The Science of Energy Healing

Dawson Church, PhD

Bliss Brain”, yes. All about the neuroscience of elevated states, and how those are having effects on the way our brains function and how they change.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, and how to create more happiness, which we all need a little bit more of. You always seem so happy whenever I’m around you. I want some of your happiness.

Dawson Church, PhD

It’s free. It’s available to everyone, Tom. So your wish has been granted. “Mind to Matter”.

Tom McCarthy

There you go, and people get to experience it today. You’ve also done amazing things, like working with veterans on PTSD. And a lot of people know you through eftuniverse.com, which has been so helpful to so many people with EFT, the emotional freedom technique that you teach and tapping. So lots of great things you’ve already brought to the world that have helped so many people. So welcome to the Global Energy Healing Summit. We’re so thrilled to have you on board.

Dawson Church, PhD

Well, it’s great to be here. It’s great to be in such distinguished company, and the information that people will get here and then hopefully apply in their lives has the potential to be revolutionary and put us on a whole different trajectory in terms of our health, our wellbeing, and our happiness. So I’m thrilled to be here.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, so hey, one thing, you know, a lot of people call a lot of what we think of as energy healing or these techniques, even like EFT, you know, new age, right? This is invented in the new age. But part of what we were discussing earlier is that it used to be the norm. Many of these things that we say new age used to be the norm. Can you take us through a little bit of history and energy healing just from your research?

Dawson Church, PhD

Yeah, and I talk a lot in my books about evolutionary biology, and seeing everything through the lens of why did we evolve this way, and how are we the product of evolution? And so it’s really useful if you have any behavior, anything going on with your life, your health, go back and say, what was the utility of this a hundred thousand years ago, 500,000 years ago? Why am I this way? And so when we go back in human history, of course, we find when we go back a long way that there was no surgery, there were no drugs. There were herbal remedies. But all of the tools of modern medicine were developed, really got going after the enlightenment and the Renaissance. And so they’re pretty recent. Before then, we had energy, we had belief. So if you were sick, the herbalist might, the curandero might have a herbal concoction of something like willow bark, which was used, which aspirin was derived. And they might have tools like that. But they had placebo.  

They had belief. And if you look, for example, at drug trials, look at trials of drugs, like Zoloft and Prozac. What you find is that those drugs are about 40% effective.  They’re about a 40% effectiveness.  In the placebo groups, when the drug company is conducting the clinical trials, the placebo, the pill with nothing in it, the inert substance is 35% as effective. So the placebo in many drug trials is so close in function in its ability to heal to the drug that there’s hardly a difference between them. And those things we’ve had for millennia. So the Shalon might’ve given you that herbal substance, may have danced around you. You may have had to do some kind of ritual purification and connotation, and then, you brought all the power of that placebo into the encounter. So these techniques are ancient, and some of them are astonishingly effective.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, and so talk a little bit more about placebos. So tell people what that means, and why is the placebo effect so powerful.

Dawson Church, PhD

If you just believe something, it has an extraordinary effect. So placebo is the power of belief. It’s believing that something’s possible. If you believe it, then it’s much more likely to happen than if you don’t believe it. And for example, in one big trial, by the University of Rochester, they looked at all the factors that were contributors to heart disease. So the cardiac arrest, congestive heart failure, all of these cardiac events. And so they looked at all the factors that played into that. Lifestyle, diets, smoking, habits, behaviors, exercise. They looked at all of these things. 

And Tom, this is so funny. They found a funny, not funny haha, but funny interesting. But they found at the end of the day, there was one factor that was a bigger predictor of having heart disease than any of those other things. And that was the answer to one question on the questionnaire. And that question was, do you believe you’re at risk for heart disease? 

Tom McCarthy

Wow, wow.

Dawson Church, PhD

Belief is more important than everything else. And there are literally hundreds of these placebos trials. Even people notes placebo. You tell them this is another substance. And they know it’s another substance. It still has a strong effect. So our beliefs are tremendously important. 

