Introduction to Tapping and the Episode Guest

Anxiety and being overwhelmed, fear and physical discomfort are basically responses that our brains have learned. That means that they can be changed.

This is a bold claim. I'm scared of needles or I am scared as public speaking or flying. Their amygdala is firing. They go, oh my gosh, this is the dangerous situation.

But I was bit by a dog, so I scared dogs my whole life. Just imagining it would drive a cortisol. Some of the hardest pain, cancer pain and neuropathy, a lot of people struggle with it.

The question isn't just what's happening, it's what can we do about it? We can drop anxiety 42% in nine minutes for free. I couldn't find anything that dropped cortisol in this way.

We see about a 34% decrease in pain in about 12 minutes. And he says, I've been getting 20 minutes of deep sleep the last month. You could do one round and you will likely feel just a downshift in your nervous system.

Unbelievable. Fits in everywhere. Doesn't compete with anything. A tool that we can bring in. That's all we need to change our lives. Hey gang, it's Dr.

David Perlmutter again. Here on The Empowering Neurologist, my guest today is somebody you may know. You may have read his book. Nick Ortner is a New York Times bestselling author and CEO of what is called the Tapping Solution.

And this is platform, if you will, that has helped bring emotional freedom techniques, EFT tapping, into the mainstream conversation around things like emotional health and the regulation of the nervous system.

For more than a decade, Nick has been at the forefront of translating what many once considered to be sort of fringe practices into something increasingly grounded in neuroscience.

and even application every day. His work focuses on a simple but provocative idea, and that is that many of the patterns that define our emotional lives, things like anxiety and being overwhelmed, fear, even aspects of physical discomfort, are not fixed, but are basically responses that our brains have learned.

And that means that they can be changed. In his new book, Rewired, he makes the case that these patterns are what he calls reactive loops, basically automatic responses that are driven by the nervous system and that by engaging the body directly through his tapping technique on specific points, which are in fact the acupressure points.

We may be able to interrupt and reprogram these damaging loops. This is a bold claim because if it's true, it suggests that many of the struggles that people feel stuck in, things like chronic stress, emotional reactivity, and even patients who've experienced trauma, may more malleable, more able than we've been led to believe.

It also raises, I think, some important questions about the mechanism involved here. What is the evidence and where does this new technique fit within the broader landscape of neuroscience and clinical care?

Today, we're going to explore both the promise and the reality of tapping, what it is, how it works, and whether it truly has the potential to help people rewire their brains and hopefully reclaim a greater sense of control over their lives.

Can't wait to get started. Here we go. Nick Ortner, welcome to The Empowering Neurologist. David, I'm so excited for this conversation. We started chatting before we recorded and said there's too much to talk about.

First of all, the cover is really cool. Oh, thank you. Thank you, that is all my sister working really hard on. You know how covers are. A hundred iterations for it.

This morning I was at a doctor's office getting ready to have some blood drawn and in the waiting room There was a TV running in the background, and this woman comes to the TV, she said, if you're feeling stress, I'm not kidding you, today, you should try tapping.

Stop. She demonstrated it. I am not making that up happen today. So people are talking about this tapping thing as a way of gaining emotional control, reducing stress et cetera.

And there's plenty of science that validates what you are talk about in book and we'll talk that. But first, let's just talk what this is. What is EFT?

Yeah, absolutely. So we call it tapping, EFT, emotional freedom techniques, because we are literally physically tapping on these points of our body.

What EFT Tapping Is and How It Works

They're connected to the meridian system, but the latest research actually shows that these are mechanoreceptors. These are actually sending an electrical signal to brain that's telling the amygdala to stand down.

In that case, when you're at the doctor's office and if someone has a needle phobia, what's happening with a Even thinking about it, even before they get there, their amygdala is firing.

They go, oh my gosh, this is a dangerous situation. I hate needles, all the stuff around it. So when we tap while focusing on the threat, the trauma, We send that calming signal to the amygdala.

Phobias are one of the places where it works really well and really powerfully because it's already there. You don't have to like dig around to search what's going on in your life.

It's like, I'm scared of needles. I see it. Or I am scared as public speaking or flying like a clear threat to brain response. And then we send these calming signals, this contradictory safety signal, and then we down-regulate that fear response.

So I would assume that many people watching our podcast right now are skeptical that you can make so many claims about this simple technique of tapping.

And it's clear that even you were quite skeptical at the beginning, skeptical as well. What shifted you over to becoming an advocate? Yeah, I mean I'm still skeptical.

I am still like shocked every time it works. When you tell me, you know, like this happened, that happened. People are using it because it's the idea that we're tapping on our face and it is changing something that radically is just not something I had heard until I first experienced it almost 20 years ago now.

At a Tony Robbins event I was a participant. And I remember so clearly one of those moments in time That gets stuck with you and he came up on stage and He did a little demo we actually handed out these pieces of paper that had all the different tapping points on them And he says I've been doing this thing.

