Ep #74: Tap Into Calm - This Incredible Technique Will Instantly Reduce Overwhelm

episode summary

Are you overwhelmed by stress and struggling to find effective ways to manage it? Imagine if you could neutralize your triggers and restore calm easily, and within minutes.

Today we explore the power of tapping, a neuroregulatory technique that helps reduce not just mental stress but also calms your physical body. If you're dealing with anxiety, fear, or even unexplained physical symptoms, this episode offers an approach that could transform how you handle stress and overwhelming emotions.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

How tapping can neutralize your most intense stress responses to handle any triggering situation with ease.
A tapping method you can try for yourself to reconnect your mind and body to feel less stressed.
How to use tapping to overcome fears, physical discomfort, and even improve financial abundance.

Press play now and learn how to use tapping to reduce stress and overwhelm in your life, all while gaining a powerful tool to calm your body and mind.

Featured on the podcast:
Kelly Howe coaching
Connect with Kelly on Instagram
The Tapping Solution
The Tapping Solution Documentary Film
The Manifestation Lab (Kelly's podcast)

Listen to this episode on Apple or Spotify!

For the full show notes and transcript, head over here.

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Want to learn more about me or my work? Head to my website at www.michellegauthier.com

Discover practical strategies to overcome imposter syndrome, manage time effectively, and cultivate a calm and positive mindset while setting boundaries and combating negative self-talk in high-stress jobs, all while learning how to say no and prioritize self-care on the 'Overwhelmed Working Woman' podcast.

Music Used: Pop Guitar Intro 01 by TaigaSoundProd, Licensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-licen

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CHAPTERS:

3:07 - What is Tapping?

