EFT

Have you ever felt tired or hungry even though you just ate and had plenty of sleep? Well this is because of a trick that our body sometimes plays on us. This is called FakeHungry and FakeTired.

I recently attended a weekend of lectures here in London, it's something I'd been looking forward to for a while even though I remember it was sometimes hard to concentrate in lectures at Cambridge. I made sure I went to bed early the night before and had also read about the subject before hand.

After a great night's sleep and a light breakfast I arrived at the venue feeling great. But for some reason about ten minutes into the lecture I started to feel really tired. I felt confused and drowsy and could hardly keep my eyes open.

I wondered whether I had slept well the previous night. I went to the toilet, grabbed some fresh air outside and had a drink of water. That would temporarily wake me up. But I would feel tired again only a couple of minutes after sitting down.

I found this strange and it made me think. Having a lot of success with Tapping has led me to try it on everything. So in this case I tried tapping my tiredness, but I did it in my mind, otherwise I might have gotten some odd looks. This works just as well if you can clearly imagine saying the phrases and tapping the right places.

I started to feel less tired and could easily pay attention to the presentation. I tapped again during the break and again in the evening before I went out. Despite having a drink and getting to bed later than I had intended I felt fresh and awake during the next day's presentations.

That was the first time I really noticed FakeTired - Tiredness You Can Tap (TM). Before I explain what's going on, I'll tell you about FakeHungry.

This time it was me giving the lecture, during one of my weekend seminars. We do a lot of Tapping during these weekends, and don't shy away from intense stuff. This often brings up some bad feelings for people, so I frequently ask "how does everyone feel now? does anyone feel less than great?". Sometimes there are cloudy or foggy feelings, but this time a guy said he felt a bit hungry. It was an hour or so before lunch, and maybe he hadn't eaten that much for breakfast.

A few others said they felt hungry as well and we all laughed when I suggested using EFT on it. But we started to become curious when those people actually stopped feeling hungry. When it was lunch time the first person still didn't feel hungry and he later told me he didn't eat as much as usual as his appetite was smaller.

What's going on?

Our body gives us signals to tell us that we need sleep or food. But these are interpreted as negative feelings. This is so that we are properly forewarned to take action to remedy the situation.

But sometimes those have feelings have become associated with particular circumstances or events. So if I spend three years at University attending lectures while I was tired, hung over, bored and confused then those feelings will return when I enter a lecture room, even if it's eight years later.

Similarly, who knows what our minds associate with being hungry, it could be as simple as "I don't have an empty plate in front of me". We can certainly associate it with sitting in a seminar room. Our minds are wonderfully powerful learning machines, and all it takes is one time when you were really hungry and sat in a chair, to associate sitting down with hunger.

When the association is fired off we start to feel FakeHungry or FakeTired and our body can't tell the difference between those feelings and the real thing.

Even more confusingly, one way to banish FakeHungry is to eat, and one way to banish FakeTired is to sleep. When we eat, our system gets flooded with the feelings generated by digesting food, and these stronger masks the FakeHungry. It could even be that FakeHungry is always there, but we only feel it when the first stages of digestion are passed. Note that this happens way before we start feeling RealHungry.

Sleeping switches off emotions that have been switched on due to associations. This is how powernaps work. It's less about a physical process of rest, and more about switching off the emotional processes that are going on. It doesn't take long to switch them off when we relax and close our eyes, but it also doesn't take long to switch them on when we go back to what we were doing.

Because our survival mechanism has generated it, FakeTired is fear-based. This creates that strange situation where you are so tired you can't sleep. The fear feelings contained within FakeTired keep you awake to deal with possible danger.

You can also tell the difference between FakeTired and RealTired, or FakeHungry and RealHungry by checking whether you can increase their intensity deliberately. You can do this by just thinking of times when you were very hungry or tired.

As I find myself saying so often these days - you might want to tap that.

EFT

Emotional Freedom Technique

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