedy act during the fighting episode. It was so funny I wasn't even offended that Wa, where I'm from, was named as the farting capital of Australia.
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C
Oh, thank you, Shelley.
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B
I can't remember if it was the most volume of farts or if it was the smelliest farts. I'll have to go back in.
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C
I think it was the length.
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B
No, wait, no, wait. I just remembered it was stench and linger was the terminology.
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C
Just makes you want to catch a plane to Perth, doesn't it?
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B
It makes me want to catch a plane away from Perth. Bella says, firstly, I swear I didn't write this. Tegan's farter joke didn't get nearly the amount of recognition it deserved. For context, the line was, they got
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C
Carter the farter disorder.
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It was data on flatulence. Farter. Bella says, I actually laughed out loud for real life. Bella says, my family always teases me about the amount of farts myself, husband and 4 year old daughter do. So I really enjoyed this episode. I took from it that we're really healthy.
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C
Yeah, take away whatever you like, Bella.
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B
So that is all of the feedback on our farting episode. We also had a very, very sweet email from Rosa Norman that I want to read to you. Ros says, my husband and I have been enthusiastic listeners of your podcast since the days of COVID lockdown in Melbourne. We learn something new every week. Ros says, I hope you enjoy reading the following story and see the amazing side benefits of your weekly contribution to our lives. During a recent medical appointment, a nurse asked my husband about his diet. Dementia has stolen much of his language and he was having trouble getting any words out. He turned to me and managed to say one word, rash. Immediately I replied, mediterranean diet. Ding ding. The nurse looked most bemused and asked how we got from rash to Mediterranean diet. So I explained about your podcast and we had a laugh together.
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C
We always need new podcasters. Thank you very much, Rod. What a lovely story.
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B
Well, if you want to send us any sorts of notes, we prefer your nice ones, but we'll take whatever you're willing to give us. Our email is thatrashvc.net au and we'll
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C
see you next week. See you then, Sam.