Beyond ADHD A Physicians Perspective: The Power of Tapping or Emotional Freedom Technique

Dr. Diana Mercado-Marmarosh: Dr. Diana Mercado-Marmarosh: Hi, welcome to Beyond ADHD, A Physician's Perspective podcast. I am your host, Dr. Diana Mercado-Marmarosh. I'm a Family Medicine doc, with ADHD, practicing in a rural setting in Texas. I am a mother to two very energetic toddlers who are three and four years of age.

And in the past year, I have undergone radical transformation after discovering ADHD coaching, and life-coaching. For the past decade, my typical day consisted of having 300 charts backlog, a graveyard of unfinished projects, and a lack of time awareness. I didn't realize that I was not filling my own cup. I was running on fumes. The last year I figured out the secret; learn to stay in your lane. So now my mission is to help others develop systems that tap into their zone of genius. So they too can reclaim their personal lives back like I have.

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Well, hello. I am so excited to be with you guys today. Yesterday, I had an amazing class with my group coaching clients. And we talked about, I brought in a special coach, Dr. Jill Winner, and she's actually a physician who talks about tapping or what is called the emotional freedom technique. And the reason I asked her to come and be a guest in my program was because I felt like my clients needed to hear from an expert who uses this on the daily and really show them yet another tool that could help people with ADHD manage our own emotional dysregulation or overthinking or anxiety or our focus that happens.

And so the way all this started was, during the pandemic, I felt like maybe I was just a few thoughts away from like, " always losing my shit in clinic". I know it sounds funny, but at that time I didn't realize that. It was my ADHD that was causing me to sometimes just become flustered, you know, like I didn't realize that there was boundaries that I needed to create and I didn't realize that I wasn't slowing down enough to see, okay, what do I need to do?

I think I would just become overwhelmed because you know, they would knock on my door. And asked me to sign for orders or do different things that were not necessarily an emergency. And I was getting distracted or as soon as I would walk out, I would feel like I was just flustered because they would ask me to do this.

Or the ER was calling or the hospital was calling or the nursing home was calling. And I felt like I was being pulled in so many different directions and I didn't realize. I could say, hold on, what is really important? What do I need to address first? Why don't I need to address? So I didn't realize that, you know, it was just my, sometimes my ADHD acting up when I would " blow up on my nurses" or whoever was coming to ask me different things.

It's just that my brain could not be pulled in so many different directions anyway. When I discovered life coaching, I realized that, okay, maybe there's more to just my thoughts or whatever. In my inner critic. And slowly I started listening to different podcasts. And I remember coming across one of them that talked about tapping, which stands for emotional freedom technique.

And I looked that up. It was talking about a different form of meditation. And while I tried meditation, I was always in my head wondering if I could concentrate long enough or not. I was always wondering if I was doing it right. I remember the first time I went to a meditation class. Like there was like, it was an in person thing and it was before this whole COVID thing.

And I remember like we, we were being guided through the meditation and like, all I could see was black. like, I couldn't see anything. And the person next to me was talking about this beautiful rainbow, like scenario that she had gone through and some beautiful things and, just remember turning over to my friend and being like, what the hell?

Like, is she on something like, how come nobody shared ? So I always thought that meditation sounded cool and I had read stuff, but I just could not relate anyways. When I heard about tapping. At that point, the tapping solution was an app that was being advertised. So they had a promotion or something going on for healthcare workers where you could download it for a certain amount of time for free.

And then after that, like you could decide if you wanted it. And so, you know, yesterday when I shared with my group, I have used it myself to keep me " insane", from going insane. 2,838 times. And my app here says that I've used it 497 hours and nine minutes. And so. Somebody pointed out to me, that's like 21 days.

And I was like, oh my God, I didn't realize how much I was leaning into this. So the emotional freedom technique or tapping is an intervention that draws on acupressure and psychotherapy principles to like try to decrease stress and emotional issues. And it's really quite simple and benign. Like there's nine areas in your body that you tap, you usually just use your fingers and tap across these key points. And these are the areas that if you were going to go get acupuncture, that's the same areas where they would insert the needles. And so the cool thing about it is that it's evidence based and there's been lots of studies that show that it does decrease cortisol levels.

So I thought, well, why not? Like, why not use this Meridian points? Like I said, there's nine areas and you usually just use the tapping to the top of the head, to the face, to like under the eyebrow and the nose. Clavical area. And then like the side, like on the axilla area, and it's meant to help decrease or clear or process emotions or trauma, it can help with PTSD, anxiety, stress, phobia, chronic pain, anger, resentment, chronic headaches, or sleep problems, or any other conditions.

So it's meant to kinda relax or sympathetic nervous system. And deactivate or at least bring down or flight or fight mode. And so it's supposed to just bring us down. So with the cool thing that I like about tapping is that it's not meant to cause you to just ignore or think of the opposite feeling it's meant to help you sit with it and feel okay with it.

And so I think it's really a really cool technique that if you never tried it, you should, because. It can help you be able to process things. So what I've noticed is that when you're tapping, there might be areas where they, it feels more tender than others. And usually that's where maybe there's a block, an energy block that you might be experiencing.

I even use it like for my kids, like at night so that they can go to sleep cuz, oh my God, I feel like they have more energy. And so usually, you know, take like five minutes. We'll do the child one and they'll go the fall ride to sleep. So this is a really good thing to use. So I wanted to just share about this tool

 

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