EFT — Emotional Freedom Techniques, better known as tapping — is a simple way of calming your nervous system down. You tap gently with your fingertips on a handful of points on the face and upper body (mostly spots borrowed from acupuncture, minus the needles) while saying out loud what's actually bothering you.

Naming the feeling while calming the body sends your brain a clear message: we're safe, you can stand down. Sounds odd. Feels odd for about ninety seconds. Then something loosens — and that's the bit no explanation can do for you.

Tapping's older than people think. Its roots go back to the 1980s, when American psychologist Dr Roger Callahan began combining acupressure points with psychology. In the 1990s, an engineer called Gary Craig simplified it into EFT — one straightforward routine anyone could learn — and it spread around the world.

Thirty-odd years on, millions of people tap every day, and it's been the subject of dozens of published studies.

Fair question — it looks daft, I know. Research has linked tapping with meaningful reductions in stress and anxiety, including drops in cortisol, the stress hormone. Scientists still debate exactly why it works so well.

Here's what I care about after fifteen years of doing this: the number you feel when you start, and the number you feel when you finish. That's why every session here asks you to rate the feeling before and after. Don't take my word for it — take your own.

Two fingertips. Firm enough to feel it, gentle enough to be comfortable — like drumming on a table, impatient-like. About 7–9 taps on each point while you say the phrase out loud (out loud matters).

Don't fret about millimetre-perfect placement — close counts. The app lights up each point and tells you exactly what to say, so you can't go wrong.

I'm the fella behind Free Me. I've been tapping for fifteen years, and I've used it with hundreds of people — for anxiety, stress, confidence, sleep, cravings, the lot.

Somewhere along the way I noticed the tapping world had gone very… beige. Whispery voices, whale music, everyone acting like feelings are made of glass. That's not me. I reckon you can take the work seriously without taking yourself seriously — have a laugh on the way in, do the real work in the middle, walk out lighter.

That's Free Me: proper tapping, none of the pantomime.