I know I’ve done a couple of trials with cortisol, looking at cortisol levels. And we find that cortisol levels just based on your emotions, if you have a lot of emotion, a lot of stress, a lot of negative thinking, it drives cortisol high. So just thinking, believing, having a worldview is having effects, dramatic effects medically on our bodies.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, so you just described an example of a placebo not having a positive fact, but we have beliefs and thoughts in our mind that actually can make us sick, right? That can create disease or illness.

Dawson Church, PhD

I teach a lot of live workshops. And I ask people in those workshops what is going on with them. And Tom, it breaks my heart. Some of the people in there, they’re in their twenties. They may have a hugely successful career. They often are very affluent. And they have so much negative self-talk. It just so touches me sometimes. You’ll see somebody who seems to have all of these outward privileges and advantages. And yet inside, they are self critical. They have this constant voice of nagging, self-sabotage going on. And in fact, not only do we have that voice, the brain literally defaults to that voice. And in “Mind to Matter”, I talk about the default mode network, and is called the brain’s default mode network, because when we aren’t actively monitoring something, when we’re balancing our checkbook or doing a spreadsheet or talking to her friend or cooking dinner, then the task positive network, the brain is turned on. 

There’s a whole bunch of sides of the areas of the lateral part of the brain that when we just stop doing anything, when we’re just trying to meditate, for example, or we’re relaxing, a bunch of regions in the satellite of the brain turns on called the default mode network. And the default mode network does two things. It obsesses about the bad stuff of the past, and put it next into the future and says what might hurt me in the future. And that’s the, say our brain’s default.

Tom McCarthy

Wow.

Dawson Church, PhD

And so there are these people, and they want healing, they want to improve their lives, and yet, they’re just obsessed with these negative default thoughts. So that’s the big challenge in the healing realm is we know that’s the way the brain works. How do we counteract the brain’s negativity bias and the default mode network?

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, and that was great. I didn’t even know that we were gonna learn that today. And I’ve got a lot more questions.

Dawson Church, PhD

How many hours do we have?

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, I know exactly, but like how are people, what can they do to, you know, now that we all know we’ve got this default network that’s obsessed about the future in danger and what might go wrong. I mean, what are you coaching people to do? What are things they can do to, what do they, do they turn it off? Do they just refocus on tasks? What can they do?

Dawson Church, PhD

Well, a big clue came when neuroscientists, we had to study Tibetan monks. And these Tibetan monks have the ability to shut out the default mode network really, really quickly. In fact, they are told, for example, that they’re about to be tested. And the researchers are gonna look at what their brain patterns are when they’re in these events states. And when they’re told they will be tested, before they are being tested in one second, they shut up the default mode network.

Tom McCarthy

Wow, wow.

Dawson Church, PhD

Now that takes 10,000 hours of practice. And so all you do, Tom, is just 10,000 hours of

Tom McCarthy

That’s it.

Dawson Church, PhD

that go to a lot of street. Take vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. Spend about 20 years.

Tom McCarthy

Oh, come on, come on. There’s gonna be . Yeah.

Dawson Church, PhD

So anyway, about 15 years ago, I was at a conference, and all these great speakers were there. And this guy called Rollin McCraty, who is a chief scientist with HeartMath, and Dota Spencer

Tom McCarthy

Yeah. 

Dawson Church, PhD

who slipped in. And we were all talking behind the scenes in the speaker’s lounge about these great techniques. We know EFT is just fantastic, reducing stress. HeartMath makes you really relaxed. We know that neurofeedback and biofeedback, mindfulness, all of these things are effective. And I had this idea. I said, what happens if we do them all in sequence? And so the next year at the same conference, I said to the organizer, you know, I’d love to just have you indulge me. I want to stand there in front of the whole group. I want people to do some EFT tapping, EFT acupressure,

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, yeah.

Dawson Church, PhD

tapping of pressure at acupuncture points,

Tom McCarthy

Yeah.

Dawson Church, PhD

Aand do a little bit of self-hypnosis. Then do HeartMath heart coherent breathing. Then do a couple of mindfulness techniques altogether. So we did that, took about six minutes. And I stood there in front of the room, Tom, and I was astounded as people not only went into coherence and of these deep meditative states by stacking all these things on top of each other, the whole room went into coherence with each other.

Tom McCarthy

Wow.

