Learn To Change Your Brain With Tapping & Meditation

When we practice techniques like meditation and EFT tapping (Emotional Freedom Techniques), we greatly reduce our stress levels. This in turn changes brain function. In this insightful talk we learn the 6 basic brain waves, which ones are predominant in stress, and how they're associated with hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. We will also practice a short tapping routine designed to calm stress and promote healthy neural growth.

Transcript

Hi,

My name is Dawson Church.

I'm the author of the bestselling science book,

The Genie in Your Genes.

I played a role in many scientific studies,

And most of my career,

Most of my life,

I've been fascinated by the kinds of techniques that can help us relieve our suffering.

I remember being a child and seeing my friends,

My relatives,

People in my community suffering from anxiety,

From depression,

From traumatic stress,

And really wondering what could be done to help release that suffering.

I also wound up with a great deal of stress and anxiety and depression myself.

And so for many years I was focused on learning tools and techniques that could help me as well as those around me.

Over the course of all this exploration,

I found that two techniques are especially powerful,

And those are meditation and tapping,

Also called EFT or emotional freedom techniques.

The way EFT works is very simple.

You simply tap on seven to twelve acupuncture points rather than using needles.

You think about what bothers you,

Whether it's a childhood event,

Whether it's an adult worry,

Whether it's something from your past,

Some future concern,

Something in your present.

You think about things that bother you,

And while you focus on those things,

You apply pressure,

Acupressure with your fingertips,

To the seven to twelve acupuncture points.

What's now been happening over the course of the last decade in research is we're getting a glimpse of what EFT does inside the body and inside the brain.

If you look at most of my early research,

Focused on anxiety,

Depression,

And traumatic stress,

We were looking at symptoms like flashbacks,

Like panic attacks,

Like nightmares,

Like disturbing thoughts,

All those characteristics of not being psychologically at ease.

And we found over the course of a great deal of research that EFT is extremely effective for addressing those psychological barriers and problems.

In fact,

One study I did of 216 healthcare workers really shifted my outlook.

We tested healthcare workers like doctors,

Nurses,

Chiropractors,

Psychotherapists,

And social workers at five different professional conferences.

And we found that over one day EFT workshop,

Measuring their anxiety and depression before and after,

That their levels of psychological distress dropped by 45% over the course of the day.

So,

That is a huge result from just a single day of focusing on what's not working in your life and applying this acupressure based method.

At this point there are over 100 clinical trials of EFT published in peer reviewed journals,

And the most exciting new frontier of research is looking below the level of psychology to the level of physiology.

What's happening in the body,

And especially what's happening in the brain,

As we tap,

As we meditate,

As we interrupt our old patterns.

One of the primary ways in which biologists measure stress is using hormones.

And the two primary stress hormones in the human body are adrenaline and cortisol.

An adrenaline is your fast acting stress hormone,

And cortisol is your slower acting master hormone,

And it controls the activity of many other hormones and many genes in your body.

So researchers look at levels of cortisol,

And whether they're high or low.

Typically people experiencing negative events will have high levels of cortisol,

And if you have a mind consumed by worry,

By stress,

By fear,

You will then drive your cortisol levels high,

Even when nothing bad is happening around you.

Now your body is meant to handle high levels of cortisol,

High levels of adrenaline for short periods of time.

If somebody cuts you off in traffic,

If you have a near miss with another human being on an escalator,

If somebody annoys you,

You might have a rise in cortisol and adrenaline.

But our bodies are meant to process these and release these stress hormones very quickly.

If you have high levels of stress hormones,

Hour after hour,

Day after day,

Month after month,

Year after year,

Then it has a bad effect on your body.

And we tend to have high levels of stress hormones because we think about bad events,

Even when no bad events are actually happening.

So many people I test have high levels of cortisol,

Even when nothing bad is going on.

One man I remember testing as part of a bigger study had a level of cortisol that was extremely high as he talked about an event in his life.

A few years earlier,

He'd been in a relationship and he felt as though this woman was the love of his life.

The relationship didn't go well.

Eventually it fell apart.

And he had this memory he described to me of taking her to the airport and watching her as she left to board her plane.

As he remembered that event,

His eyes filled with tears,

His face was flushed,

He was deep in grief.

And that event had happened eight years before.

So again,

Our bodies meant to handle these rises in stress hormones over the course of a few moments.

But if a month later,

Six months later,

A year later,

Eight years later,

We're still agonizing about things that might have been that didn't go well in our lives.