I'm finding results with it I just want to add it to your toolbox He just kind of threw it out there So I went home with this sheet and then I on the internet and started looking things up I found Gary Craig who developed emotional freedom techniques EFT and You know, all the people talking about it and I started using it.

One of the great things about is that you can be skeptical, but the cost to, you know get rid of this skepticism is nothing. You just try it out and see if it works.

So, the running joke at the time was don't say anything is wrong around Nick because he's going to make you tap on it, it was like, I was going with a buddy to a baseball game, going through a Yankees game and he is going, my shoulder is just killing me.

playing flag football and it hurts so much. And I go, Oh, I heard that tapping works on pain. So it's like, okay, here we go. Even though I have this pain in my shoulder, going through the points.

Wow, that's weird. Like something shifted there. So person after person, I was just, you know, 25 year old kid at the time, just passionate about it, sharing it with people I loved.

And every single time it worked on all these different things. I became so passionate that in 2007 decided to make a documentary film about tapping. Basically, no money, credit cards and credit lines.

I bought $40,000 worth of camera equipment, having no idea what I was doing. And I set off across the country with my little sister, Jessica, and one of my best friends from high school, Nick Polizzi.

We made this film documenting the results. The film shows 10 people, like 10 real people from around the county, who each have different issues. You know, John, a Vietnam veteran with 30 years of chronic back pain, we go to his house in Minneapolis and we see all the surgeries he's done, all of the pills he has taken, everything he is gone through and he sits down on his couch and is groaning, you know because his back is killing him.

And about a month later he comes to our event and do this crazy tapping thing. We spend a couple of hours working through different things in his life from the past.

He wakes up the second morning and you can see it on camera. pain-free for the first time in 30 years, just sitting on the floor. That was the genesis of it all, trying it out.

Now, 20 years later, we have the research to back it up. But that started with the stories, the excitement. Within our tapping solution app, for example, 18 million track sessions measured 0 to 10. We have accidentally almost built the largest longitudinal data set in mental health history.

There's nothing like it. We have 18 million sessions. So when you say, does it work on anxiety? I can say well, 1.3 million times people played this one anxiety session.

It ran for nine minutes and anxiety drops by 42%. So it's like- What's in the way here? Why is it still, to be fair, considered fringe? With what you're telling me, which sounds very powerful, and in your book, you have some really compelling stories, why is it so fringe, or at least considered fringe by so many?

Yeah, it's been around for a long time. It's a great question. That's one that I have continued to ask myself. And I think I know the answer now. If we just look at the genesis of time and how it was talked about.

So, discovered in about 1980 by Roger Callahan, he developed TFT, a sequence of algorithms for tapping. Gary Craig, his students, takes it and makes it simple in the 90s, early 2000s.

Garry's was great at just like, hey, try it on everything, had these videos, share it with everyone. But the research wasn't there. It just wasn' his focus.

He was just focused on spreading it to the world. There was also a lot of language around the energy system, stuck energy in the body, meridian system.

And while it certainly, I think is related to the meridians system and the acupuncture system I, think it held it back for a little bit of time because people go, well, you're talking about energy, what's going on with that?

I get that. Tell us what the meridian system is for those who don't know about traditional Chinese medicine. Yeah, these are channels through our body and, you know, they've now connected them to actual nerve channels.

So, I mentioned mechanoreceptors, that is like the physical pressure turning into an electrical signal and that moves through these afferent nerve pathways through the brain.

This meridians system, is a direct line to the the chest, it's sort of the communication system of our body. So how does that relate then to the acupuncture points?

Nick Ortneru2019s Origin Story and Early Results

How do the Acupunctur points relate, then, to The Meridian System? Yeah, so these are the points of conductivity. Now, they're all over the body. And if you go to an acupunkturist, you might find that they'll do a point here and then something there.

When we do tapping, we just do this main set of points. There are other points, but really, for simplicity, it's almost like all we need gets us most of the way there by going through the basic sequence of point.

Hey guys, we're going to get right back to the podcast, but I do have a very important message for you. I think many of you will recall a conversation I had here on the Podcast with Dr.

Michael Leone. He is a University of California Irvine neuroscientist. And what he studied and what we talked about on The Podcast is what is called olfaction, our sense of smell, and how things that stimulate our senses smell are directly wired into the brain's hippocampus and amygdala.

And these are the same circuits that govern things like memory and emotion. You know, most of our sensory inputs get routed through a bunch of relay stations, but our sensitive smell actually doesn't.

It has a direct line in through the centers that I just described. And Dr. Leon's work takes full advantage of that pathway and enriches this olfactory pathway with a variety of scents presented to you during your sleep.

That's when your brain is already doing its nightly work of clearing out the metabolic debris, things like beta amyloid and other accumulated misfolded proteins.

