Driving stress ....

I was driving into Newcastle the other day when a car travelling in the opposite direction pulled across me to turn into a side street. I wasn’t travelling fast and was able to brake to avoid a collision. I was startled, able to utter “What a *#!ing idiot!!!”, but the initial shock soon passed (I thank EFT for improving my ability to cool down quickly) as I drove on.

After a while I noticed I was saying “What a *#!ing idiot” to myself quite a lot. As if the impact of the incident had passed but my judgement of the driver hadn’t. As I continued to drive I used the Fingertip EFT method to work on the feeling using “What a *#!ing idiot” as the reminder phrase. A couple of rounds and there was no charge left.

This got me thinking about using tapping for ‘small issues’. If we’d crashed, or had a very near miss, then I’d have had a load of tapping to do. That didn’t happen the only thing I was left with was this little judgemental phrase rattling around in my head. Why bother dealing with it?

In EFT you enquire of the client how ‘intense’ some emotion or thought is on a scale of 0 to 10. This is sometimes called the Subjective Units of Discomfort or SUDs scale. I think discomfort is the right word, to have any negative reaction there must be a level of discomfort in the body.

Think about some embarrassing situation you were involved in … you probably know you were embarrassed because you can feel it in your body, perhaps your heart ‘sinks’ or your ears go pink.

Your thoughts change your biochemistry, which effects your body, those sensations are then experienced as feelings. Then to be aware of an irritiation there probably has to be some little discharge of stress chemicals into my system, the effects of which I’m picking up in my experience.

If so, every little disturbance is drip, drip, dripping, stress hormones into your system. In the good old days you’d work them off, a bit of manual labour would burn off the excess adrenaline, and your physical systems would go back to normal. These days, in your car, or in front of your computer, you just have to sit there and take whatever stress hormones come your way from irritations and annoyances. You get the stress but not the means to relieve it.

Of course, if you know EFT you can use it to relieve these little upsets and their aftermath. A bonus effect is that you are systematically reducing the likelihood that you will be triggered by the same events in the future. Two benefits for the price of one.

P.S. The day after I wrote this post, I was driving into town when a driver decided he wanted to drive so close to me that the VW emblem would be engraved on my rear bumper! I was annoyed, but it took me the best part of a mile with this guy stuck to my bumper, to realise that I was annoyed, then I tapped and took care of the feeling, using the fingertip method.

This is one of the challenges of using this stuff: once you are in your trance of annoyance, or whatever, it’s difficult to break out of it enough to do something to resolve it. It’s not only knowing how to tap, but having the awareness that you’ve slipped into a negative state and the ability to snap out of it long enough to tap it away.