7:45 - Neutralizing Triggers

15:29 - The Mind-Body Connection

18:59 - Over-the-Counter Tapping

Kelly Howe:
0:00
It helps reduce stress, but not just in the mind. It really helps to calm the physical body down in a physical stress response.
Michelle Gauthier:
0:12
You're listening to Overwhelmed Working Woman, the podcast that helps you be more calm and more productive by doing less. I'm your host, ichelle Gothier, a former Overwhelmed Working Woman and current life coach. On this show, we unpack the stress and pressure that today's working woman experiences, and in each episode you'll get a strategy to bring more calm, ease and relaxation to your life. Hi, friend, thanks for joining us today. Today we're talking about a super interesting technique that has been proven to reduce stress and overwhelm, and it's called tapping, sometimes also called EFT. I've had personal experience with this. I did it with my son when he was having a hard time with anxiety, and then I got tapping from our guest today, Kelly Howe. So Kelly is a coach who focuses on tapping, and she is going to tell us all about how tapping can really neutralize even the most intense stress responses, and a method that you can try for yourself. So she's going to give us some tips on how to just give it a try for yourself and how she uses tapping to help her clients overcome fear and physical discomfort and even improve how much money they make. This was a really fun interview and fascinating to hear what she's doing and how she's helping people change by doing this simple method of tapping. I'm doing it right now you can't see me but tapping on different places on your face and your head and your chest, in a specific order to calm your whole system down.
Michelle Gauthier:
1:46
Before we jump into the interview with Kelly, I want to say thank you again to everyone who has written a review. We are in the top 2% of all podcasts worldwide, which is just simply amazing, and just last week I got another new awesome five-star review from M Wood: "Michelle's podcast is speaking to the challenges that my friends and I face every day. Thanks for providing such a valuable resource. It's worth a listen. Thank you so much for taking the time, m Wood, to write that review, and that is my whole goal is to talk about the challenges that all of you and all of your friends are facing, so that we can feel less stressed and be more present in these beautiful lives that we have been gifted. So, if you haven't already, I would love if you would do a review yourself. If you haven't done one already, okay, now let's welcome Kelly.
Kelly Howe:
2:41
Hello, thank you for having me, and I love talking about stress and ways to reduce it, so I think I'm in the right place.
Michelle Gauthier:
2:46
Yes, you have come to the right place. Who doesn't love talking about stress and overwhelm? Right?
Kelly Howe:
2:51
I know! I think there are people that don't. They think we're actually very strange.
Michelle Gauthier:
2:54
Yes, I know it's true. Okay. So first of all, tell us what tapping is and then, if you don't mind, just tell us a little bit about your backstory, like how did you even hear of it or become interested in it?
Kelly Howe:
3:07
Yes, I was actually just sending somebody a message today talking about this. So tapping is a neuroregulatory emotional release technique and that is a lot of words to say that it helps reduce stress, but not just in the mind. It really helps to calm the physical body down in a physical stress response. So a lot of times when we're experiencing stress, yes, we're having, like, our mind is racing, we feel overwhelmed mentally, but if we really tune into what our physical body is doing, there's a lot of physical symptoms that we can identify and show up. And what tapping does is two things: it helps reduce stress, it helps calm the body down on a nervous system level, but if you use it in the right way, you can actually help to rewire stress responses. And one of the best and easiest ways to explain this is thinking about something that triggers you and you get like a big physical response. EFT can actually, in a very systematic way, break apart that trigger so that you can encounter the exact same thing and feel no physical response to it. So it is incredibly powerful and I used to work as a nurse, which is when I found tapping. Of course, now I'm a transformational coach and I work with entrepreneurs.
Kelly Howe:
4:13
But back in the day I was a nurse working on the floor during doing labor and delivery and I was having a lot of anxiety and at the time I was very immersed in Western medicine and really was convinced that I'm fine, I don't have any stress, there's nothing wrong with me, there's something wrong with my body. I was very convinced that - I'm having tightness in my chest, I'm having bowel issues, feeling sick to my stomach all the time, really nauseated, just didn't feel well a lot of the time. I always had this kind of like low-grade anxiety, shakiness, to me and I was really very convinced that there was something wrong with my body. Well, what was wrong with my body was that I was extremely stressed and I was kind of not in touch with the amount of stress that I was under and I was working as a nurse and I truly had a surrender moment. I was very much not myself. I was angry and lashing out on people and, like I said, just really not feeling well, and I remember crying in bed one night and being like okay, universe, something made me this way. This isn't how I've always been. I've always been very cool, calm and collected and laid back, and it just felt like I wasn't myself.
Kelly Howe:
5:20