Dawson Church, PhD

So I have a room of hundreds of people, and they’re all coherent. And I’m getting more now into these group flow studies. Look at how we can focus

Tom McCarthy

Nice.

Dawson Church, PhD

On our families, our teams, and groups. But anyway, so what you have to do is you have to do use evidence-based techniques. The way I was taught to meditate, like when I was 15 years old, I went to live on a spiritual community. And the meditation master said, “All you do is close your eyes and steal your mind.”

Tom McCarthy

Okay, how do I do that?

Dawson Church, PhD

But I can never steal my mind. And I still asked him, I meditated this morning for about an hour. And, you know, it’s been 50 years since I was in that ashram learning to meditate. And I still can’t steal my mind. So what happens is if you use these techniques, the HeartMath technique, the self-hypnosis technique, the tapping mindfulness technique, stack them all on top of each other. And without stealing your mind, you’re using these seven evidence-based, science-based techniques, and automatically you drop into the steep state. On that first experiment at that conference, many people came to me and said, Dawson, this is the first time in my life,

Tom McCarthy

Yeah.

Dawson Church, PhD

I have ever been able to meditate successfully. And so that’s the answer. Is use silence.

Tom McCarthy

That’s awesome.

Dawson Church, PhD

And it turns out that most of the stuff people try and do like closing their eyes and stealing their mind, doesn’t work. You close your eyes, the default mode network cranks up. And you’re worried about the laundry and the shopping and the kids,

Tom McCarthy

Yeah.

Dawson Church, PhD

and all those other stuff. So you have to use science-based techniques. When you do, you very quickly drop into those elevated emotional states. And you’re super relaxed on a physical level.

Tom McCarthy

I love it. So it’s more about activating something than trying to stop something.

Dawson Church, PhD

Yes.

Tom McCarthy

I love it. I love how you stack those techniques. That’s awesome. And I know a lot of people will be now looking at EFT Universe and HeartMath. We had Debbie Rozman was on,

Dawson Church, PhD

I love her, yeah.

Tom McCarthy

as part of it, yeah. And some of these other techniques to be able to stack and learn more about. Hey, let’s dive into the science now. So you talked about evidence-based techniques. Today, there’s tools like we were talking earlier. Gene ships, MRI scans that can measure the effects of energy healing. Talk to us a little bit about that, and the research you’ve seen, and the research you’re doing.

Dawson Church, PhD

Well, what these modern tools are being used for is to study the brains of those who have done the 10,000 hours, and then to reverse engineer those states and train people to get there really, really fast. And so we can quantify change that way. We know, for example, that EFT is effective. But how effective is the EFT? We know that meditation is effective. How effective is EFT for certain kinds of conditions, emotion-based conditions? So for instance, in a group of women who struggled with weight loss, they had a BMI of 33. So they were in the obese range. 

And when the researchers showed them pictures of food in an MRI, pictures of chocolate and pasta and cake and candy, their emotional midbrain and other parts of the brain to do with craving were highly active. After six weeks of learning to use EFT at the simple energy therapy, they put them back in the MRI and then the emotional midbrain was totally completely still. All those parts of the brain to do with craving were not activated by those same images of crave foods.

Tom McCarthy

Wow.

Dawson Church, PhD

So we’re now gonna use things like EEGs and MRIs. We can study the brain and the workings of the brain. And so we’re now able to map exactly which parts of the brain light up, and which parts of the brain become dormant. In one study I did using MRIs, it was a brilliant, it was a large-scale randomized control trial, other than meditation technique. And so we had 24 volunteers, 12 in one group, 12 in meditation group. And we had them learn the meditations for only a month. 

We had them use only a month of meditation. We measured them, and their brain function before and afterwards. Afterwards, after only one month compared to the control group, when I got the scans back, all the MRIs, I got chills. It showed that default mode network, it was like, turn off the light switch on the brain.

Tom McCarthy

Wow.

Dawson Church, PhD

That part of the brain was just shut down. And the other cool thing is that the compassion part of the brain, it’s called the insula. And it receives the pro social emotions like empathy and compassion, gratitude, joy, love. The insula of those people after one month was lit up like a Christmas tree.

Tom McCarthy

Wow.