We still have unresolved trauma from our childhoods.

It has a large effect on our cortisol levels and a large effect on our bodies.

A huge scale study of adults showed that people with unresolved childhood trauma,

People who had many adverse childhood events in their lives,

And people who had those events and hadn't resolved that emotional trauma,

50 years on had high levels of cancer,

Heart disease,

High blood pressure,

Diabetes,

And many other diseases.

So again,

These were psychological impacts,

Psychological stresses,

That decades later they were producing physiological effects in people's bodies.

So what we study is what effect stress reduction in the form of meditation,

In the form of tapping,

In the form of acupressure is producing in your body.

Along with colleagues of mine at the University of Arizona,

Tucson,

And the California Pacific Medical Center,

I did a landmark study of cortisol.

We divided patients into three groups.

One group got rest,

One group got an hour of regular talk therapy,

And one got an hour of EFT.

We measured their levels of anxiety and depression before and after that one hour therapy session.

We also measured their levels of cortisol,

And we found that in the EFT group,

The anxiety and depression levels of those patients dropped twice as much as it did in the talk therapy and the rest groups.

We found that the cortisol levels of those who got EFT dropped 24% over the course of just one hour of acupressure.

So we know from that and many other studies of the physiology of EFT that it's producing a potent effect in your body,

Reducing those levels of stress hormones.

In fact,

When I tested that man who was remembering that event eight years earlier and the love of his life leaving at the airport,

We found that after EFT,

He told the same story and his cortisol levels after acupressure were 50% lower than they had been beforehand.

So EFT is producing a big effect not just in your mind in the form of your stress level,

In the form of symptoms of anxiety and depression,

But also in your body at the level of cortisol.

My most recent research has been into brain waves and seeing how EFT shifts the way in which the brain works.

There are six primary brain waves.

The lowest brain waves,

The slowest brain waves are delta and theta.

And those range from zero to four cycles per second in the case of delta to four to eight cycles per second in the case of theta.

Above that,

A little bit faster,

Is the alpha range,

Which goes from eight to 13 cycles per second.

Now that measurement of cycles per second simply means how quickly groups of neurons are firing.

If the firing at a slow race like one cycle per second,

That kind of slow pace means that they're just firing one time every second.

One,

Two,

Three,

Four,

And so on.

And the speed of firing is a way in which groups of neurons in the brain coordinate their activities and communicate with each other.

Think of it as an audience clapping.

If people are clapping slowly,

That means one thing.

If they're clapping fast,

That means something different.

Same thing with the speed of neural firing in your brain.

So groups of neurons are firing at different rates in your brain,

And these are the way in which neurons coordinate activities across the whole of your brain.

So we study these six brain wave patterns,

And we know from a century of research what these mean.

The slow waves are associated with healing.

Cell repair and especially cell communication is associated with healing in the frequencies of delta and theta.

Then above alpha are higher levels,

And one of those frequencies that's particularly studied is called beta.

Beta brain waves are fast brain waves,

And those fast brain waves are important when you're thinking.

When you're focused on a task,

When you're navigating through the streets of a new city,

When you're focused on learning a new language,

When you're trying to read a menu in a language you don't understand,

Anything that makes the demand of your brain generates beta waves.

But if you're anxious,

If you're stressed,

If you're upset,

You have a lot of high frequency beta waves,

And so high frequency beta is the signature brain wave of anxiety.

And we found in research that high frequency beta actually inhibits healing and cell repair inside your body.

So these slow brain waves of delta and theta facilitate and increase cell repair,

While the fast brain waves of beta inhibit cell activity and inhibit cell repair.

Now what happens in the brains of people who meditate,

People who learn to calm themselves,

And people who tap is extremely interesting.

We see their levels of slow to fast brain waves start to change after time.

So as they practice reducing their stress,

Moment after moment,

Day after day,

Not only do their cortisol levels go down,

But their brain waves start to change as well.

And over time,

These alterations in the pattern of firing of those neurons in their brains starts to literally change the structure of the brain itself.

This is a phenomenon known as neural plasticity.

Our brains are evolving,

Changing and growing all the time,

Depending on the information we put through them.

If you look at a power cord going to your cell phone,

There's a little skinny power cord that can charge your cell phone.

It's a small low power device.

But if you want to charge a computer,

You'll see there's a bigger,

Thicker power cord for that device.