Dr Leon has done some wonderful clinical research on the idea of stimulating the brain with during the course of the night. And he has demonstrated that using this approach in some of his research has shown as much as a 226 percentage increase in memory function and 22 minutes in addition of sleep with his results published across healthy adults, older adults and yes, even people who are suffering from what is called mild cognitive impairment, MCI, what we consider to be the harbinger for further brain decline.

So he and his research team have built a device around this research and that device is called Memory Air. It isn't a pill, it's not a supplement. You put it on your nightstand and it does its work while basically you're sleeping at night.

Their website is memoryair.com. I've been working now with memory air and have developed a Relationships such that you can get a 15% reduction in cost of your memory or device should you choose to buy one.

You use the code PERLMUTTER and this is also going to get you free shipping and a 60-day money back guarantee. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration and the product is not intended to diagnose, treat or cure or prevent any disease.

Let's get right back to our podcast. You mentioned some brain-related physiological changes, particularly in an area called the amygdala. What exactly is then going on in the brain when somebody is involved in tapping?

Yeah, so what we're seeing is that there's a concept called memory reconsolidation. And when we bring up anything from the past, it's almost as if we were opening up a computer file.

So if I say, hey, think about that high school breakup. It can be not a big deal. Bring it up, high-school breakup! For some people, they'll bring that school break up.

They'll be like, yeah, that was a horrible time. But there is no emotion attached to it. There's nothing there. Other people will bring it that memory and go, There's still something going on, right?

It's affecting my relationships today. I haven't been able to deal with it. It is a lot of what therapy does. Hey, let's talk about your mom, Let's Talk About Your Childhood.

We're bringing up these memories and they either exist as, you know, hopefully a positive memory, a growth, and even if it's a negative one, one that has Growth attached to it learning attached it or for a lot of people they bring up the memory and there's all this other stuff attached To it now when we bring it up We have this window of time where we can affect in the Memory what a Lot of processes do is they Bring it Up talk about it, dance around it and then re-save the memory with all that same information.

When we bring it up with tapping and now we send that competing safety signal, because basically what we're doing here is we are telling the brain it's safe.

So now I got childhood memory, I've got traumatic childhood, even a bad breakup that has all this stuff attached. I have opened it. My body would normally tense, think negative thoughts, worry, stress.

We send this competing signal and it is almost like the relaxes. And then when we resave it, now it's resaved without all those attachments. So basically what you're saying is you are recontextualizing a memory of an event.

I remember this terrible event and it is associated with fear, it associated feeling threatened, but this is a technique that allows you to still have memory of the event, but not necessarily keep it attached to those other stress responses that you might experience.

No, exactly. And what you brought up initially, phobias, is one of clear demonstrations of that, because we'll hear stories like, I was bit by a dog when I 10 years old, so I'm scared of dogs my whole life.

Now we bring it up, we either bring up the original memory or the current fear of dogs. We resave it and we go, okay, wow, there's no, I don't react when it's not threatening.

Certainly I'm not scared of dog. Now, if you have a German shepherd lunging at you, so there is, you know, You will still react, right? Your survival instinct is still active.

The amygdala fires when is should. when we have this little puppy that's 100 yards away on a leash, and it doesn't fire out of that fear, oh my gosh, this is a dangerous situation.

So recontextualizing is the perfect word for that. Well, for me, two things come to mind. First, snakes. I need to deal with snakes, the second thing is, my high school girlfriend, now that you bring it up, showed up at my 70th birthday party, just saying it was the most remarkable, wonderful moment.

It was so great. My wife arranged that. That's amazing. Beautiful. A good, healthy, happy memory, not what a lot of people have. Even healthier now. Your book talks about things called reactive loops.

First, let's unpack what that term means, and then how we deal with that, Yeah, Reactive Loop is really what we're dealing with all day long. It's that instantaneous response, right?

It something happens and it's… It's like you see a comment on Facebook and boom, your anger stirred up. Someone says something to you in a certain way and there you go.

It is the emotions that we live in. For everyone it is different. Some people it's anxiety. Something happens and anxiety hits instantly. Other people, it was depression, low mood.

into that state. So it's the states that are wired in our body. Oftentimes, through negative childhood experiences, things people said to us, like our upbringing can certainly play a huge role in creating these reactive loops.

The phobia is a reactive loop. You know, you hear a dog bark, reactive, loop, all of a sudden, tense up, right? There's something happening there. you know you're going to fly in three months on this amazing vacation.

There we go. Before you even know it, you can look at the ticket. You can think about booking it and your body responds. What we're looking to do with tapping is first just recognizing that this reactive loop exists in different places in your life is a healthy thing.

Why Tapping Was Considered Fringe

That's step one. It's like, where are the places of my life where someone walks in the room and I'm immediately upset or anxious or I mean a certain social situation and that I don't want to be there.

