Dealing With Emotional Challenges

Are you stressed, worried or anxious about something that challenges you? Can’t get it out of your head? Trouble sleeping? Comfort eating? Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)? Suffering after-effects of trauma? Read on; EFT Tapping has answers for you.

Whatever challenge you are dealing with, at the heart of it there will likely be some fear or worry, some emotional pain or behavioural programming related to upsetting current situations or past events.

EFT has been successfully applied to a variety of everyday and more serious challenges. Find a list below of challenges people have come to EFT Devon for help with.

EFT your ideal tool

EFT is your ideal tool to use to reduce the intensity of either emotional or physical pain, tension and stress – basically for any of life’s challenges that threaten to overwhelm you, for any adverse feeling at all. With EFT, you will feel calmer and clearer about the challenge and it will make it all feel easier.

When you get curious enough, ask the right questions, any and every challenge will break down to specifics that are “tappable “(ie to which EFT can be applied).

Research using brain imagery (fMRI) has shown acupoint stimulation to calm the part of the brain responsible for stress responses or fight/flight/freeze1.

Your EFT Practitioner will guide you through a succession of rounds of tapping, breaking down the challenge as you go, into specific smaller chunks such that it is easy to focus on one small point or “aspect” of the problem at a time whilst soothing the brain’s stress response with the tapping (acupoint stimulation). Research studies have now been repeated, showing that EFT is consistently effective in reducing levels of the stress hormone cortisol2. People always remark how much calmer and more relaxed they feel after tapping.

For traumatic or disturbing emotional memories, experienced practitioners are adept at helping you with specialised and gentle EFT Tapping techniques that meet all the criteria for neuropsychotherapeutic memory erasure and reconsolidation3

Can it be applied to my problem?

Here are some of the challenges people have come to EFT Devon for help with:

  • addiction
  • alcohol problems
  • anger management
  • anxiety4
  • anxiety-based conditions, eg OCD
  • autism support
  • auto-immune conditions, incl Crohn’s disease
  • burnout
  • cancer support
  • carer support
  • childhood abuse
  • childhood trauma / high ACEs score
  • chronic pain
  • confidence, self-esteem/self-worth
  • depression5
  • difficulty with decisions
  • emotional eating
  • exam stress or fear
  • fatigue
  • fear, phobias
  • grief, bereavement
  • insomnia, sleep issues
  • issues with law of attraction / law of allowing
  • historic abuse
  • long-term condition management / improvement
  • loss, sadness, grief
  • low mood, depressed feeling
  • low self-esteem / self-worth
  • ME/CFS6
  • PTSD7, C-PTSD
  • post-traumatic stress states
  • problems at school
  • public speaking
  • recovery from narcissistic parenting
  • recovery from narcissistic relationship
  • relationship issues
  • sadness, loss
  • sleep issues
  • smoking cessation
  • sports performance issues
  • stress-related illness (about 85% of all GP visits)
  • tired all the time
  • weight or eating issues
  • work performance issues
  • workplace stress

Can I do it on my own?

At first you will likely need help from a practitioner to chunk down to the specifics of the problem or challenge We don’t advise you to go-it-alone from the outset (ie self-help only, such as an app or YouTube only) or expect to get results from EFT without further training, for anything beyond tapping to calm yourself in the moment and managing to ‘take the edge off’ things when you feel upset (simple emotional first aid technique).

Getting a first taste

You can also get a first taste of EFT at a free tapping group here
or an introductory workshop here

Next steps

Your ideal first step would be to book a course of sessions with a practitioner. Read more here

If you are serious about transforming your life and always being able to make anything easier, combine your course of 1:1 sessions with the full EFT Levels 1&2 training course

Money-back guarantee

Such is our confidence in EFT that we offer a money-back guarantee on the first session. If you at the end of the session feel that EFT holds absolutely no benefit for you, we will not charge for the session.

We do this because EFT will seem very new and unusual to those with no prior experience of Energy Psychology and you may be hesitant to make a financial commitment, worried whether you will be wasting your money.

With our first session money-back guarantee you can try out a session safe in the knowledge that if at the end of the session you were to feel that you wouldn’t be able to benefit in any way from EFT you need not pay.

So why not give it a try? You have nothing to lose! (and much to gain!)


  1. Feinstein, D. (2012, August 20). Acupoint Stimulation in Treating Psychological Disorders:
    Evidence of Efficacy. Review of General Psychology. Advance online publication. doi:
    10.1037/a0028602 ↩︎
  2. Stapleton, P., Crighton, G., Sabot, D., & O’Neill, H. M. (2020). Reexamining the effect of emotional freedom techniques on stress biochemistry: A randomized controlled trial. Psychological trauma : theory, research, practice and policy, 12(8), 869–877. https://doi.org/10.1037/tra0000563 ↩︎
  3. Ecker, Ticic and Hulley, Unlocking the Emotional Brain: Eliminating Symptoms at Their Roots Using Memory Reconsolidation, Routledge, 2012 ↩︎
  4. Clond M. (2016). Emotional Freedom Techniques for Anxiety: A Systematic Review With Meta-analysis. The Journal of nervous and mental disease, 204(5), 388–395. https://doi.org/10.1097/NMD.0000000000000483 ↩︎
  5. Nelms, J. A., & Castel, L. (2016). A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized and Nonrandomized Trials of Clinical Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) for the Treatment of Depression. Explore (New York, N.Y.), 12(6), 416–426. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2016.08.001 ↩︎
  6. for more information see article EFT Tapping for ME/CFS and Long Covid https://internationaltappingmonth.com/aug221/ ↩︎
  7. Stapleton P, Kip K, Church D, Toussaint L, Footman J, Ballantyne P and O’Keefe T (2023) Emotional freedom techniques for treating post traumatic stress disorder: an updated systematic review and meta-analysis. Front. Psychol. 14:1195286. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1195286 and PTSD. Read full article (open access) https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1195286/full ↩︎