If you take a look at the clothes dryer in your home,

You'll see there's a big,

Thick cord going to your clothes dryer,

Because your clothes dryer needs lots of electricity,

Lots of energy to create the heat to dry those clothes.

Same thing with the neural bundles in our brains.

If we are passing a small amount of energy through a neural bundle,

We can use just a tiny neural bundle.

But if we're passing a lot of information,

A lot of energy through a pathway in our brains,

Our brain that needs a big neural bundle to carry all that energy and all that information,

What your brain is doing is dynamically reshaping itself every day,

Every moment based on the way you're using it.

So if,

For example,

You have a lot of high beta activity in your brain often,

If your habitual mode is to be stressed,

Have a life full of drama,

Have a brain that has a lot of anxiety,

Then all the circuits that carry those signals get larger and larger and larger,

And as that is the frequency you're carrying most commonly in your mind,

It then becomes the hard wiring of your brain.

What I'm seeing as I study the brain scans of hundreds of people who meditate and who tap is that as they shift their level of psychological functioning,

They get their brain shift to change that configuration.

Their brains literally change the way they're structured to reflect the way they're being used.

Mind is becoming matter.

What people think about the software of what they pay attention to becomes the hardware of their brain.

It's a powerful process that's happening in your brain every single moment of every single day.

In my book,

Mind to Matter,

The Astonishing Science of How Your Brain Creates Material Reality,

I describe the case history of one particular researcher and what happened to him when he set out to shift his behavior.

In chapter one of Mind to Matter,

I tell the story of Dr.

Graham Phillips.

Graham Phillips is an astrophysicist,

But he also works as a TV reporter,

And he was a skeptic when it came to meditation,

Tapping,

And all of these psychological technologies.

But he read some of the research on how good they were for you,

So he decided to commit to an eight-week mindfulness program.

Now,

Before he began his program,

A group of researchers at Monash University gave him a whole group of physical and psychological tests.

These included measuring the volume of each segment of his brain.

He then went on his eight-week mindfulness journey,

And after that he went back into the university.

They gave him the same battery of tests,

And they measured how he changed over the course of eight weeks.

It didn't take eight weeks for the changes to become apparent to him.

After just two weeks,

He mentioned he was much calmer in meetings at work,

He was less susceptible to road rage,

He was feeling much less stressed in his life.

He began to feel all the benefits of mindfulness after just a couple of weeks.

But when those researchers got him back into the lab after eight weeks and measured his brain,

They were astonished.

The volume of various parts of his brain had changed measurably in just eight weeks.

Some parts changed by 3%,

Other parts changed by 5%.

But the part of the brain,

The part of Dr.

Graham Phillips' brain that changed the most in eight weeks was a part of the brain called the hippocampus,

Which is responsible for turning short-term into long-term memories and many other memory functions.

The part of the hippocampus responsible for emotional regulation,

It's called the dentate gyrus,

That part of his brain in that eight weeks had grown by 22.

8%.

Now I'm going to say that again because that's a hard number to comprehend that the brain could grow by 22.

8% in just eight weeks.

But that's exactly what the researchers at Monash University found.

In just eight weeks of changing his behavior,

Changing the way he handled the world,

Changing his stress level,

His brain had rewired itself drastically and his dentate gyrus,

The part of the hippocampus that handles emotional regulation,

Had grown by 22.

8%.

That's how quickly you are shifting the hardware inside your skull as you tap,

As you meditate,

As you use these tools to reduce your stress level.

So these aren't just ways of feeling better.

These aren't just ways of approaching your life in a more rational way.

These aren't just ways of feeling good subjectively.

They're producing objective changes in the very hardware and structure of your brain.

You might look like the same person a year from now,

But based on the way you've used your mind,

The way you've used your consciousness,

Your habits of tapping,

Your habits of meditation,

You will have literally changed the structure of your brain,

Not just eight weeks from now,

But eight months from now,

And throughout your life you are literally rewiring your brain based on what you do with your mind.

Once you have developed a brain that is resilient,

Once you have practiced tapping,

Meditation,

Day after day,

Week after week,

Year after year,

Made it a consistent practice in your life,

And you have a brain where those circuits are hardwired for emotional resilience,

For emotional well-being,

For stress reduction,

Then you're able to meet the challenges of your life with resources,

Neurological resources,

Biological resources,

That allow you to master the challenges of whatever happens in your life.