So what is that that's happening and oftentimes, we feel these reactive loops in our bodies. It's just like, oh, this feeling in the pit of my stomach, the tightness in my chest, I can't breathe.

We get into these states very quickly. And then what's happening, we're looking to deactivate that reactive loop, send that calming signal to then be a choice, then say, OK, can be in this situation if I want to be.

I could react to the people around me in a healthy way. There's so much talk these days about boundaries and the people in your life and how to deal with them and those are all healthy when we do it from the healthy place but all too often people go I've got a reactive loop around my mom she triggers me every time I see her so my you know solution for this is to just not see here not engage and maybe it's healthy for her not to be in her life but can you make that choice from that grounded calm non-reactive place So we have these responses that are challenging to us and even some phobias that we might have.

And I think traditionally the techniques were exposure therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy. as ways of ultimately doing what I think you're describing tapping does.

So is tapping something that can coexist with other approaches and augment their ability to help us deal with these issues? They can, and that's the way it should be.

To me, the cutting edge therapists out there right now, we have so many that refer people to our app and everything we're doing with tapping. They take all the knowledge that they've learned and go, okay, what's next thing that can speed it up faster?

So CBT has this incredible body of knowledge about how to pull things out of people, how talk about things, to frame things. We actually have a series in our App which is CB and tapping because they complement each other so well.

What we're seeing though is the tapping works when the cognitive brain is offline. So something that CBT does well, you're sitting down in the therapist's office and you are talking about what happened 20 years ago or last week and your working it through.

It's a lot of cognitive work. The question is, what happens when it's 2 a.m. and you wake up in a panic attack? Your cognitive brain is offline. So this is the tool when your cognitive is off-line.

When you're angry, when there's just like a rage that's taken over, cognitive brains are off line. You're in fight or flight response. All the tools that you learned in CBT often struggle in those moments because you go, well, I don't care, right?

It's like fight of flight, you still need that gap of time, the gap space to go well let me do some tapping now. But tapping will actually work and will bring you right back cognitive brain back online.

And now you can implement all the things you learned. So again, you still need to be able to make that decision to engage the tapping therapy with prefrontal cortex, not the amygdala, because amygdali already happened and you've already responded.

But if you want to deal with that recurrent loop, then you bring on board this technique. You mentioned that your belief is that what you're doing is you are stimulating these mechanoreceptors.

which may or may not necessarily line up with acupuncture points. The point I'm trying to get to is, you describe exactly where to tap for various types of things.

I mean, we know that if you look at an acupunture chart, there's the kidney spot, the low back pain and the great toe. You put the needle in the gray toe, that's good for low, whatever.

There are various unique spots that a trained acu puncture knows how to find and then to needle. But let's get back to tapping now. How do we know that we're in the right spot?

You describe where to go for the various problems, and is that necessarily an acupuncture point versus, you know, is it more related to the mechanoreceptors that are there?

And are those, is the representation of where our mechanoreceptors are the same in all people? They do seem to line up. These are points of more conductivity.

There's been a couple research studies with sham tapping, basically like, okay, so one point is eyebrow point, inside of the eyebrow where the hair ends and it meets the nose.

Sham tapping will be like tap here, right? And it's just not the thing. So, you know, it does matter where you go. In theory, there could be points on your toe that we could tap on, I don't know, and they could do something, but for the simplicity, for having, you know doing the same sequence every time, that was Gary Craig's innovation.

Brain Mechanisms, Reactive Loops, and Memory Reconsolidation

He took Roger Callahan that had different points for different things, he said, this is going to be impossible to teach people, especially in moments when it's 2 a.m.

and someone's having a panic attack, let's do the whole sequence, every-time, we seem to get significant results just from that. For close to 40 years I have found myself in examining rooms watching a family struggle through the loss of a loved one.

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Your brain is right now. Here's a thought. Is there a way using any sort of measuring device to determine the right placement of the finger tapping? I mean, can you get feedback that, oh, okay, now I'm right where I need to be?

Yeah, there's a device, and I don't know the name of the device but I've seen a video, I think that Dawson Church, who's one of leading the FTE researchers made, where you take this device and it shows points of more conductivity.

And it's lined up with how we measure it. So inside of eyebrow, side of eye, under the eye. Under the nose, the mouth. collar bone, which is we got the two little bones.

It's right below it under the arm about three inches underneath the armpit either side of the body and the top of The head and those are that's what oh well and we start with the side Of the hand.

That's the basic sequence that we do every time So let's talk about some science. What do you think is the most compelling science that validates what you're talking about?

Yeah, so there's two camps here, the sciences, you know, 300 plus studies, multiple RCTs. Rcts? Explain for our sorry. Yeah random randomized controlled trials.

So they you know, it's the gold standard for science So one study for example, which I think is probably the most compelling one What's happening was on cortisol and it actually been done twice.