Dawson Church, PhD

And so we’re using these advanced tools now to look into the brains of people and see what’s going on. At the level of epigenetics, these are powerful epigenetic interventions. I did one study with a group of veterans who had severe PTSD, flashbacks and nightmares. I remember being in the Sacramento Veterans Hospital, just in a room, explaining this, recruiting patients there. And Thomas, it was so hard, even filling out the forums to ask them about their experiences, triggered flashbacks and nightmares, just sending out the forums and in a safe setting.

Tom McCarthy

Wow.

Dawson Church, PhD

So these people were so triggered by this. After 10 sessions of EFT, those flashbacks disappeared. The nightmares disappeared. Their levels of symptoms dropped by more than 50%. And genes to do with inflammation, the regulation of inflammation were dialed way up. Genes to do with immunity were dialed way up.

Tom McCarthy

Wow.

Dawson Church, PhD

And the stories that we had. Maybe we had like one young man who had been in Iraq. And one of the experiences there shortly after he got there was that he had a group of friends, had been through basic training with them, got to Iraq. He began to work as a medic. And then one of his friends was killed. His friend was shot through the head. And so he had the job, this young medic in his mid twenties of cleaning the uniform of his friend to send it back to his next of kin in the US.

And the smell of the uniform and of the helmet was so bad that this young guy trying to clean his friend’s helmet was literally in the medics hat. And the stench was so bad. He had to run outside and take a breath, take a deep breath, then run back inside, clean the uniform a little bit, and then run outside to get another breath ’cause the smell was so intense.

Tom McCarthy

Wow.

Dawson Church, PhD

And I was tapping with him, doing acupressure EFT, tapping with him on this terrible, terrible trauma. And his emotion was 10 at a 10. He was just as triggered as could be. And of course, he had a lot of other bad experiences in Iraq as well.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah.

Dawson Church, PhD

All of these helping to produce that high level of PTSD. And his numbers just dropped steadily as we tapped. It was amazing. And then I ran in to begin about three months afterward after that. And I said, let’s talk about the helmet and about cleaning the uniform. And he said, then he had a whole different take. He said, “I’m so glad I was the one to clean the uniform “because I knew him. “And I now realize it was my act of service to his family “to get to clean the uniform.”

Tom McCarthy

Wow.

Dawson Church, PhD

In psychology, we call it a cognitive shift.

Tom McCarthy

Yes.

Dawson Church, PhD

Cleaning the uniform has gone from a tragic loss to an act of service, an act of love.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah.

Dawson Church, PhD

And that means over and over and over again with traumatized people, whether they’re Rwandan genocide victims, whether they’re Haiti earthquake survivors, whether they were… We worked with people at school shooting sites. We worked with over 20,000 veterans. And we find that story repeated over and over and over again. So these techniques are powerful. And again, they’re literally changing the expression of your genes.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, I love it. And so it’s not amnesia. He still remembered the event, but he didn’t have the same feeling, the same emotion, the same just, you know, terror or whatever he was experiencing there. It’s being able to see it and feel, wow. It was my final or a final act or an act I could do for my friend and his family. That’s really beautiful, right? You know, these things happen in our lives and we don’t control necessarily what happens all the time. But we can shift the way we think about it and the way we feel about it in an EFT. And that’s a real shift that if you would have done an MRI on his brain, his brain would have been different, right?

Dawson Church, PhD

His brain would have been different. The emotional sentences brain would have been different. The attention parts of his brain would have be different. I discussed several networks in my book “Bliss Brain”, and showed how they’re all changed by meditation. And several of them are changed by tapping. And the cool thing is that when we practice these techniques over and over again, then that process of experiencing those elevated states fires those neural networks repeatedly. Then thanks to the miracle of neurogenesis and adding neurons and adding siblings speed, those neural bundles, those states become stable traits. 

Now you aren’t just feeling happy, you are happy person. You know, just feel creative sometimes, and then it goes away. You are a creative person. And then you are just resilient, occasionally. You build a super resilient brain. So when the pandemic comes, or when the financial crash comes, or when you lose your house or your job, or the people who die around you, things are just gonna have life happens.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah.

