London - My ten-year-old is watching me from the door, looking bemused. I’m sitting at the end of my bed gently tapping parts of my body in a sequence I repeat ten times.
The only thing that makes this scene slightly less embarrassing for her is that I’m doing it in private rather than on the bench outside her school.
“Interesting,” she says, like David Attenborough describing a rare encounter with a strange endangered species. I hold up a book for her to look at as I tap and watch her roll her eyes.
She doesn’t care that I am waving around a book that guarantees it will change my life. A book that claims it can alleviate stress, cure pain, banish addictions, fight phobias and relieve exhaustion.
It describes itself as so “revolutionary” that it holds the key to “emotional freedom” and a life of fearless happiness. I want some of that, obviously.
And this book even comes close to claiming its techniques can help cure cancer or, at the very least, enable sufferers to live longer. Now those are serious promises.
The author, Nick Ortner, says he has been using his tapping methods to help those affected by the Sandy Hook tragedy. He is helping to heal the community of Newtown, Connecticut after the mass murder of 20 schoolchildren and six teachers last December. Indeed, The Tapping Solution is already on the New York Times bestseller list just a week after publication. So it deserves to be tested properly.
But I’m a cynic. At the glossy magazine I edit, we’re sent books which promise to have “the answer” for a stressed-out generation battling with recession, family woes and all manner of health issues on a daily basis.
Books such as Awaken The Giant Within or Master Your Panic And Take Back Your Life. I haven’t even mentioned the diet ones, the career ones or anything by Oprah.
I don’t think any of those books gave us anything we couldn’t work out ourselves. Want to lose weight? Eat less and move more. Got depression? See a GP. The secret to being successful? Work harder.
But (oh, the irony) even a sceptic like me still holds out hope for the book that really does deliver on the stress-free living promise.
“Scratch any cynic,” as the quote goes, “and you will find a disappointed idealist”.
I have four children aged two to ten, a diabetic dog that could pop its clogs at any minute, ailing relatives to care for and a full-time job with 33 staff to manage.
Sometimes at night when my enormous to-do list stops me sleeping and I’m battling my fourth cold that week, my chest starts to feel so tight I think my heart may burst out of it.
The ringing in my ears gets worse, my head aches and my eyes twitch. I fear the morning because my day starts when the toddler rises at 5am, yet I still struggle to fit everything in by school drop-off. Being able to multi-task is a curse.
I’d love to be able to handle life more calmly - without feeling a failure or relying on three coffees before the dawn chorus. The Tapping Solution says it can help. But can I, the world’s biggest disbeliever, embrace a book with such a ridiculous title?
Can I trust a book that explains at great length why tapping repeatedly on acupuncture points will cure anything from post-traumatic stress to disastrous weight gain? Actually, after a week of tapping away, I think the answer is yes. Let me explain how you do it. Before you tap, you need to work out your MPI (Most Pressing Issue).
So I settle for: “I don’t have enough time. I feel overwhelmed and drained.” An MPI could be anything from “I can’t stop smoking” to “my back is so painful it’s stopping me sleeping”. Basically, it’s the thing ruining your life right now - but the book devotes eight chapters to different potential MPIs, from losing weight to making money, and how to deal with them.
Then you rate the issue on a scale of one to ten in terms of how it is affecting you. Anything over five deserves “tapping out”.
For the next five minutes, you tap on eight acupuncture points in the following order: eyebrow, temple, cheek, nose, chin, collarbone, underarm and head. As you do this you repeat a sentence, which tackles your “limiting beliefs”. You say: “I feel overwhelmed and drained but I deeply and completely accept myself.”
I felt silly saying this because as I tapped away I wanted to say: “Get a grip”, but here’s the clever bit.
As you tap you start to think through the situation - it is almost enforced meditation. As the days pass you tap with a more positive sentence “I choose not to feel like this” or “I choose to believe that if I don’t get it all done I am not a failure and a rubbish mother.”
Tapping helps change your language, so you say “could” rather than “should” for example. The author believes this sets off a physiological change and sends out chemical signals which train your brain to be more positive.
After two days tapping, I felt significantly calmer. Most of my tapping was done in the loo as I didn’t want the children to YouTube me or send off a home video to You’ve Been Framed to win £250.
I also tapped watching Peppa Pig at 6am beside a bemused two-year-old. I kept the blinds drawn so the commuters walking past the kitchen window wouldn’t see my odd ritual and call an ambulance. I thought about tapping in my office at work but the fear of discovery was too great.
At first the tapping made me angry. It irritated me to say things out loud, and I found it tough to focus. My mind would wander to the pile of washing that needed doing.
What became clear is the more you repeat something, the more true it becomes. A lot of us fear that failing in one area of our day-to-day lives - skipping the gym or forgetting to stack the dishwasher - means we have failed overall, but if you keep telling yourself that today you choose not to tick everything off the to-do list rather than that you have failed to do so, it starts to make you feel calmer.
When I began I also felt profoundly down for some reason, but as the days passed I was cheered. It was free; no one need know I was doing it. I slept better and my headache disappeared.
The tapping sends electrical impulses through the body, according to the author, which “clears blockages”. I don’t know how this works but it seemed to for me.
In the book there are many case studies: Mary the water phobic, who dipped her toes in the pool after one tapping session; a 50-year-old lung cancer sufferer who went into remission after four months of tapping; a woman with chronic pain who tapped herself better and a breast cancer sufferer with insomnia who slept through after one day of tapping.
These may or may not be credible stories (I’m sceptical about the cancer remission) but there is science to back up the claims. Still, I think a lot of it is simply the result of us wanting it to work, especially in cases of extreme illness where all other alternatives have been tried.
But for what it’s worth I’m a convert. Tapping seems to flick a mental switch, asking your subconscious to solve your problems for you.
And after all that is when self-help works best, when it’s delegated. - Daily Mail
* Lorraine Candy is editor in chief of ELLE magazine