It was replicated, but let's start with the first one Dawson church was one of the leading EFT researchers took I Think it was 40 people, you Know per group they all spit into a tube You know with saliva and they measured cortisol Before they did the intervention, then they tapping.

Another group just sat around. And another group did psychoeducation. So just learning about stress relief techniques. Then they measured cortisol, salivary cortisol afterwards.

In Dawson's study, the salive cortisol dropped by 24% in an hour, which was a dramatic drop, so much so that he tells a story about having to present the paper at a conference, you know, waiting for the results and the lab kept delaying, delay, and he said, look, I need this now.

And they just kept recalibrating their equipment because of the one sample. You couldn't believe it. The one example was so off everything. They go, this has to be wrong.

Peter Stapleton in Australia replicated his study, which is always what you want to see because you hear a lot of studies out there just cannot actually be replicated and they fail.

She saw a 43% drop in cortisol in an hour. And this was interesting because she replicated the only difference that she did group tapping. for the intervention.

So, you know, everyone together in a group and actually saw, a even more dramatic drop in cortisol. Now we're seeing clearly, and I was just looking in the last week or two, I love meditation.

I loved breath work. that drop cortisol in this way. You know, sometimes eight weeks meditation seems to drop cortisone, but for that acute one hour effect, really profound.

So, you know we have 300 plus studies on all sorts of different things. I was looking at a basketball study with free throws the other day, um, you know, trying to improve free throw accuracy.

And then we have real world evidence. Um, and that's the 18 million sessions, within our app. It's not controlled, meaning there's one group of people, but The enormity of the data set, the fact that it's 18 million times and that its consistent is just unparalleled.

It does not exist out there. We just have a sister company called NeuroTap that was just approved for Medicare for the access. So the government has a new program through Medicare that is basically saying, hey, go out and we'll let you treat people and will pay you based on the results they get.

You know, we had to apply for program, clinical director, a whole scientific advisory board. So it was a rigorous process to get into this. And the government, Medicare basically said, the evidence is strong enough here to give you guys a shot.

In about six months or so, we'll have even more validated stuff, anxiety scales, depression scales pain scales that are through the Government. They have all the data and we will have more evidence of it.

And I think that goes back- Well, I was gonna ask, where are you getting your best results in what clinical situation? Is it anxiety, is it trauma, post-trauma?

Where does it really shine? Yeah. So, you know, You know, in our app, people come to us for three things mostly. Anxiety, sleep and pain. Sleep and Pain.

Okay. So sleep onset, stress about sleep, dramatic results. I mean, we are just, you know we're down regulating the nervous system so quickly. A way to not just do some breathing or meditation, like let go of the stuff from the day.

People get great results, We see it in aura rings. You now I've got, I worked with a guy a couple years ago, a big celebrity and We did one tapping session and then I gave him a session from the app and he sent me his aura ring data the next day.

And he says, I've been getting 20 minutes of deep sleep the last month and it was an hour and a half that night. So you just see it. It's N of one, but you, you know, where did he tap?

Science, Cortisol, and Clinical Evidence

He did. I just took him through the sequence. That was just like the same sequence every time, how many sites are there for tapping? Yeah. Eyebrow, side of the eye, under the eyes, nose, mouth.

collarbone, under the arm, top of the head. And that's it. Do it one time, repeat it… And how long each spot, or you count the taps, how do you do that?

Yeah, generally it's five to seven taps. Sometimes you'll stay on one spot longer, you know, because you might say, like, if I'm taking you through a process, let's say the high school girlfriend wasn't a good thing, and it was just like oh man, I can't, every time I think of her I just feel, oh, my body.

And I might bring you back to that time. Well, tell me what happened, right? And you might close your eyes and this is worth combining different processes like, okay, let's close our eyes.

Let's think about it. let us visualize what happen. Oh my gosh, I feel it in my body. So it's not, you know, an exact science every step and some meditations, we have these quick taps that are one round, 60 seconds.

And then we. Extended sessions that. 20 minutes. There's one called You Are Enough that's 16 minutes that goes ultra deep on all sorts of things. And these are on the app.

Yeah, the App has a thousand different sessions in there. So yeah, so I mentioned sleep. Pain relief is dramatic. I wrote my second book about a decade ago on pain relief because when I was Speaking for Hay House, one of the things I would do, you know, there'd be an audience of three or five thousand people and, almost like a stage hypnotist.

So it wasn't what I was doing. I'd say, who out there's in pain? I picked some people. Okay. You, come on up. And we would say oh, my shoulder is stuck here.

in real pain and we would do tapping for 10 or 20 minutes together and then you saw things like, oh my gosh, the shoulder went up, pain is gone. So pain, you know, some people get complete resolving of the pain.

I heard from a guy six months ago that he did one session and the paint went away. doesn't always happen, but it does happen which is incredible. And then other people use it for pain management.

