Three minutes. No kit. A calmer team.

I spent 15 years in advertising

I left because it burned me out, and it was pulling me further and further away from myself.

I know what 11pm on a pitch night does to a person, and I know what it looks like a year later. I know the particular exhaustion of being good at a job that is quietly taking more from you than it gives back. I know what it costs a business, too, because I watched people I admired leave and I understood exactly why.

I found EFT at a point when I badly needed something, and it became a lifeline back to myself. In 2018 I retrained so I could bring it to more people. Now I work with organisations sharing this tool with the people who need it in the moment, not years later on their burnout recovery pathway.

That is the difference between me and most wellbeing suppliers. I am not just bringing you a framework I learned on a course. I am bringing you something I needed and did not have access to.

What it is

The technique is EFT/ Emotional Freedom Technique. Most people call it tapping. It sounds far-fetched right up until someone tries it, which is why you have to experience it to believe it.

Here is what happens. You hold a specific thought and related emotion: the deadline and the overwhelm, the conversation you are avoiding and the anxiety, the presentation on Thursday and the dread. While you hold it, you tap lightly on a fixed sequence of points on the face and upper body. It takes about three minutes. As you tap, the physical stress response comes down. People can feel the difference in one go, which is why they keep doing it.

No mats, no changing clothes, no room to book, no app to roll out. It takes three minutes, sitting down, and people do it privately: before the call, in the car, on their own terms, whenever they need it.

What it isn't

It isn't talk therapy or counselling, and it doesn't replace your EAP. Nobody is asked to disclose anything personal, in front of colleagues or at all. Nobody lies on the floor. Sessions are practical, supportive, and there is usually more laughing than people expect.

If you have already run mindfulness or meditation sessions, you will notice the difference quickly. Those teach people to observe what they are feeling. This gives them something to do about it in three minutes.

Fewer stress-related absences

Stress remains the leading cause of long-term absence in UK workplaces, and the cost of it doesn't appear on any single line of your budget.

High performers who stay

Burnout is why good people leave, and they rarely say so in the exit interview.

Managers who hold their nerve

Difficult conversations, presenting, the 3am email, imposter syndrome. The pressure doesn't go away. What changes is how they manage it.

Something they're still using in six months

Most wellbeing initiatives stop the day the supplier leaves the building. This one costs nothing to repeat and takes three minutes, so people actually keep doing it.

Where this fits

Most burnout is structural. Workload, unclear expectations, unfair treatment, managers carrying too much themselves. That's work design, and unfortunately it's not something my workshops can change.

What I can offer is something for the moment your people are actually in. The 3am wake-up. The Monday inbox. The meeting they've been dreading since Thursday. It doesn't make the pressure any smaller. It changes what happens in their body when the pressure lands, and that's often the difference between a hard week and a week that costs them something.

How a session runs

We start with what stress does to the physical body and how to recognise it. This doesn't take long and settles most of the doubt in the room, because it is mechanical rather than mystical, and I'm always glad of a sceptic in the room.

I share the foundations of the technique, how it works, why it works, when it might be useful. Then we work on something real: whatever this team is actually carrying. A restructure. A launch. A quarter that hasn't gone well. Nobody shares anything they don't want to. People work on their own thing, silently, at the same time.

Then everyone tries it. Most people feel a shift the first time. Some don't, and I tell everyone that at the start. There's no right way to respond to it.

They leave with a one-page handout and the technique in their hands. It's up to them to use it.

The Research, in case you need it.

EFT is a structured self-regulation technique: you hold a specific thought while tapping a set sequence of points on the body. This sends safety signals to the brain and brings down the fight, flight and freeze stress response.

EFT has now been through more than 100 randomised controlled trials, alongside six meta-analyses and eleven systematic reviews, published by researchers across more than a dozen countries.

In one of those trials, a single hour-long group session reduced cortisol, the body's main stress hormone, by 43%. That was against 20% for a psychoeducation group and no change in the no-treatment group (Stapleton et al., 2020). The study replicated an earlier randomised trial which found a 24% reduction (Church, Yount & Brooks, 2012).

Eight studies have compared EFT directly against cognitive behavioural therapy. It came out equivalent or better, and reached those results in significantly less time. At work, that last part is the whole point.

Read the full research summary