Dawson Church, PhD

You want that neural wiring of resilience, and you want it to be hardwired into your brain.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, when the pandemic came, honestly, it didn’t freak me out. It was, I mean, you know, my business, a lot of my business traveling and speaking was wiped off the table. But we reinvented the business, and we had our best month ever in April, and not traveling. Like all virtual. So yeah, this is really amazing stuff you’re talking about. But, you know, in our day in time, Dawson, everybody goes, okay, I’ll meditate today. I better feel better tomorrow. And it’s not, you know, it doesn’t. You know, it’s a nice. You’ll get some benefit from one meditation. You’ll get some benefit for tapping, you know, once on one thing, but it’s cumulative. It adds up. That’s the important thing for people to understand, like give it time, right?

Dawson Church, PhD

Yeah, that’s why I have been doing my best to turn people into drug addicts, morphine, Ayahuasca, Oxycontin, all of these things. I’m really focused on making people as addicted as possible. And what we found is that…

Tom McCarthy

I know where you’re going with this, by the way. What do you mean? What do you mean? Yeah.

Dawson Church, PhD

I’m one of the world’s most famous pushers. And what I do is I, first of all, get people addicted to dopamine, ’cause dopamine is your basic reward neurochemical. When people have heroin or cocaine, they have a big surge of dopamine, and it activates the brain’s dopaminergic reward system. It’s at the base of the brain. It involves a structure called the nucleus accumbens. And when those people shoot up with heroin or cocaine, they have a beam trough that actually gives you a surge of dopamine. So that’s when people get addicted to these drugs. And if you do meditation, like I tell to do it in “Bliss Brain”, your dopamine level can rise up to 65%.  Your endorphins go up. 

Endorphins are just the synthetic morphine. It’s a synthetic form of your body’s natural endorphins. You make endorphins in your brain if you do the right techniques. And your body’s natural endorphins are three times as strong as synthetic morphine.  So you’re getting serotonin, which has the same chemical structure as psilocybin, magic mushrooms. Like when I took magic mushrooms in September, I thought, well, what’s the deal here? I took them. I felt the effects of magic mushroom interesting. It was about, took me about a third as high as I get just in meditation every morning.

Tom McCarthy

Yes.

Dawson Church, PhD

People don’t realize you can get psilocybin, you can get heroin and cocaine, you can get alcohol and chocolate. All these things just and dodged honestly in your own brain with the right kind of meditation.

So that’s what people do. And then when they do that, Tom, the hooked. One lady woke up at a live workshop. One of the last ones that did in 2019 before the pandemic. And she said, “Dawson, I did the meditation the first time, it worked.”And so I said, I’m gonna do this every single day “for 30 days.” And I said to her, well, that’s great. You made that commitment. And what day are you on right now? She said, “I’m on day 47.” And I thought, great, she’s helped. She’ll never stop. And that’s what happens

Tom McCarthy

Yeah.

Dawson Church, PhD

I become addicted to these amazing feel-good ecstatic. You know, you read Rumi and you read some Catherine. You read these amazing people through history. And they’ve been in these extraordinary states? It’s because of all these neurochemicals flooding their brains.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, without the side effects of heroin or morphine.

Dawson Church, PhD

Yeah.

Tom McCarthy

I mean, you get all this beautifulness from it without the, you know, because it’s manufactured inside of you. You’re manufacturing, not injecting something or ingesting something. I love that. Well, I know people right now are rushing off to their buy on Amazon or wherever buying “Bliss Brains”. So make sure you do that if you haven’t done that. Hey, one of the things that you and I have talked about is the quantification of healing effects. 

Now, demonstrate that advanced energy healing methodologies are orders of magnitude more effective than conventional therapies. You just talked about it a second ago by comparing it to drugs. Like you took psilocybin. You’re like, okay, this is nice. But wow, I get more than this just from my meditation. But talk to us a little bit about that. The effectiveness of some healing strategies, energy healing strategies compared to conventional methodologies.

Dawson Church, PhD

Yeah, and so you need to find the energy healing methods and also the conventional methods that work for you.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah.

Dawson Church, PhD

There’s no one size fits all in healing. But what is one size fits all is stress reduction. You definitely want to reduce your stress. Like Tom, I was just looking at my hair going gray, or your hair gray or gray.

