My Simple Life Hack for Dealing with Trauma and Anxiety

Last week, I was driving back to my home office after meeting with a business client. It had been raining, drizzling, and was foggy all morning long. Traveling on the roads on days like these always causes me mild to intense anxiety, so I tend to be overly cautious. My biggest fear, and perhaps you have this one too, is losing control of my car on a slick street, having a wreck, and hurting myself or someone else.

On this particular rainy day, I left my meeting and was on the freeway for no more than a few miles when a pickup truck barreled past me at what seemed like a high rate of speed. Granted, it may have seemed fast because I was traveling so cautiously, stressing about having an accident.

Little did I know that my greatest fear was about to manifest right before my eyes. As adrenaline started coursing through my veins and my anxiety rose, I anticipated what might happen. And then it did.

That truck that had passed me suddenly began to swerve out of control. First to the left toward the center cement median, then to the right as we approached a bridge overpass. Then it swerved left again and back to the right. The truck’s back-end looked like a fishtail swishing back and forth.

When it fishtailed back to the right, that was it for that truck. It slammed sideways into the overpass’s cement wall, causing the left wheels to come off the ground and all the contents in the bed to scatter all over the freeway. There were plastic milk crates and PVC pipes everywhere. Luckily, the three men in the cab were not seriously hurt.

Even though the accident did not involve me or my vehicle, seeing it happen was almost as traumatic to my psyche. All of the emotions one might expect to have – fear, shock, dread, anxiety, helplessness, out of control – were present and ran rampant through me. The release of excess adrenaline caused my body to start shaking.

In that moment of my physical reaction, I knew exactly what I needed to do to calm my sympathetic nervous system – tap. You see, I am a practitioner of the EFT-Emotional Freedom Technique, also known as “tapping.”  Normally, there is a series through which you tap on the meridian points of the body (like acupuncture without the needles), but I didn’t have time to go through it, plus I was driving through a bad bit of wreckage and rain. With one hand, I began to rhythmically tap on my collar bone with my fingertips and take long deep breaths as the other hand steadied the steering wheel. In less than five minutes, I had recovered from the trauma and felt almost normal again.

The human body is programmed with a fight or flight response to fearful situations, and the body knows to release the appropriate kinds of hormones and chemicals for that purpose. The challenge is, when we have experiences that don’t directly impact us, the body doesn’t know the difference between real – happening to me now – and something happening to someone else. The same chemicals get released.

But, just as the body is programmed to react to trauma, it is also programmed to reduce and neutralize emotional and physical reactions.  Studies have shown that by stimulating the meridians within your body, you can reduce and even eliminate the stress response, restoring the body to a balanced state. By gently tapping on the collar bone, we are using the body’s natural calming meridian to manage the trauma and assure that the experience does not get lodged in our emotional psyche and create lingering anxiety.

So, the next time your fight or flight hormones and chemicals are released, try tapping gently on your collar bone and take deep, cleansing breaths. You will notice a difference in no time and will have helped your mind ward off the negative memory that causes anxiety.

For a two-minute video showing how to do this simple life hack, watch this video.

For the full tapping script and diagram of meridians, please subscribe to my email updates, here.

A copy will be emailed to you shortly after subscribing.

I hope you have an amazing and stress-free day. Let me know if I can help you in your quest for emotional self-mastery.