Norman Swan

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, 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?

So David's right in that, you know, we're recording this in Queensland and Queensland is one of the epicentres of research into EFT, emotional freedom therapy.

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 different areas.

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 fright 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.

So that's the theory.

That's the theory.

So there has been research, some of it done at Bond University and published, and the research shows benefits.