Tom McCarthy

Hey, wait a minute now. I saw of spot there, yeah.

Dawson Church, PhD

So today, a study was published, showing an amazing study. They did a whole bunch of mouse studies, and they looked at the graying of the hair of these mice. And they just finished a human trial now. And they found that this is really, blows my mind actually. It’s just brand new. It was actually published today. So they found that when people got stressed, they were examining hair follicle pores. And they found that when they got stressed at work, their hair literally began to go gray. 

And they could measure it to the day they were doing daily measurements to these people, and then little minute margin, your hair grows each day, sort of seeing, is it turning gray at the very root or not? And what happened today? Was it stressful? So stress, stress, stress, day one, day two, day three. Day one, day two, day three, gray coming out of the skull.

Tom McCarthy

Wow.

Dawson Church, PhD

The cool thing that they discovered, which I never would have predicted. So those people went on vacation, and the scientists kept measuring them. And what happened when they released their stress? Their color began to come back. 

Tom McCarthy

Okay, all right. So I have hope. I gotta start releasing some stress here.

Dawson Church, PhD

So stress, that’s the one size fits all. And so meditation is great for releasing stress. And then you want to meditate in the morning, and then do the EFT tapping whatever you are stressed. And in terms of what is of magnitude, here’s an example. So there are these very elaborate calculations that researchers do called meta-analysis, where you gather together all the clinical trials for a drug or for an intervention, and you put them all together into a giant combination. 

And then you extrapolate the information from all of those clinical trials. That’s a meta-analysis. And they also measure the efficacy of that therapy using meta-analytical tools. And on that scale, they use two, means this therapy has a demonstrated effectiveness. Five is it’s moderately effective, and eight is it’s very effective.

Tom McCarthy

So we want the higher number then?

Dawson Church, PhD

We want the high number.

Tom McCarthy

Okay.

Dawson Church, PhD

We have the meta-analysis and says, this technique, is it a seven or a six or an eight? That’s pretty good. Eight is hitting it out of the ballpark in terms of therapy. So that’s a scale for meta-analysis to some effect. Five, moderate effect, eight, big effect. For depression, EFT on that scale of two, five, and eight is a 12. For anxiety on that scale of two, five, and eight, EFT is a 13.

Tom McCarthy

Wow.

Dawson Church, PhD

On for PTSD, like those flashbacks and nightmares, or that young soldier with uniform, for that, EFT on that scale of two, five and eight, it’s 29.

Tom McCarthy

Wow.

Dawson Church, PhD

I’m reaching my hand out.

Tom McCarthy

That’s amazing.

Dawson Church, PhD

It’s, you know, six one-hour sessions. And we see these guys and women just dropping their stress and reclaiming their lives. I mean, chills, as I tell you this,

Tom McCarthy

Yeah.

Dawson Church, PhD

Cause I know I’ve seen some veterans heal now. It’s just, it’s nothing short of miraculous. So we have these hugely effective healing tools available to us now.

Tom McCarthy

That’s amazing. That is so cool. Hey, tell us, I’ve got another question in just a minute. But tell us, you’ve talked about EFT. You are one of the renowned experts on EFT. How can people find out more about EFT? Where can they go?

Dawson Church, PhD

Well, every year, we update the official manual for EFT. It’s called the EFT manual. So you can get a copy of the manual. You get a copy of the mini manual, which is the abbreviated manual on my site, EFT Universe. There are also thousands of stories by people who have used EFT. One funny one, Tom, was there’s a problem, the psychological diagnosis called trichotillomania. And someone asked me, is EFT helpful for trichotillomania? I couldn’t even spell trichotillomania. 

So I went on our search engine there on my own website. Trichotillomania, thousands of stories. And there were many stories about trichotillomania in our people who have used EFT successfully because it’s a wonderful resource and go at EFT Universe, and that’s the fastest place, sorted by the manual, and download it. And it’ll have your tapping in a few minutes, and you will feel the changes of your body.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, I know I use it all the time, and it’s so amazing because you’re right. I mean, you have to, you learn the sequence at first. And it’s like, okay, where do I tap? But once you learn it and it doesn’t take that long, it’s so effective right away.