And within a matter of a couple of days I started getting emails through a series of events. I signed up for a Hay House newsletter and Hay House, of course, is like a self-help publishing company and I started getting emails about tapping and I thought it was ridiculous. I thought that it seemed crazy. It sounded crazy. My very stubborn ego nursing brain was like if this was real, I would have heard of this, or I kind of pooh-poohed it and was like, well, you know, maybe it's something, but it's just placebo effect. But I remembered that surrender moment and I went ahead and tried it and I just - the first time I tapped I did it on a video and you literally, we'll talk about it here in a minute, but like you, literally just tap on different points on your face and kind of on your chest and on your head. It felt absolutely ridiculous. But within seconds I felt my body start to relax.
Kelly Howe:
6:13
And what's really interesting is when you can get your physical body to relax. A lot of times we feel this after a good workout, right, where you can get your body really worn out and relaxed, then mentally we feel better also. It's like the head stops right, it stops. And so it's another tool to use, like exercise, like yoga, to really get in touch with our physical response, calm our body down, get our nervous system regulated so that we mentally feel better.
Kelly Howe:
6:38
And I like to say what makes this a little bit different than a lot of self-help work is that we actually really look at the problem and how we're feeling, rather than trying to shift just our thoughts to be positive. We go, okay, I can do that and that's useful a lot of the time, but say sometimes we're trying to be positive and we're still feeling that sickness in our stomach or that tightness in our chest. That's our body showing us that, hey, yes, I know you're trying to go through your affirmations right now, but there's something else going on that we need to pay attention to. So that's what tapping does - it really lasers and it targets okay, what is the actual problem, and it gives us a really effective, efficient, useful tool to actually process through what that problem is, whatever that stressor is.
Michelle Gauthier:
7:20
Okay, okay. So I don't know if this is a good example. I'm trying to think of something really simple. So if I'm terrified of spiders, thinking of my sister-in-law who literally is terrified of spiders, tapping would be - you'd have me bring that to mind and I would allow that stress in my body and then you would tell me where to tap and what to say.
Kelly Howe:
7:41
Absolutely, you nailed it.
Michelle Gauthier:
7:43
Tell me what would happen next then.
Kelly Howe:
7:45
You know, we don't need to actually be in front of the thing that triggers us. Usually, if we just start to think about it, even with our eyes open a lot of times, just bringing it to mind, our body will start to react to it, especially if it's a big fear like that. So I would have you start to think of the thing that is triggering. And so we're talking about a spider. But it could be something like maybe somebody is having trouble going live on social media and every time they start to do that, they get like a huge physical response. And so they're like well, I'm not going to go live now because my voice is going to be shaky. I'm going to forget what I'm talking about. You know, it's like they just feel so dysregulated that they can't do it. So I have you think about that thing that's triggering, and then we just start to tap and talk about what you feel emotionally.
Kelly Howe:
8:23
So we would tap and say something like, all this fear, all this fear, all this fear. I would say, what are you actually afraid of? And like, for the person I just did this with in a group session not very long ago, she was like, I'm afraid it's going to jump on me. And so we tap and say I'm afraid it's going to jump on me, I'm afraid it's going to jump on me. It's very repetitive. But what we're doing is really activating that response and then bringing in the tapping as a neutralizing tool to really calm it down. And it starts to beat out those stress signals that are firing through our nervous system and in our brain and we start to be able to think and see the thing that triggers us and not have the physical response. So it just neutralizes it. It's fascinating.
Michelle Gauthier:
9:10
It's so fascinating, it's so cool and I actually have had experience with Kelly doing tapping at a retreat that I went to. I went on a retreat of women business owners, which I talked about on this podcast, so you guys might remember that, and Kelly did tapping with our whole group and it was so cool and fascinating to me because what we were talking about was being afraid to be seen, and so she had us picture, picture yourself being on a stage, picture all the people in the audience, picture what you're going to be talking about and then how stressed are you? On a scale of 1 to 10. And when she had previously started by saying, are you afraid to be seen? How afraid are you to be seen, I was like, oh, one out of 10, two out of 10. I'm not afraid.
Michelle Gauthier:
9:48
I've had my own business. I'm posting on social media all the time. Nothing. But then, Kelly, you pulled that card. I was like, oh crap, now I'm like a nine out of 10. But it was so fascinating to me that as we went through the whole exercise, by the end I could get myself down to a three and picture myself walking out on that stage and giving a talk that made sense and that I could be calm about. In my mind it was crazy to feel I was fine about it. Then I wasn't fine about it. I felt really triggered and then I got back down to being fine about it and it's so neat and that's why I really wanted to have you come on today and talk about this.
