More on The Tapping Solution:
A Basis in Ancient Chinese Medicine

Tapping evolved out of work that Dr. Roger Callahan, a psychologist treating a
woman with a severe water phobia, developed in 1979. Dr. Callahan had been
studying meridian points at the time he was treating this woman. Since he had
been making no progress with her, he hit upon an idea of tapping on the
endpoint of the stomach meridian as the client said that whenever she thought
about water, she got a “terrible feeling in the pit of her stomach.”

Meridians are the basis of the Chinese medicine system of acupuncture. They
are defined as energy channels that run thru the body and carry the “qi” energy
to the organs and other systems. Each meridian is associated with a different
organ system. The map of the meridians is known and easy to find even though
no one has ever actually measured or proven the existence of them as far as I
know. Nonetheless, the meridian system is hundreds of years old and to this
date Chinese medicine relies on it. The meridians are mostly named for the
organ system they feed or energize, like the Stomach Meridian, the Gall Bladder
Meridian, and so on. The Stomach Meridian ends at a point just below the eye.
Dr. Callahan asked his client to tap on that spot with her fingertips and after a
few minutes, her horrible feeling in the pit of her stomach was gone and the
story is that it never came back.

Dr. Callahan had a student named Gary Craig who worked out a way of making
tapping easier. Craig created a single sequence of tapping which became
known as EFT, Emotional Freedom Techniques. The EFT sequence was
designed to hit all major meridian endpoints and thus was more of a general
solution to whatever was the problem. The EFT sequence starts tapping on the
hand, moves to the eyebrow, under the eye, under the nose, the chin, the
collarbone and the side of the rib cage. It ends at the top of the head.

Since stress and its near-relation, anxiety, affect our organs and many aspects
of our nervous system, it stands to reason that it would reduce stress and
anxiety. One thing about a system like the Tapping Solution that may put some
therapists off is that it seems on first look to be fairly mechanistic. However, that
may not be fair. The current evolution of the Tapping Solution has grown
substantially and now there is a large literature including studies which deserve
a review.

In short, research over the past 10 to 20 years has shown that one can
measurably decrease limbic system (amygdala, hippocampus) activity by
stimulating selected meridian acupoints. PET and fMRI brain scans show the
amygdala calming when acupoints are stimulated. Studies have also shown
reduced cortisol levels when tapping is done during a stress response. In fact,
the level of cortisol reduction has been labeled “dramatic and unprecedented.”

The growth of this technique among others is now in an area of psychology
called, Energy Psychology. Evidence is coming from many countries now that
suggests that Tapping is not only fast and effective, but also the effects are
lasting. The discussion of this technique is broaching on a concept that is
making a lot of news: you CAN change Your brain.

J. Fang et al. “The Salient Characteristics of the Central Effects of Acupuncture Needling: LimbicParalimbic-Neocortical Network Modulation.” Human Brain Mapping 30, no. 4 (April 2009): 1196-
1206.

The Tapping Solution To Release Stress and Find Balance

Years ago when working with very anxious infants and toddlers, I discovered a good calming technique was to pat or tap the child’s back gently in a continuous pattern. The child would calm and finally go to sleep. Actually, moms have been doing that for centuries. I taught clients with high anxiety little children to do that as a means of calming the child. It always worked but I never thought of it as a technique that could be used with older children and even adults.

Recently, an old friend who had become highly anxious after a head injury attended a seminar on the Tapping Solution and referred me to it. I am excited to learn about it and that there is a theory behind how it works to balance the nervous system. And, to make it even more available, Nick Ortner and his siblings developed an App called Tapping Solution App. During this superstressful period of Covid-19 they have been offering a special for the healthcare workers, including mental health care workers, and first responders. The special is a 6-month free access to the premium version of their Tapping Solution App. The basic app and a few of the tapping meditations are free.

An example of a basic tapping meditation works like this. You download the app on your smart phone. You start the anxiety tapping meditation which begins with music and a way of measuring your anxiety before starting the tapping. The meditation is 9+ minutes long and begins with a nice deep breath in. The phone shows you where to start tapping on your body (side of hand). The app guides you with a positive statement to repeat to yourself as you tap.

The app tells you where to shift to the next place to tap. Each place of tapping is done for a few seconds before moving to the next spot. The places to tap are lit up with a blinking star. There are approximately 10 or more places on your hand, face, head, collar bone, under the arm to tap. As the app continues, you are asked to think about what makes you anxious or stressed as you tap. If you are in a group or more public place, earphones will make you unobtrusive as you use the app.

