Nick Ortner on how The Tapping Solution ‘sends a calming signal that helps to rewire the brain’

Virgin Radio

19 Jul 2022, 11:26

Nick Ortner joined the Chris Evans Breakfast Show with Sky to talk about The Tapping Solution, and to give a demonstration of it.

Nick Ortner is the CEO of The Tapping Solution, a company with the aim of bringing Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) into the mainstream. Whilst maintaining mental focus on a negative issue or emotion, tapping involves using your fingertips to tap on nine specific meridian points of the body. Nick explained: “What the latest research shows is that when we tap on these places in our body while we’re stressed, anxious, overwhelmed, we send a calming signal to the amygdala in the brain, the fight-or-flight part of us, the part that’s stressed, the part that’s hurried, the part that’s spilling their coffee… it sends a calming signal that helps to rewire the brain and find peace within.”

Tapping is based on the combined principles of ancient Chinese acupressure and modern psychology. Nick told Chris: “We’re going a little bit beyond talk therapy, which is wonderful. And when we talk about our feelings, and when we express what’s going on in our lives, we can certainly create change, [but] a lot of people find that they get stuck. So they’ll say, ‘I’ve been talking about this issue for a decade, and it doesn’t seem to get better. I’ve been dealing with a fear of flying, I’ve been dealing with this anxiety, I’ve been dealing with this thing that I can’t seem to break through’. And what the tapping does beautifully, is it brings this body that we have in.”

Nick - who is the producer of the documentary film The Tapping Solution, and the New York Times bestselling author of The Tapping Solution - continued: “We tend to forget that it’s not just our mind up here. That it’s our whole body. So when we bring the body in, and when we combine the tapping with the mind, we send that calming signal. We sort of break that pattern of what’s happening in our brains.

“We all clearly know that there’s emotional issues associated with our bodies. If you ask any traditional medical doctor, ‘Does stress play a role in illness and disease?’ They’ll all say yes. They don’t know what to do about it, usually, but they’ll say, ‘Yeah, if you’re stressed, if you’re overwhelmed, if you’re overworked, that’s going to play a role. That’s going to beat down your body, and it’s going to open the door for other things to happen.’ So, we’re really looking to combine these things here, and to serve as a complementary technique. One of the things that I love about tapping, it’s not like, ‘Well, you do tapping, you don’t go to the doctor, right?’ No, you bring it in, and this is why doctors and psychologists and psychiatrists from around the world bring this tool in, because it’s so accessible.” 

When speaking about the advantages of tapping, Nick told Chris: “It’s so quick… If you’re anxious, if you’re overwhelmed, if you’re having a rushed day, if your mind won’t stop moving, and I say, ‘Hey, why don’t you sit down and close your eyes for ten minutes? Why don’t you meditate?’ It’s really hard to do. Because this is such an active process, a lot of people have more success with it.”

Nick added: “Instead of just being angry, or just being anxious, and not moving through it, we do that while tapping, in order to let go of those emotions.”

In 2007 Nick founded The Tapping Solution website alongside his brother and sister, Alex and Jessica, and a podcast followed. In 2018 The Tapping Solution app launched. It features several guided tapping meditations and talks users through how to carry out effective EFT. Nick told Chris about how The Tapping Solution focused on helping frontline workers during the pandemic. “So, we donated over 22,000 memberships to nurses and doctors, and everyone who was on that frontline, doing that extra work,” he said. 

“We created specific tapping meditations in the app for before a shift and after a shift, just trying to get their energy settled before a shift. I mean, think about it, you’re in the thick of it, that work is hard to start with, and then you add the lockdowns and the stress and the places that were hit hard with Covid. So, preparing them from the day, and then at the end of the day, letting go of the day. So, these were just processes to calm down the body, to let the body know that it’s safe, to turn off that fight-or-flight response. That’s really what’s happening.” 

At the end of the chat, Nick demonstrated some exercises live on air that Virgin Radio listeners were able to join in with. You can watch it here:

For more information about The Tapping Solution, visit: thetappingsolution.com

For more great interviews listen to  The Chris Evans Breakfast Show with Sky, weekdays from 6:30am on Virgin Radio, or  catch up on-demand here.