It is so worthwhile cultivating these habits,

And my wish for you is that you take a look at your life,

You take a look at where you're growing your brain,

You take a look at where you're going in terms of brain development,

And you make a commitment to meditating,

To tapping,

To making these behaviors part of your everyday life,

And then to growing a brain that gives you the best possible life.

Let's now do some tapping and some reflection on these themes,

And set ourselves up to cultivate this awareness,

To cultivate this type of life,

And to set up the conditions in our lives that create a healthy and resilient brain.

So let's start by tapping on the side of our hand.

Tap on the side of either hand,

Right below the joint that anchors your little finger.

Tap with three fingertips on the other hand,

And while you tap there,

Say either out loud or silently to yourself,

I accept myself.

I accept my life the way it is.

I've been stressed much of my life.

I've been way too stressed much of my life.

And even though I've spent so much of my life in stress,

I accept the way I am,

That I'm doing my best.

I'm doing my best even though I've spent so much of my life in stress.

Good,

Now take a breath,

Then take two fingers,

Place them where your eyebrow meets the bridge of your nose.

Tap on that eyebrow point,

Say out loud,

Stress.

All the stress I've had in my life.

Tap on the side of your eye,

Stress.

All the stress I've had in my life.

Tap under the pupil of your eye on the bony edge of your skull.

Say,

A lifetime of stress.

Tap under your nose.

All the stress.

Two fingers,

Tap under your lower lip.

All the stress.

Tap where your collar bone meets your breast bone.

All this stress.

A lifetime of stress.

Finally,

Tap under your arm about four inches below your armpit.

Say out loud or silently,

A lifetime of stress.

Tap on the side of your hand again,

Say,

And even though I've had this lifetime of stress,

I make healthy choices now.

Even though I've been way too stressed much of my life,

I make healthy choices now.

Keep tapping on the side of your hand and say out loud or silently,

The choices of my past weren't always perfect.

The events of my life were stressful and even though I've had all this stress in my life,

I choose healthy thoughts and habits now.

Even though I've had a stressful life,

I make new choices now.

Tap with two fingers where your eyebrow meets the bridge of your nose.

Healthy habits now.

Side of your eye.

Release stress.

Under your eye.

Healthy habits now.

Under your nose.

Release stress.

Under your chin.

Healthy habits now.

Where your collar bone meets your breast bone.

Release stress.

Under your arm.

Release stress.

Side of hand.

I now release a lifetime of stress.

Now breathe deeply and think about what you could do every day to create a healthy mind and a healthy brain.

What I do personally every day is I wake up and meditate.

I don't meditate for a long time every day.

Some days it's just 10 or 20 minutes.

But I do meditate every single day.

I also begin by tapping and releasing anything and everything that stands between me and inner peace.

So think about what your personal commitment might be.

Can you do that?

Can you commit to waking up every morning and tapping to release and then meditating for a few minutes every day?

I'd recommend you make that minimum commitment to your brain health.

And whatever it is you can commit to,

I want you to think about what that thing is,

What that behavior is,

What that concrete activity is.

And I want you to write it down now.

So write down what you will do every single day by way of a commitment to reducing your stress.

If you have a day with many stressful events,

Maybe it's tapping off for each one.

Maybe you'll take 30 seconds to tap each time you have a stressful event in your day.

Maybe you work in a busy workplace and you can't be seen tapping every half hour,

Every hour.

You can go to the bathroom and close the door and tap to release stress.

Whatever it might be,

I want you to make one written commitment right now of a concrete activity you will do without fail that will support your peace of mind and the growth of a healthy brain.

Now let's work with those words you've written down.

Take a look at those words.

And as we're tapping along together now,

Feel free to substitute your exact words for my words when I say this new habit.

So for example,

If I say the words this new habit and your new habit is to tap whenever you're stressed,

Then substitute the words tap whenever I'm stressed.

Got it?

Okay.

Start with the side of your hand.

Say out loud,

I am committed to my brain health.

I'm committed to a healthy brain and a healthy mind.

And I now embrace this new behavior,

This new habit.

I accept myself with this new habit.

This new habit is easy.

This new habit is me.

Tap on your eyebrow point.

This new habit.

Side of your eye.

This new habit.

Under your eye.

This new habit.

Under your nose.

This new habit.

Under your lower lip.

This new habit.

Collarbone.

This new habit.

Under your arm.

This new habit.

Side of your hand.

This new habit.

Now say out loud,

I feel some resistance to this new habit.