Dawson Church, PhD

Yes.

Tom McCarthy

Absolutely love it. Yeah, so eftuniverse.com is where they can go?

Dawson Church, PhD

Eftuniverse.com, and then you could also get a free session with a live practitioner ’cause we have an app where you can just go on online, work with a practitioner. Your first session is free, and that website is tappingplace.com. And you go there, there are practitioners standing by 24/7. Then literally, you’ll punch your video on switch. 

They’ll punch the video on switch, and you’ll be working live on your problem with a trained and qualified clinically EFT practitioner in real time. So there’s tons of resources like that. And see you want to use EFT for simple problems by yourself. Don’t go use it on psychological trauma or childhood abuse, things like that, alone. You want to work with the practitioner for those serious issues.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, you talked a lot meditation too. “Bliss Brain” is a great book to read around meditation. Do you have any other tools that people can access?

Dawson Church, PhD

Yeah, go to blissbrain.com to get the book. And also there are eight free meditations at blissbrain.com. And they’ll give you that sense in your body. All that dopamine surge, serotonin surge, you’ll feel it. And that will turn you into an addict as well. 

Tom McCarthy

Awesome, I love it. I love it. Last question, and then we’ll do some closing comments. But one of the things you’ve also mentioned to me is that this concept of energy healing is becoming mainstream. It used to be kind of like that was out there. But now institutions, organizations, even governments. Talk a little bit about what is going on, and what your hope or what you see for the future.

Dawson Church, PhD

Yeah, it is so encouraging ’cause we’re training people now in hospital systems, we’re training people at the veterans administration. And the veterans administration classified it officially as a recognized therapy in 2017.

Tom McCarthy

That’s EFT, EFT?

Dawson Church, PhD

EFT, yeah.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah.

Dawson Church, PhD

That opened the door to be used with many veterans. And so increasingly, these techniques are in primary care. And what I really want to see happen is a combination of good primary care, and also energy therapies in primary care. For example, there are studies of EFT with people recovering from surgery, and they recover much quicker if they aren’t stressed. So it’s useful there. There are ways that people or women in hospital before they go to labor and childbirth and using EFT there, and the much less stress, the delivery and childbirth tends to be easier as a result. So I just love seeing all the ways which it’s being applied in primary care. 

One study was of nurses in a COVID ward, and these nurses had super high levels of burnout and stress because I mean, during the height of the pandemic, they were working double shifts. They were just, and they were seeing people die all the time. I mean, they were so stressed. After 20 minutes of EFT, just done online, there is significant drop in their stress levels. So I really want to see it get into institutions more and more and more. Why not? I mean, why not go see your doctor for pain? And then when you’re there in the waiting room, pull out your app, and we have an app called Tapping Place as well, go to the Tapping Place app, do a little tapping script for pain. 

When you get a diagnosis, maybe it’s a serious diagnosis, then use EFT to reduce your stress. You don’t have both the diagnosis, and a high stress from the diagnosis. So I want to see EFT pervasively used for stress reduction, and I want to see meditation in hospitals as well. We should be offering every single patient the opportunity to spend the first part of their day, calming themselves. It lowers your heart rate, improves your heart rate variability. And in two clinical trials I did with my research team, and the one, a weekend on meditation plus some tapping raised people’s levels of immunity, immunoglobulins. And these immunoglobulins are the little antibodies produced in your body that stick to the spike protein on coronaviruses, and they mobilize them.

Tom McCarthy

Wow.

Dawson Church, PhD

Those immuno bodies rose 37% in a weekend of doing this.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, wow.

Dawson Church, PhD

In a week, they rose 130%. They more than doubled. So your immunity, you want to be in hospital. I mean, they’re all used, you know, antibiotic-resistant bacteria and viruses. You want to have this tool to raise your immune system really high at peak when you go to hospital or you’re sick. So I so want to see it used widely in institutions.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, if anybody watching this has an illness, you know, something, a chronic illness or a scary illness, one of the most valuable things you can do, like Dawson said, don’t have the diagnosis and the stress like, okay, diagnosis’ fine. And by the way, you can create a placebo effect in your mind, right? We don’t have to buy into the scariness of that. But by reducing the stress, you give yourself a much better chance of letting that immune system work and heal. 