You know, we see about a 34% decrease from 800,000 sessions. So we have 800 thousand completed pain sessions in the app. Some of the hardest pain, cancer pain and neuropathy, you know, every kind of thing, we see about a 34% decrease in pain in about 12 minutes.

So you can't really beat that for something that is not pharmaceutical, has zero side effects, no addictive potential, dropping pain 34%, is significant.

So when does it, what's your biggest failure do you think? When did you expect it would work and it just hasn't stepped up? That's such a good question.

So, you know, and what is interesting about some of these failures is that you'll see complete resolving for some people and then not at all for other people.

Tinnitus is one that a lot of people ask about and I think because sadly a a of a people struggle with it. We'll hear, oh my gosh, my tinnitus is gone from it.

We have some tennitus specific sessions. Will hear it's dampened. So maybe something happened in the nervous system where it was there, but it is not potentially irritating as much.

Something like tannitus, there's also such an emotional component to it, right? Just like, Oh my Gosh. And then for some people it won't touch it at all it.

Won't do anything. So that that's one where you know For some it doesn't work at. All hmm So how does a person get started there? They're having issues right now What do you how do?

You deal with this individual? How do we get? Started yeah, so I mean we can have a little experience if you want to just see what it's like for people.

I'm in. All right, I know some people will be in the car listening to us, so yeah, you gotta pull over, be safe, or put it on autopilot if you want to do that.

We'll play this podcast later on. Go ahead, i'm with you. Yeah, yeah. So the first thing to is just to pick what is that you wanna work on, right? If you're feeling really anxious.

If we mentioned pain, if you've got, oh, my back has been bothering me and, you know, maybe I can do something there. Uh, If something happened, it's, breaking thought loops, rumination does go really well.

It seems to just break that thought loop right out. So just pick one thing, everyone at home listening that you were just like, I don't want this anymore.

I want to let this go. Let go of this thought, let go this feeling, like go with this pain. And then give it a number on a scale of zero to 10. So if you're super anxious right now, it's a 10, if we've got nothing going on, to zero, something someone said to you two weeks ago, keep spinning in your mind.

There you go. It's seven. so just pick your thing. Give it. And we'll do some tapping. We start by tapping on the side of the hand. That's called the karate chop point, whatever hand feels comfortable.

whatever feels comfortable for you. So you just pick one side, you know, some people do it like this, but really we're just making contact, tapping gently.

And then, sometimes in some of the sessions we'll do a repeat after me. There's different ways to approach it for now. You're learning the points and I'm just going to guide you through it.

Don't worry about saying anything out loud or repeating anything. so you're tapping this out of hand and just put your attention back on that thing that you brought up.

the anxiety, the stress, and the overwhelm, we're actually looking to bring it up now. We're looking at bringing up that memory to open up the window to send that safety signal.

Then we move to the eyebrow, inside of the eyebrows, right where the hair ends and it meets the nose. You can do one hand or both hands. These meridians run down both sides of your body.

And you're just tapping gently. If you can close your eyes, go ahead and do it. Bring your attention back to this thing. Think that thought that you keep thinking.

Feel that pain in your body, just notice it, be present to it. And now we move to the side of the eye. It's not at the temple, it's right next to eye, on the bone, again, one side or both sides.

There's a lot going on here as you're figuring out where the points are and what you are doing, but just bring your attention back to that thing that you want to release.

If something happened, see it in the mind's eye If you're anxious or angry, just feel it in your body. And now we move under the eye, right on the bone, tapping gently, breathing gently.

Bringing your attention back to it. If get distracted, that's okay. Something else comes up, we just refocus. What's going on? What is really happening here?

What's this pain about? What this anger about, what's the thought loop about. And just see where your mind takes you. Under the nose, right there, above the mouth, low the noses, tapping gently.

Noticing how your body feels, how maybe it begins to soften even as you have these thoughts. Under the mouth, at that little crease above the chin, below that lip, little crease there, tapping gently.

Just tuning in, think those thoughts. And if something else comes up, you can follow that trail. Maybe this is about this other thing, or you could stick with the original thing.

Live Tapping Demo and Immediate Effects

just noticing how you feel, thinking those thought, bringing it back up. Couple points left. Feel for the two little bones of the collarbone. You can go right below it.

All 10 fingers of both hands. Tapping gently and tuning in to the stress, the pain, and the anxiety. The things they said. And the thing you said, whatever feels stuck.

Be present. Do it now. Underneath the arm, we're going about three inches underneath the armpit. Either side of body. It's right on the bra line for women.

Just tapping gently. Bringing your attention back to this thing. The anxiety, the pain, just noticing it. You're doing great. And the last point to complete one round is right at the top of the head.

Tapping gently, bringing your tension back. Now you know the points, let's just do one more. Back to the eyebrow, and now you can close your eyes and just notice how you feel.