It's a new habit after all.

It's not what I'm used to.

It might be hard to start this new habit.

I might resist this new habit.

I now feel that resistance and I let it go.

Feel the resistance and let it go.

For a healthy brain,

For a happy mind,

I let the resistance go.

Tap your eyebrow point.

This resistance.

Side of your eye.

All this resistance and really feel that resistance strongly.

Under your eye.

All this resistance.

Under your nose.

Huge amounts of resistance.

Chin.

Enormous resistance.

Collarbone.

All this resistance.

Under your arm.

Huge amounts of resistance.

Side of hand point.

And even though I feel all this resistance,

I'm willing to let it go.

A healthy brain,

A happy mind,

Is more important to me than all this resistance.

All this resistance.

All this resistance.

Eyebrow point.

All this resistance.

Side of eye.

This huge amount of resistance.

Under your eye.

So much resistance.

Under your nose.

Too much resistance.

Chin.

Strong resistance.

Collarbone.

Weak resistance.

Under your arm.

Some resistance.

Side of hand.

No resistance.

Keep tapping the side of your hand and say out loud whether or not I feel resistance.

I embrace myself and my new habits.

Okay,

Sit back,

Take a deep breath,

And congratulations on that new habit.

You now have a concrete activity you can take to create a healthy mind and a brain wired for happiness and resilience.

And I urge you to do these things.

What will happen as you do these things is wonderful.

As you gradually shift your levels of those stress hormones,

Like cortisol,

And those high brain waves like beta,

What then happens is that your whole body,

Your whole being,

Your whole physiology gets used to that much healthier way of functioning.

And you change your set points.

We all have set points for hormones,

For brain waves,

For neurotransmitters,

For enzymes,

All kinds of physiological processes in our bodies.

And as we practice a good new habit over and over and over again,

As we tap away the resistance,

As we install that new habit,

Those set points change and gradually you feel used to,

It feels like normal to live in this wonderful,

Happy,

Healthy body.

That is my passionate desire for you.

A happy mind,

A healthy body,

A brain hardwired for resilience,

For happiness,

And to live the best possible life you could have.

Thank you so much for listening.

Thanks for making that commitment.

Please follow through with that every day and watch how not just your mood changes,

But your brain changes right along with it.

Reviews

I feel positive after this. I liked the talk and then the meditation afterwards.

Thank you for re-invigorating my Need to tap to reduce stress… Very timely, thank you so much🙏🏽❤️

This is excellent. I already meditate daily, but I’m going to incorporate tapping daily as well. How long do you recommend for each? Also, I’m curious - the man whose brain changed so significantly after 8 weeks - how much time a day did he spend tapping?

Excellent guidance. Thanks so much for all you do, Dawson. 🙏

Very informative and easy to follow. It was great to learn how to tap while creating a new positive commitment. Thank you

A mindful exploration of how we can improve our brain and body with meditation and EFT, plus immediate, practical application of the technique.

A great beginning, now it is up to me to follow through.

Many thanks for your useful information. I’m giving this ago. Highly recommend 😎

Very clear teaching. Thank you for sharing this important information - including the practical activity at the end 🙏

Thank you for providing the science behind EFT. I have shared tapping with cancer survivors in a meditation class I teach and it’s been very well received.

Dawson I loved your talk. I'll search for it on YouTube so I can share it with all beginners in tapping. Thanks ...love the clarity

This was so helpful. Just following along with the tapping exercises at the end made a difference in my body that I could really feel. Thank you so much for creating this talk. I can already see how this new habit will change my life and how I experience it. 🙏😊💜

Recently a month ago I had a major stroke due to stress . I am going to try a commitment everyday to improve tapping and reduce cortisol in the brain and change my life! Thank you🙏

A great and powerful launch to a new habit! Thank You Dawson 🌟✨🧠✨🌟

This was such an eye-opening learning experience. Dr. Church is very supportive and positive. I appreciate what he has to share and look forward to tapping and meditating daily.

Excellent practice. Nicely paced.

I’m thankful for this informative talk. I’m definitely cultivating this new habit and making it a daily practice.

Excellent! Part of my new morning rituals. Thank you for sharing this important information. 🙏🏽 💕Game changer. 💝✨

Interesring.... My new habit is drinking a sip of water

What a great talk! I learned so much and I especially liked being guided through the tapping technique. I want to do this everyday so I can make my brain more resilient and live my best life. Thank you 🙏