Kelly Howe:
10:27
I've gotten so good at triggering people.
Kelly Howe:
10:30
It's what I do for a living and I honestly I'm kind of making light of it, but I do it in a very gentle way, in a way that kind of brings it up so that we can then clear out that block.
Kelly Howe:
10:40
And we were working on being seen. And, of course, you know, most of us get comfortable at a certain level but then, like for you getting ready to do the podcast, maybe you had to break through that next level. And then you know, as we put content out there, a written word, like sometimes we have to break through that again, or putting ourself out there in a different space, it just breaks through a different layer of it. And so, of course, with the group, I had, you guys, imagine being in a gigantic stadium and I think it was like we imagined that Brene Brown was there or something. I really was like okay, really, let's dial this up a little bit, but because we can activate the nervous system, we can also retrain it to feel safe in that environment. And it is incredibly empowering to be able to work through your fears in such a systematic, effective and really rapid way. It's wild.
Michelle Gauthier:
11:28
Yeah, and it feels so safe because you're in your own space and I, at least, tapping with you, I knew that you would bring it back down. You activate triggers but then you bring it back down, so you are always feeling safe as you're kind of going through it. So what are some of your favorite results that you've gotten from with your clients over time?
Kelly Howe:
11:51
One of my favorite things that I like to work with people on is that mind-body-money connection, which, of course, we did on the Wild Expansion Retreat, because everybody has to deal with money. Nobody gets out of planet earth without having to deal with money, and no matter how much we have or no matter how much scarcity or abundance we had growing up, we all have weird stuff around money and it holds us back, it stresses us out and it keeps us from living our fullest life, and so I love working on tapping around money. And the thing that I see over and over again that's so interesting is that people will come to me - I've had the privilege of I have a handful of entrepreneurs that I've been working with really for like five or six years now, and they will come to me and say, I just had this client drop out out of nowhere, and they're like a 10, because it feels like life or death, is my business going to go under, and I can usually get them regulated within a matter of 15 or 20 minutes, and not only that. You know, on the metaphysical level I don't know if you talk about this much on the podcast, but it's like energetically, once we clear out that next level of fear and kind of trauma around money, we drastically open ourself up for like floodgates of abundance to flow to us. So that might sound like really woo-woo to some people, but I have seen this happen so many times it's insane. A nd it's almost like if we can use the wound and the stress to just clear out what's there, then the floodgates open. And I've seen that over and over again with these entrepreneurs where it's like they lose a client, they do some tapping and then all of a sudden they get three clients that are even more aligned and they think they're going to have their worst year ever and instead they have their best year ever, you know. So I love working on stuff like that.
Kelly Howe:
13:30
I also like to share, you know, I have a love for working with people that have kind of strange health issues.
Kelly Howe:
13:37
Also, it's kind of like a side niche that I have I don't really advertise, but people that have, you know, strange pains or chronic illness and if they just are curious about like what might emotionally be going on behind the scenes, to be hijacking my immune system and really, you know, not allowing me to rest and digest and get better. I had a client come to me one time who had really bad pelvic pain. She had been to doctors, and she had been I mean, she'd had surgeries and she'd had all these things done and within a matter of probably 15 or 20 minutes, we had uncovered that it was actually related to an old trauma that she had never shared with anyone, and the birth of her child, which was a very traumatic birth, had actually re-activated the stress, unknowingly, in a very deep subconscious space, had re-triggered the stress around this trauma that had never been spoken about before. So when we were able to tap and, you know, release the emotions behind this thing that happened so many years ago I think I worked with her two times and that pain that was so severe and she'd had surgery on was gone.
Michelle Gauthier:
14:45
That is absolutely amazing. Oh my gosh, how rewarding.
Kelly Howe:
14:52
It is. You know, and I have to say, with the physical stuff it doesn't always work like that. There's an emotional component and a nervous system component to all physical discomfort and all illness, right? So sometimes we get responses like that and that's not the only time I've seen that kind of really rapid release and really incredible response. But sometimes what we see is like a gradual release over time and then people just gradually start to get better. Because when we can kick ourselves out of fight or flight and allow our body to truly rest and digest, we have energy in our body to put towards resources for healing and the body can do what it's designed to do.
Michelle Gauthier:
15:29