Notice if something is changing. Notice if your body's beginning to let go. Side of the eye. Being present to all these thoughts and feelings. If you yawn, that's great.

if you notice your shoulders dropping, That's Great. Under the Eye. under the nose. Just letting go. Thinking that thought. Noticing as it fades away, maybe loosens its grip.

Under the mouth. Letting go, collarbone. Just let it go under the arm. Two more points left. Top of the head, gentle breath in. And you can gently stop tapping.

I want to read an interesting, supportive note. Put on my glasses here, hold on. Rewired, the name of your book. reveals the groundbreaking science and deeply human stories behind tapping, showing how this simple practice can unlock calm in even the busiest mind.

That's the actor Hugh Jackman. So he is certainly an advocate of this technique. How long does it take to get results? Yeah, so we just did two rounds.

So everyone listening, maybe check in and see, okay, well, you know, I was angry at an eight and now it's a five or a six. Like see what shifted. Sometimes other things will come up.

I thought it was really angry about this thing, but then something else came up, uh, You can do one round and you will likely feel just a downshift in your nervous system.

You want to rewire childhood beliefs that have been keeping you stuck for 20 years, um, that'll require some deeper work. But, you know, one of the things I talk about in the book is called the velocity principle, which basically says this, the time that it took the, time, something's been around.

So you had a problem for years. It doesn't mean it takes 20 to fix it, right? Like that there's a speed here, especially when we do this memory reconsolidation, it can be just that fast to heal.

And is this a technique people, for example, who get nervous giving a presentation, stage fright, they could use this just before they go on stage, to calm them down?

Yeah, 100% fabulous. I mean, a couple things there. One, if you can do all the phobia, the stage-fright, it's like fear flying. If you could do some conditioning beforehand, so before you're in that state, and we have some things in the app for fear, public speaking, flying, You just imagine yourself.

So if someone has a fear of public speaking, I know you don't, David, but let's say you did and you had something coming up on Saturday, you close your eyes and just imagining it would drive up cortisol, right?

Which is incredible. The power of our mind that we can just image this future event, drive a cortisol anxiety, all those things. You can imagine it and tap through the points.

Now you're sending that calming signal. Ideally, now you get to Saturday and it's not there, what most people find If they do it beforehand, then they'll get to Saturday.

And instead of being a 10 or an 8, maybe it's a 4 or a 5. Okay, now it is manageable. Now backstage, before you go on, let me do some tapping. Let me bring it down.

You can have some regular nerves that any might have, and now you can go backstage. All these things are a loop. you go on stage and you're super nervous and anxious, what's gonna happen?

Well, you not gonna do a great job, right? Like your frontal, your prefrontal cortex is offline. Excuse me, now I'm having trouble speaking. I should do some tapping on it.

So you don't have a good experience. And even if you are good, then you were judging yourself, oh, I wasn't good because you on this fight or flight mode.

Then it just spirals and spirles and people tend to get worse in those circumstances and if can stop it, Bring it from a 10 to a five. Now at a 5, you're like, okay, I can do this.

This is manageable. That was a positive experience. Let me take that positive and bring it into my body and my sense of self and identity. And then off we go from there.

When I attend the various expos of one sort or another, longevity, health extension, et cetera, there's so much technology these days of devices that you have to buy and carry around and plug in and use in a specific way.

And you're talking about your fingertips. I think it's quite remarkable. So what does the future hold? Is there upcoming more research? What are your plans?

Yeah, so right now, they're, you know, a major university in a couple of months is releasing the first study on our releasing anxiety tabbing meditation.

So this is just one tabing meditation, it's one of the biggest institutions in the world. I can't say it yet because you know how these things are with preprints and research and all this stuff, but it's going to be, it robust because again, nothing like this has ever been published.

And my hope is that that will wake some people up and go, wait, this happened 1.3 million times and it dropping anxiety by 42%. You know, there's no, Placebo effect that that works that well and the paper so robust that it actually looks into that can it be placebo effect and there's all these Statistical models that a dozen says no, it's not this is actually working.

So I think the future holds more of that.

Applications for Anxiety, Sleep, Pain, and Performance

You know, I mentioned this company the sister company neuro tap, which is going to work with Medicare that is you know as legitimate as can be in terms of like, okay, if this is in Medicare and Medicare approved, and now we're actually not only Medicare approve, because, you know, some people can get a contract, these are going to be public results, the way this program works.

So people will be able to see, Okay, this intervention did this for anxiety, And that intervention, did that for Anxiety. And it's all going To be Public, which will Be really interesting to See.

It's almost like a competition that, You know I'm looking forward to because I know that the data is there. I think it'll be more of the waiting room that you're in and they say, I mean, just think about that experience.

It costs nothing to put that up on TV. Someone was really anxious and now they can do this and get a little more peace back in their lives. free to use, fits in everywhere, doesn't compete with anything.

It's not CBT or this, it's CBTA and this. it is not exposure therapy. No, you want to make exposure, therapy work really fast, like try this you know.