But it takes a little work, and it takes tapping. It takes meditation. It takes these things that you can do. And they don’t take a lot, you know, you don’t have to do them 24 hours a day. A little bit of your day put into it will allow you to naturally thrive and be happy. And thank you so much for just letting people know that. Your work has helped so many people.

Dawson Church, PhD

It’s all right.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, so blessed to have you on here. Any final thoughts? Anything that you want to make sure people remember? I mean, I hopefully will remember everything you said, but if you were to pull out something or just remind them of something, what would it be, Dawson?

Dawson Church, PhD

Do me a favor right now. Grab your cell phone, pull up your calendar program, and enter in the time you’ll wake up tomorrow morning, and make an appointment to meditate just for 15 minutes tomorrow, and make it a recurring appointment. I know I use Google Calendar and it says, when I put an appointment in there, it says, make this a recurring appointment, hit yes. And then, it’ll ask you how many times, how many times is it repeat? And the correct answer is forever.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah.

Dawson Church, PhD

What you wanna do, you don’t ever have a habit. Now in “Bliss Brain”, I have all the science behind why you do it first thing in the morning. And there’s a lot of neuroscience behind that that I won’t go into that now. But it’s important to do it first thing in the morning, before you do anything else. Don’t do other things, then do this. That’s the thing to do. Learn tapping. It takes two minutes to do the tapping routine. You then have a stress reduction tool that’s good throughout your day. Those are the two great pieces of self care.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah.

Dawson Church, PhD

If you do that, one study looked at people who have optimistic and positive emotions. They lived, in a 30-year study, huge, massive epidemiological study. The people with positive emotionality lived 10 years longer than those who have the negative. And another study of Alzheimer’s plaques, they found that people who were negative thinkers, they had more Alzheimer’s plaques in their brains. And the more negative they were, the greater the amount of Alzheimer’s plaques in the brain. You literally clear Alzheimer’s plaques from your brain by doing these stress reduction things. So you want that kind of high cognition in your, as you get older, you want to be healthy, happy, and have your mind be at peak. So love yourself enough to do the stuff. Just set that alert right now, and then use the meditation. 

All that stuff is free on the web. We’ll make sure you get links. And then use those links. Use that, it’s called eco meditation, use it in the morning, tap during the day whenever you’re stressed. And again, mind to matter, you will be lowering cortisol. You will be lowering other harmful neuro chemicals like adrenaline. It will be boosting your immune system. You’ll be boosting human growth hormone, DHA, all kinds of wonderful things as well, and you will have a much longer happier life. So that is my strong recommendation and watch.

Tom McCarthy

That’s amazing, yeah, I think. And I’m just gonna pile on top of that. I mean, it makes total sense that a happier person, their body’s gonna want to thrive and live longer, right? If you’re native and your mind and body are like, hey, let’s check out a little early from this party. But we can change that. It doesn’t matter if you’d been negative and you’ve got lots of fears and anxieties. You can change it. Meditation and tapping changes it. And the other thing I like about meditation, you’re right. You know, I love setting that habit ’cause the first time you do it, you’ll get some benefit and feel good. But it’s that cumulative effect where it is like a drug and you don’t want to not have it. I think either you or maybe it was Joe Dispenza. 

I remember talking about how we spend so much of our energy, you know, giving and doing and acting. And meditation’s where we get to call it all back in to create. And so it’s such an important time of our day. And people have heard it a million times. You know, you gotta meditate, you gotta meditate. And yet still so many people don’t take the time. They don’t schedule it on their calendar and make it a must, like you just suggested. So that is such a great suggestion.

Dawson Church, PhD

Take your drugs first thing in the morning.

Tom McCarthy

Take your drugs first thing in the morning, I love it. Dawson, I love you. You are such an amazing human being. Thank you so much for blessing us with your presence in this summit. And I encourage everybody to check out Dawson’s work. It is evidence-based. It’s the real deal. It absolutely will work for you. Dawson, thank you again so much for being on board.

Dawson Church, PhD

Oh, it’s a pleasure. I love sharing this. It’s just a joy to share every day. I’m privileged to be here. Thank you.