There are over 100 tapping meditations on a wide variety of topics to choose from. Basic topics include Releasing Stress, Releasing Anxiety, Releasing Fear, and Releasing Grief. Now, they have added specific tapping meditations for Covid 19. There is a really valuable one entitled Quiet My Racing Mind, which is a major cause of anxiety. Some of the meditations are in Spanish as well

There are over 100 tapping meditations on a wide variety of topics to choose from. Basic topics include Releasing Stress, Releasing Anxiety, Releasing Fear, and Releasing Grief. Now, they have added specific tapping meditations for Covid 19. There is a really valuable one entitled Quiet My Racing Mind, which is a major cause of anxiety. Some of the meditations are in Spanish as well

Normally, the use of the app costs about $50 a year, paid monthly or annually. However, the current offer of 6 months free for healthcare workers is a great deal. To explore further, you can order Nick Ortner’s book, The Tapping Solution, at Amazon.

The Zen of Balance

The Zen of Balance of which I write relates to our ever-present list of things we have to DO versus making some time to just BE. To illustrate the importance of balancing the Do’s and the Be’s in life, meet Stacy (a fictional character). Stacy is the kind of person who does not have a good sense of how stressed she is, and she did not do much to change her busy schedule even when she was warned about needing more time for relaxation. Her attitudes about work and career keep her feeling overwhelmed and responsible on the one hand and conflicted on the other hand because she frequently reads about how long-term stress can affect your health. This is a mental tug-a-war that many career-focused people have a hard time resolving.

Stacy is a good example of how we can get worn down by our attempts to live up to all of our responsibilities to family, work or education, and friends (and still enjoy a social life). Like so many of today’s bright young people, she wants to balance her personal life and her career. Her story, however, indicates that she may not be managing as well as she thinks.

As a lawyer, Stacy has always prided herself on being logical rather than emotional. She uses her cell phone and computer to manage her exercise routine, keep up with her business responsibilities, and watch her diet to manage her weight. Recently, Stacy added a yoga exercise class as a way of relaxing. Adding more to her daily to-do list, though, stretched her even more each day. Thank goodness, Stacy thought, for the modern electronic world at our fingertips. Stacy’s plan was to stay in touch with the office even when she went to yoga class, by using her cell phone. She set her email on her phone to notify her of important “can’t wait” messages. She completely missed the concerned looks that the yoga teacher gave her whenever her phone would ring, and she would excuse herself to go outside the classroom to take the call. Despite her best intentions to relax, Stacy cut her relaxation exercises short to attend to business. Even more problematic was that Stacy could not bring herself to take mental breaks from thinking about what she needed to do next and about business details and issues.

We all generate lists of what we want to get done today or this week. And, don’t we all run out of day (time) before we run out of the things on our todo list? Time is a funny thing; if you want time to do a thing, you have to MAKE that time. The point is that one thing that few of us make time for is time to spend each day just Being.

Just Being means a making a short period of time, maybe as little as 5 or 10 minutes, in which you find a quiet, peaceful environment, assume a gentle and safe position (so that you will not be concerned or thinking about your body), and clear your mind of all thoughts. Try to push away thoughts of what you will do when finished or next. Focus on listening, being aware of the environment around you. Or, focus on listening to your breathing. Try to make time every day to spend a few minutes just being.

In a lot of ways, Being can lead to enlightenment. Buddha is thought to have said: “Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.” Maybe spending a few minutes in a state of Being will make chopping wood and carrying water a bit more palliative.

by Susan Andrews, PhD

Living Long and Stress Free

Longevity is living a long life. Longevity is often considered in relationship to the current life expectancy, which has markedly increased in the past 100 years. More and more comments and articles are now focusing on ways to live longer (and hopefully happier). Surely, there are many critical factors that contribute to the length of one’s life; however, many factors are beyond our control. A major factor over which we have little or no control is genetics. On the other hand, one of the factors that repeatedly earn mention in such lists is avoiding stress in your life. And, that is something that we can take control of. 

Recently I saw this article (healthline.com) on 13 Habits to a long life. Other lists of “ways to increase your longevity” are shorter, maybe listing 6 or 7 factors or habits, and some list are longer. A common element besides reducing stress that always figures prominently has to do with food, what you choose to eat, how much you eat, and whether or not you are overweight. This particular article put much emphasis on food choices. For example, almost one-half of the “13 Habits” were about food and drink, including eating nuts, turmeric, vegetables and leafy greens, avoiding too much alcohol but recommending caffeine, and avoiding overeating. 