Yeah, yeah, that's a great point too. So even if the tapping doesn't heal the thing, it heals your thinking and your nervous system so that you can heal yourself. I talk a lot about the mind-body connection in my coaching, and one of the things that I work on a lot with my clients is being able to know what emotion you're feeling in your body. So if you're feeling anxious, what does that feel like to you? And if you're feeling, I don't know, joyful, what does that feel like to you? And I do think that it is easier to notice your body once you get practice at that, to say, oh, there's something, I know there's something going on with me, because I can feel it somewhere in my body. I was just wondering if you agree with that.
Kelly Howe:
16:14
Oh my gosh. Yeah, absolutely, and unfortunately, culturally, and I think it's getting a lot better with recent generations but we weren't taught to really tune into that feeling or acknowledge it or give value to it. It was just annoying and shut it down and make it go away and suck it up and you're fine, you're fine, you're fine. And so we learned to do that to ourself and be like I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine. And especially for people who grew up in a lot of discomfort and it didn't have to even be wildly traumatic, but like a stressful childhood there was probably a lot of deep physical reaction to that discomfort and we don't have a tool like tapping to help process it and help our body feel safe. So we have really no choice but to just kind of like push it down and move on. And so we get really good at pushing it down and moving on, so much so that we actually start to create a separation between the mind and the body. And so the mind is saying I'm fine, I'm okay.
Kelly Howe:
17:13
This is exactly where I was, by the way, when I was working as a nurse.
Kelly Howe:
17:16
I was like all about like affirmations and stay positive, and I still am.
Kelly Howe:
17:22
I just have this other side too, where I'm like okay, I need to acknowledge what's actually physically going on too, because I got so good at zooming out and seeing the bigger picture and recognizing, like, everyone's role in it and I didn't get really emotional about anything because I could see this broader picture, I could see how things were working out. But there was this other human aching pain inside of me that I had learned to just completely disregard, and so that mind-body disconnect is so real and so many of us are dealing with that. So, yeah, just starting to name like, what do I feel and where do I feel that in my body? Just that awareness alone is enough to start to allow that to process and release. And then there's the stuff that's a little bit stickier, that's been there for longer, and sometimes putting awareness on it is what we need to get in tune with how uncomfortable it is, but it might not necessarily release it in a way that it's like, okay, now I realize that I'm anxious but now what the hell do I do with it?
Michelle Gauthier:
18:21
Yes, yeah, exactly. Now I feel this anxiety, I don't have anything to do with it. That's when you need Kelly, you need your tapping. So if somebody's interested in learning more about this, where should they go?
Kelly Howe:
18:32
Yes, so my website is kellyhowe. co. People all the time ask me if I'm missing the M. No, I am not. It's just dot co. Dot co. Or connect with me on Instagram. It's @kellyhowecoaching on Instagram. Yeah, I mean, definitely I like to connect on Instagram, so check out, you know, check it out there. Shoot me a DM if you have questions about anything and we'll get you set up.
Michelle Gauthier:
18:59
Okay, Sounds good. If you're not taking one-on-one clients at the moment and they just want to know what tapping is, can they just try tapping on their own? Is there someplace you would recommend that they go?
Kelly Howe:
19:08
Yes, absolutely so. I do a lot of educating on my Instagram page, so you'll find some information there about how to tap on your own. One of the resources that I send almost everybody to is The Tapping Solution. They have a documentary which I recommend everybody watch. It's really great. They take 10 people through 10 different issues and you literally see this transformation over a week. But they have a website that has a ton of free resources. They also have a free app and you can download it. It's short, little meditations.
Kelly Howe:
19:38
Absolutely, people can learn to do this on their own. I would say they should. I truly think this is something that eventually will be taught in schools as just regular self-care, and that's kind of what I call like over-the-counter tapping. It's like okay, how can I help process my stress today? You know, how can I take care of myself? How can I recognize where I might be carrying some stress and start to release and remove that or just acknowledge it, right?
Kelly Howe:
20:03
The second, deeper piece of that is we can take it into looking at our wounding in our past and use tapping on that very specific, like working through old memories, to start breaking apart these patterns at a nervous system level from things that happened to us a long time ago, you know so, in the example of the spider, for example. Now that is one of those kind of hardwired fears that a lot of us just have. Like it's just a primal response to that, but a lot of times there's a memory that goes with it where the fear was really solidified. And so for the example of the person that I used the other day, of course, as we start tapping, our memories will start coming forward and then suddenly we have a memory of being in third grade and it's like, oh, no wonder I'm afraid of being afraid a spider will jump on me, because I remember being in third grade and my brother came in the room and threw a spider at me, and that was the memory that really created this big nervous system stress response to the spider.
