Last week I had a dental appointment. It was for a routine cleaning, the type of dental appointment I’ve had regularly for decades, so you’d think I’d be okay about it after all these years.
But dental appointments, even for routine visits and cleanings, give me huge anxiety spikes.
As far back as I can remember, I’ve felt nervous about visits to dentists and doctors, but the anxiety got worse at some point during the past twenty years or so. And it seems like it just continues to get more severe as the years pass.
So the anxiety was very high before my appointment last week, but there was one thing in particular that helped bring it down.
I tapped to calm.
Tapping (also known as EFT or Emotional Freedom Technique) is something I learned a long time ago, back in 2008 when I first got involved in energy work. It involves tapping on certain points of your upper body while saying certain things about what’s going on.
It sounds woo-woo and weird. As time goes on, though, more is being understood about exactly why and how it works, and studies have shown what we who have experienced it found out firsthand: tapping can be helpful for a variety of things, including anxiety.
There are definitions, videos, articles, and books out there about tapping that can do a much better job than I can do of explaining or describing it, so I’m not even going to try doing that in this space.
But I do want to recommend my favorite tapping YouTube channel, Brad Yates – Tap with Brad.
Brad’s channel goes back well over a decade and has over 1,500 videos, most of them quite short and all of them easy to follow. When I want to tap about something going on in particular, I’ll visit his channel and input my concern (or problem or issue) into the channel’s search box, and I’ll usually find several videos to fit what I want to address. I simply follow along.
If you’ve never tapped before, it might seem strange or feel ridiculous at first. But it’s easy. It doesn’t take much time at all. And it helps.
I’d say it’s definitely worth a try.
❤
Ginger Simpson White 