Of course, exercise and physical activity are on everyone’s list as a means of maintaining good health and reducing cardiovascular problems. Moderation is always mentioned for alcohol but Avoiding is the usual term used for smoking and recreational drugs. Not mentioned on this particular “13 Habits” list was that people who avoid taking too many medications tend to be healthier and live longer. A good night’s sleep is also listed as important in longevity. 

Often bringing up the rear there will be the suggestion that “avoiding stress” leads to greater longevity. Truly, it is a lot easier to add turmeric to your diet than it is to avoid stress. Stress is not a large rock or boulder in the road. In truth, it is probably not possible to avoid stress in today’s life. In fact, it is not even desirable to live a stress-free life if you could figure out how to do it. 

A much more helpful habit is to learn how to reduce the stress that you accumulate by living. The best method is to become aware of accumulated stress and how you and your body have responded to the challenges of the day. Then you can plan what you need to do and how much you need to do to reduce the day’s accumulation. I rarely see this point made and even if it is made, it is not elaborated so that the average person will walk away knowing how to manage stress. Different methods of stress reduction work best for each of us. Some favor types of meditation. Others do much better in the gym with exercise to help let go of or use up the builtup cortisol and other stress-related hormones with increased activity. Music – either listening or playing an instrument – is an excellent method. Walks in nature and visits with friends and family are also good ways to reduce built-up stress. 

But, all of these suggestions miss an important point which is how important a positive frame of mind is to longevity. The key to understanding whether a potentially stressful event will have a negative versus neutral versus a positive outcome is what the person thinks about the event. People who have the wonderful ability to see the silver lining or to recognize a positive outcome instead of a negative one might be called “Polyanna” by some, but they are also more likely to live a less stressful life. 

by Susan Andrews, PhD

Train Students in Mindfulness to  Reduce Stress and Improve Grades

For any of Louisiana’s Psychology graduate students or their advisors or our community-minded practicing clinicians looking for a project that will improve Louisiana’s schools and quality of education, I recommend training students from kindergarten to graduate level in Mindfulness. Many are now familiar with the technique called Mindfulness. It is easy to learn and easy to teach – even for young people. I am devoting this month’s column to an idea for the new year that holds great promise for making a difference in our future – the promise of increasing consciousness for ourselves, our community, the world.  

Whenever you bring awareness to what you’re directly experiencing via your senses, or to your state of mind via your thoughts and emotions, you’re being mindful. And there’s growing research showing that when you train your brain to be mindful, you’re actually remodeling the physical structure of your brain. And, when you regularly devote as little as 5 or 10 minutes daily to breathing and becoming mindful of your surroundings, amazing things can happen. The following is one of many published articles on the value of teaching students.

One hundred 6th grade students received Mindfulness training each day of the school week for eight weeks in a Massachusetts Institute of Technology research study designed to determine more of the benefits of practicing mindfulness. The students were compared to a peer control group who spent the same amount of time studying computer coding. After 8 weeks, it was found that the students who received Mindfulness training experienced lower stress levels, less depression and improved academic performance, compared to their controls. The MIT researchers surveyed 2,000 students in grades 5 through 8th and found that those who showed more mindfulness tended to have better grades and test scores. They also had fewer absences and statistically significantly less suspensions.

Many resources now exist to learn mindfulness and even to learn how to teach others. I am reminded that many moons ago now, LPA invited a young woman to speak on Mindfulness and she recommended a book available through Amazon called, Sitting Still Like a Frog, by Eline Snel. I have since recommended that many of my young clients (especially those with attention problems) buy this book. It is $12 and available at Amazon. But, the real prize is the CD that comes with the book and includes 10 or more short mindfulness meditations. Kids love it as do their parents.

Wishing everyone a Happy New Year.

by Susan Andrews, PhD

Take the Good Housekeeping Institute’s Wellness Survey

When we stumble onto something really valuable, I believe it is worth sharing. The Good Housekeeping Wellness Lab has developed a survey about what stresses you, your habits and how habits and behaviors and beliefs can affect your overall health and wellness. The survey takes about 15 minutes to complete online and asks you to consider your responses based upon the past 6 months. They acknowledge that they are going to try to gain insights and share them with their business partners and sponsors. So, you are being warned that your information is not going to be treated confidentially. 