Kelly Howe:
20:58
So thinking about things like business or at work relationships, things that are triggering us, usually actually come from a very long time ago, and so there are ways to learn how to do that on your own. But I would say, if you're working with stuff in the past, especially if it's really big stuff, you want to work with a practitioner that knows what they're doing, because you want to help yourself. You don't want to re-traumatize yourself, so definitely.
Michelle Gauthier:
21:21
Yeah, yeah, that doesn't sound over the counter that part. No, that's when you got to call Kelly or somebody else.
Kelly Howe:
21:27
Yeah, I will say I tapped on my own for years, like I think three years, before I ever tapped with someone else, and I'm kind of a DIY warrior, like I learned how to do this and was doing probably some memories that wouldn't be advised, so it is possible, if you're kind of that person, that's like no, I'm going to do this. And while I really really think that everyone would benefit from a one-on-one session, I also like to think it's disempowering to tell people that they have to work with someone. So you know, that's the other side of it. It's like, yes, be safe, don't go into places where you shouldn't without support, and you're your own person. So if you feel like you can manage it, then I'm not going to sit here and say, don't, you know?
Michelle Gauthier:
22:09
Yeah, yes, well, I will share one thing and this might be helpful to the moms who are listening is that one of my kids was feeling super, super anxious, like so anxious. He couldn't go to school for a while and tapping was the thing that we tried and we got up and did that proactively every morning for like a week and it didn't solve every single problem, but he went to school. It was enough, and I think for kids especially - it's totally my opinion, maybe there's some science behind this, Kelly - but it just seemed like meditation was really hard for him, especially because he has ADHD. So for him to have something to do with his hands, I think that was a much better way to handle the stress and anxiety than just talking about it.
Kelly Howe:
22:51
I agree, and I'm so glad you brought that up, because I think there's a lot of us running around where we're too dysregulated to actually sit down and just clear our mind and try to meditate. And that goes for adults as well, definitely for a teenager, teenage, boy. There's so many of us that like tried meditation because it does work. It is so powerful and I don't mean to discount it. But if we can regulate our nervous system just a little bit first, a lot of times, then we can sit down and do the meditation. And I'm somebody who can speak to that as well.
Kelly Howe:
23:21
Like definitely have ADD, always have. I mean, I'm not like diagnosed, but if you read the symptom list, I check every single one of them and you know I have kind of a different perspective on it. I know there's a lot of different reasons and causes. One of the things I think that doesn't get talked about and gets missed for kids and adults is that very intuitive people tend to have ADD and I like to think that that's because they're actually tuned in to different things, so that makes so much sense. They're sensitive, and they're tuning into the energy of the room and so of course they can't they can't focus on their teacher, because the kid next to them is really dealing with a lot of stress and so they're kind of being pulled in a different direction.
Kelly Howe:
24:01
So I would say, anybody that suffers from like a really wildly busy mind, definitely try tapping before sitting down to meditate. And, like I said, that's just what works for me. It helps me to kind of like feel calm and then I can sit and, you know, really be in meditation. But I'm really glad you brought that up, yeah yeah, okay, well, thank you so much.
Michelle Gauthier:
24:23
This is such good information and I've brought it up a couple times since I met you and got to know about tapping and there are just so many people who haven't heard of it or like, oh, I've heard of it, but I don't know what it is. So hopefully this will help spread the word and people can get some over-the-counter tapping and reach out to you if they need more than that. But thank you so much, I appreciate it. Okay, Kelly, before we wrap up, I know you have a podcast, so if they want to listen to your podcast, tell us the name and where to find it.
Kelly Howe:
24:50
On Apple and Spotify is the Manifestation Lab Podcast, and that's for those of you out there that do have a woo-woo side and like to explore the mystical. That's what I love talking about, so you'll enjoy it if that's your gig.
Michelle Gauthier:
25:03
If that's your jam, okay, cool, all right. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening today to that fascinating interview. I absolutely loved learning about how Kelly is helping her clients using this tapping solution with everything from physical pain to being scared of something to making more money. Check out the Tapping Solution or Kelly's website if you're interested in learning more about that, and don't forget, if you haven't done it already, to please leave us a review. It helps our podcast show up when people search for things like overwhelmed or people-pleasing, and then they, too, can listen, just like you're doing today, and learn new, cool ways to feel less stressed and overwhelmed. Thanks for listening. See you next week. Thank you for listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast. If you want to learn more about my work, head over to my website at michellegauthier. com. See you next week.