Compound interest arises when interest is added to the principal, so that from that moment on, the interest that has been added also itself earns interest.”
It’s so easy to forget that we have EFT to use as a day-to-day tool to make life a bit easier.
When disaster strikes and we have major upsets or trauma to deal with it’s obvious that we need to deal with it. Major problems are easy to spot and hard to ignore, with EFT you have an excellent tool for working with these difficulties, but what about the day-to-day stuff?
Many of the minor discomforts and problems that we experience on a day-to-day basis seem too small to bother about, we tend to get on with things and not bother tapping on it.
Most of these incidents aren’t so bad, a little dip in our mood and then we are back on track. A lot of life’s challenges give you repetitive and annoying little jolts of stress or distress that we work through every day.
Let’s imagine that you have a work colleague who has a gift for upsetting you – something in the way they speak or look just gets you annoyed.
If you meet for just a few minutes each day it’s not so bad, you only have to speak to them for a few minutes and then it’s over until tomorrow.
At first glance that doesn’t look too bad, it’s “just one of those things”. But it is not just one of those things it’s just one of many of those things, which added up, over time, can cause you a lot of stress.
Each stressful situation you go through prepares you (in a bad way) for the next one.
We are conditioned beings. What happens in any situation prepares our body-mind for the next time we are in a similar situation. We might get apprehensive or stressed, even when we think about the next time we have to go through that kind of experience again.
Dentist’s waiting rooms are full of people being stressed about something that hasn’t happened yet based on their previous experiences of drilling and filling.
Vicious Circle
This stress response pattern leads to a vicious circle.
a difficult situation …
* leads to upset and stress …
* leads to apprehension of the next time you are in that situation …
* leads you to be in a less resourceful state when next in the situation …
* leads you to have more upset and distress …
* and so on …
Compound Suffering
You might be able to handle one stressful situation at a time with ease, but if you add them up it doesn’t look so good.
Try this little experiment.
Get a calendar, mark in difficult, recurring events, such as:
Problem meeting at work...
* Weekly dinner with the in-laws
* A problem customer
* Having to deal with a troublesome neighbour.
* Mark the last time this event happened on the calendar.
* Now mark the next event when it is due
* And the one after that
* And the one after that
* And the one after that
* And so on …
These situations add up, don’t they?
Let’s imagine that your stressful event takes just ten minutes and only happens once a week.
Ten minutes are not so bad. Anyone can survive ten minutes of discomfort, can’t they?
But 52 weeks of ten minutes discomfort adds up to nearly nine hours of distress.
Imagine nine full, uninterrupted, hours of that kind of stress.
If you got that all at once would you do some tapping to relieve it?
It gets worse. It’s not just this one example of repeating stress, we probably have a lot of little stress events in our lives repeating at regular intervals and compounding their stress over time.
Happily there is a way out.
Compound Freedom
Let’s imagine that just 30 minutes of tapping cleared that reaction.
If you did that, then for just a little effort up front, you could have eight and a half hours less distress in a year.
Not only that the less triggered and more resourceful you can be in that situation the more likely it is to go well.
Tapping on the upset as it occurs will probably diminish the stress of each situation as it occurs as you get more and more able to handle it. Over time the stress response is reduced and all the later occurrences of this situation will be easier, leading to much less stress.
With a bit of tapping you can transform the vicious cycle with a virtuous one.
Virtuous Cycle
This cycle starts with the same event but goes in a different direction.
a difficult situation …
* leads to upset and stress …
* cleared with EFT …
* leads to more confidence about the next time you will be in that situation …
* leads you to be in a more resourceful state when next in the situation …
* leads you to have less upset and distress than before …
and so on …
That’s much less stress in your life and much more freedom for a small investment of tapping.
Putting it into practice
Is simplicity itself.
Review the last week...
* Pick a modest (at first) recurring stressful incident.
* Take care of it with EFT
* Take care of any residual stress the next time it happens
* Rinse and repeat until the stress response is diminished or eliminated.
* Pick another incident and repeat the process
In the time it takes to complain about something that has happened to you, you could take steps to make sure that it doesn’t happen in the same way again or you could allow your stress levels to increase again.
What’s the first change you could make to invest in your happiness?
Andy Hunt is an EFT International Accredited Certified EFT Master Trainer & Advanced Practitioner living in the North East of England. He is also an NLP Trainer and Practitioner. He works with people who give themselves a hard time and get in their own way. He is the author of the book “Getting Out Of Your Own Way – Finding and Releasing Unconscious Blocks with EFT” and the creator of the free e-class “The Tapping Habit”. Visit him online at www.practicalwellbeing.co.uk.
From the EFTfree Archives, which are now a part of EFT International .
Originally published November 5, 2011.
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