If you are okay with these conditions, then I invite you to take the survey and print off a copy of the results for your records. The survey can be found at this address:  https://www.surveyanalytics.com/a/TakeSurvey?tt=Zt XSnH1aK8U%3D

I took the survey. The first part is beliefs about yourself and your life and friends and work that range from stressful to happy and successful. The second part are questions about health and lifestyle habits. These questions include food and drink preferences and recreational habits. This is a thorough survey in that they also ask about programs and ways you promote your wellness, like exercising in a gym and fitness classes, or meditation.

The feedback is organized into four sections:  how stressed you feel, how well you are coping, your health habits and your overall health. It boils down to a score about how you are feeling about your life. Then, it asks if there are areas you are concerned about or want to improve. The survey offers a score on your Perceived Stress. It also rates your coping skills and resiliency. The last two sections are your beliefs about your overall health and health habits.

It is a great personal exercise and a good way to approach the new year 2020 and our annual exercise of making resolutions for our life and behavior.

Wishing everyone a happy and healthy Holiday Season.

by Susan Andrews, PhD

Stress Inhibits Spatial Perception

For years, stress was considered to contribute mostly to psychosomatic-type illnesses. Then, slowly the research began to accumulate that indicates stress is not simply one of those “mental” or “emotional” problems. Stress is making headlines now in ways that really seems to contribute to what we now call the mind-body connection. Stress has even been shown to be passed from one generation to the next by the mechanism of a chronically non-stress resilient woman who is pregnant. Her unborn child will come into the world as not as able to recover easily in stressful situations as children whose moms are less stressed and possibly more stress-resilient. Cortisol has been tagged as one of the mechanisms responsible for how stress  can have lasting effects on the body.

Today, I am reporting on research(1) conducted at the Collaborative Research Center 874 at the Ruhr-UniversitaetBochum showing that stress can interfere with how we see and interpret visual-spatial information. Neuroscientists at the Collaborative Research Center 874 compared the findings of stressed participants to unstressed (the control group) participants in how stress affected their perception of scenes and faces (complex spatial information).

Earlier work out of the Collaborative Research Center 874 was able to show how the release of the stress hormone cortisol can influence long-term memory in the hippocampus. The hippocampus is also involved in the perception of scenes. Discrimination of faces was included in the study as faces are processed in the adjacent region of the temporal lobes.

The cold-pressor test was used to stress young men by having them immerse one of their hands in ice water for up to three minutes while being obviously filmed by a female researcher. This is a well-known method of establishing stress in research.

The stressed participants did less well in the discrimination of complex scenes than the non- stressed participants. However, there was no effect of the stress-induced cortisol on the participants’ ability to discriminate faces. This was the predicted outcome of the study. They reasoned that stress affects the hippocampus in the area of memory and complex spatial perception, but stress/cortisol does not also affect the workings of the adjacent temporal lobe at least as regards the perception of faces.

Further research was planned to look into the activity patterns of the hippocampus when it is under stress using MRI technology.

1 M. Paul, R, K. Lech, J. Scheil, A.M. Dierolf, B.Suchan, O.T. Wolf. Acute Stress influences
the discrimination of complex scenes and complex faces in young healthy men.
Psychoneuroendocrinology, 2016: 66: 125

by Susan Andrews, PhD

New Evidence That May Help Prevent the Lasting Effects of Early Life Stress

This was a very new topic 10 years ago. Today, however, it is a research area that is receiving much more activity. In 2012, the American Academy of Pediatrics’ position paper acknowledged that the period of time from conception through early childhood is critical. They include prenatal stress in their definition of toxic stress and say that children exposed to early stressful conditions are more likely to struggle in school, have short tempers, manage stress poorly, and tangle with the law.1

A November 2018 Science Daily article titled, “Studies highlight lasting effects of early life stress on the genome, gut, and brain”, starts with a summary statement: “The new research suggests novel approaches to combat the effects of such stress, such as inhibiting stress hormone production or resetting populations of immune cells in the brain.”

In 2012, many articles existed that spoke to the dangers of high levels of stress in pregnant mothers but at that time, the main measures were cortisol production during stress and an understanding that some women (and men) were less able to reduce the effects of stress on their bodies than others. Longitudinal research done in Avon, England had followed pregnant moms and then their offspring until the children became adolescents. Those studies showed strong correlations between highly/chronically stressed mothers (measured by their own ratings) and the propensity of their children to deal less well with stress.