So I think the future holds more of that, just collaboration, a tool that we can bring in to help people. Hey everyone, we're going to get right back to the podcast, but I have an important message for you.

If you're caring for somebody with Alzheimer's, any other form of dementia or even what we call mild cognitive impairment, or maybe you've received one of these diagnoses yourself, Or if you are focused on preventing cognitive decline, I want to speak directly to you for just a moment about some serious research that's going on looking at what we call 40 Hz light and sound simulation.

We've been actually talking about that on the program. Here's the challenge. Not all 40Hz light devices are the same. Most use what's called stroboscopic light, and that is the type of light that flashes, then you can see the flashing.

And that can cause nausea, it can cost headaches. And if you can't tolerate that, you won't use it. So there is a company called Optosudix. They've solved this problem with a patented technology that still gives you the 40 Hertz light flashing, but through light that looks and feels quite normal.

It's the device I actually have on my desk when I'm working. And that's why this company sees a 94% adherence rate and significant improvements across various metrics, including mood, energy, focus, sleep, and memory.

And the light is called the EV light, EVY. You can use it as I do when you're working on your computer, when your reading, watching TV, eating breakfast, whatever.

It becomes really part of your day, not just another burden, it's kind of passive in the background. So I recommend giving it a try for 90 days. And if you and your family don't see value in it, then you can return the device for a full refund.

They cover the shipping both ways. This is a device that really is risk free in terms of getting involved with 40 Hertz stimulation. Important information.

Let's get right back to our podcast. So Nick Ortner, what is the number one thing that tapping is good for? Anxiety, we can drop anxiety 42% in nine minutes for free.

Unbelievable, that's all we need to change our lives. What is the effect of tapping on cortisol levels? Yeah, tapping drops cortisol at levels dramatically.

Two studies, one showed a 23% decrease in cortisol, the other one a 43% increase in the cortisol. So very quickly we see the body shifting out of this fight or flight mode into a relaxed mode.

You have a new study about to be published that looks at tapping. What do you expect it's going to show? So this new that is published by a major institution and a paper, they will announce it soon, is going show that 1.3 million times people got massive results with anxiety with a simple 9-minute session for free.

If tapping was done in public schools, what do think the outcome would be? You know, one of our most popular topics is tapping for kids. They're so overwhelmed.

If we tapped in public schools, teachers would just find more regulated classrooms, a way to deescalate these situations when kids get intense. And I think it would completely change the learning environment.

How do you think tapping affects cognitive function? Tapping is massive for cognitive function because the reality is when we're stressed, we cannot think clearly.

You know this better than ever, it's biological. So tapping, when bring our brains back online, our cognitive functions improves dramatically. Does tapping actually help rewire the brain?

Yeah, I believe so. And the way I know the evidence is there is that people's lives change. We have a new brain, we have new life, We've have story after story, after a story where people are saying I am different than I was before.

Their soul is the same, but their brain has been rewired. Well, Nick, this is an incredible book. I have to say I had seen tapping before, and I wasn't aware, first of all, of the scope of number of people that are using this technique.

its effectiveness, its certainly cost effectiveness. And I think it's really very exciting that you've written such a user-friendly book. People can really learn what this is all about.

So thank you for joining us today. Thank you. I really enjoyed our conversation. And thanks for everyone out there for tapping along with us. Give it a shot.

Whether you buy the book or not, the books is great. You'll love it. But if not just do the tapping. Experience it in your life. Share it with those you love.

It can be really transformative. Super. Well, all the best. Thank You. Today, we've explored something really interesting. This is no question a fascinating intersection between an ancient practice and modern neuroscience.

On the one hand, tapping is remarkably simple, almost, I would say, deceptively so. And yet, the claims that are surrounding it are anything but minimal, anything, but small.

The idea that we can interrupt deeply ingrained emotional patterns and begin to rewire our responses. In real time, it's clearly compelling.

Future Research and Closing Reflections

It does take some belief, but I think that Nick made the point today that there's good science behind what he is describing. Its really exactly why conversations like this matter so that we can look at these things and embrace new ideas because whether tapping ultimately proves to be a transformative tool for millions of people or a technique that works best in some specific context, this conversation invites us to really rethink something fundamental.

And that is that our emotional responses are not necessarily fixed and that the nervous system may be far more adaptable, malleable and maybe I say plastic than we have once imagined.

I often say the question isn't just what's happening, it's what can we do about it? If there are accessible, low-risk tools that can help some people regain a sense of agency over their stress, their thoughts, or their emotions, and their reaction, then that's a conversation I really believe is worth having, hence why we had Nick Ortner on the program today.

Let me say thank you for joining us here today on The Empowering Neurologist. It was a very interesting episode. I hope you appreciate episodes like this and certainly the work that people like Nick Ortner are doing.

Nick Ortner

Can Tapping Rewire Your Stress Response?