A subsample of 74 of the Avon children at age 10 years old were asked to collect samples of saliva first thing in the morning and at three other times during the day. The samples were collected for three days. Dr. Thomas O’Connor and the study team examined the children’s levels of cortisol and found that the mothers’ levels of prenatal anxiety, some 10 years earlier, predicted the children’s higher morning and afternoon cortisol levels. In other words, the higher the mother’s cortisol levels when she was pregnant, the higher the child’s cortisol levels 10 years later. This study is cited as providing evidence that prenatal anxiety might have lasting effects on the HPA axis functioning in the child and that the child’s HPA axis is affected by the mother’s high cortisol levels during pregnancy.2

What has been more or less missing was a mechanism that made the link between the pregnant mother’s higher cortisol and the child’s higher cortisol levels 10 years later. It is now emerging that there is not one link but many. For example, stress during pregnancy can alter gut bacteria, which can reduce critical nutrients reaching fetuses brains. Even more exciting is that researchers in Tel Aviv University have used cutting-edge genetic research and brain imaging technologies to produce a personal profile of resilience to stress. Their findings hope to lead to a future blood test that would facilitate preventive measures for people with Low Resilience to stress. This could potentially reduce the damaging health consequences and keep us from passing low stress resilience from generation to generation.

1 Jack P. Shonkoff; Andrew S. Garner; and the Committee on Psychosocial Aspects of Child and Family Health; Committee on Early Childhood, Adoptions, and Dependent Care; and Section on Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, “The Lifelong Effects of Early Childhood Adversity and Toxic Stress,” Pediatrics 129 (2012): e232–46. 
2 Thomas. G O’Connor, Yoav Ben-Shlomo, Jonathan Heron, Jean Golding, Diana Adams, and Vivette Glover, “Prenatal Anxiety Predicts Individual Differences in Cortisol in Pre-Adolescent Children,” Biological Psychiatry 58 (2005): 211–17

by Susan Andrews, PhD

What do Obesity, Chronic High Stress, Heart Disease, Diabetes, Hypertension, and Depression have in common?

IF you guessed Sleep Deprivation, my hat’s off to you. And, IF you get 7 to 8 hours of sleep a night, raise your hand high. While there is no “magic number” of hours that we should sleep, it is now firmly established that you cannot lose weight if you do not sleep a solid 7-8 hours a night. Research says the average American misses 200-300 hours of needed sleep each year. This is known as a sleep debt.

Studies suggest that healthy adults have a basal sleep need of 7 to 8 hours every night. Where things get complicated is the interaction between the basal need and sleep debt. For instance, you might meet your basal sleep need on any single night or a few nights in a row, but still have an unresolved sleep debt that may make you feel more sleepy and less alert at times, particularly in conjunction with circadian dips, those times in the 24-hour cycle when we are biologically programmed to be more sleepy and less alert, such as overnight hours and midafternoon.

Cortisol is not the only factor that inhibits weight loss but it is a big one. Some physicians are willing to flatly state that you cannot lose weight if you do not get to bed early and get a solid 7 or 8 hours. What getting a good night’s sleep can do for you:

• A good night’s sleep has a positive effect on your blood pressure, meaning that for most of us it goes down at night. If your hours of sleep are interrupted or too short, your blood pressure may never fall low enough.
• Insulin resistance is reduced by good sleep. Dr. Michael Breus, a psychologist and sleep specialist, emphasizes the fact that even short-term sleep loss (being awake for approximately 36 hours) can cause blood glucose levels to be higher than normal.
• A routine schedule for sleeping will help your body keep its internal biological clock running smoothly. You will be more alert, with good reaction time and physical ability, in other words, less accident prone.

Psychologists can help by exploring the sleep habits in the patients they are treating. A study in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, looking at adults with insomnia, found that more than 85% of the study sample who completed 3 or more sleep-focused treatment sessions were able to nod off faster and stay asleep longer. A 6- month follow-up revealed that those patients who had 3 or more sessions spent significantly less money on health care and had fewer doctor visits – compared to the 6 months before their therapy sessions focused on sleep habits. The weekly therapy sessions included relaxation exercises and education on topics such as activities to avoid doing 2 hours before bedtime (like exercise, heavy meals, and smoking). Now, the focus of ways to improve your sleep are adding the need to put your cell phone or other blue light generators down 30 minutes to an hour before bed.