---
title: "207: The 5-Minute Technique to Stop Racing Thoughts At Night: EFT Tapping for Sleep w/ Julie Schiffman"
entity: "podcast"
canonical_url: "https://www.thesleepdetective.com/podcast/207-5-minute-technique-to-stop-racing-thoughts-at-night-eft-tapping-for-sleep"
markdown_url: "https://www.thesleepdetective.com/llms/podcast/207-5-minute-technique-to-stop-racing-thoughts-at-night-eft-tapping-for-sleep"
lastmod: "2025-06-18T09:00:00.000Z"
---

[Schedule a consultation](https://p.bttr.to/3VJwvDs) to get started with the [Complete Sleep Solution program](https://thesleepdetective.com/complete-sleep-solution) so you can consistently sleep 7+ hours uninterrupted, naturally and permanently.

While addressing the root causes of your sleep issues requires investigating the imbalances in your body, there's a powerful technique that can help you sleep better tonight while you work on those deeper solutions. This simple method has helped thousands (including myself) calm their racing minds and nervous systems in just minutes.

In today's episode, you'll discover how tapping (or EFT) can be an effective tool in your sleep detective toolkit. You'll learn how this technique helps lower cortisol and calm your system when you're trying to fall asleep or lying awake at 3AM with racing thoughts. 

By the end of our conversation, you'll have two complete tapping sequences you can use tonight to complement your work addressing the underlying physical imbalances. 

Plus, you'll understand why this mind-body approach works alongside the functional testing I always emphasize as the foundation for truly solving sleep issues permanently.

Julie Schiffman, MSW, is an internationally recognized Expert EFT Practitioner. For more than 30 years, she has counseled thousands of clients, helping them to achieve emotional and physical well-being through this transformative healing modality. Her life-changing YouTube videos have been viewed more than 4 million times. Julie is the creator of Tap Into Life Membership program, the Pain-Less Program and Tap Into Sleep Mode Program helping thousands of people reclaim their lives.

​​Julie’s links:

[https://www.julieschiffman.com/](https://www.julieschiffman.com/)

[https://www.instagram.com/julieschiffman_tapintolife/](https://www.instagram.com/julieschiffman_tapintolife/)

[https://www.youtube.com/julieschiffman](https://www.youtube.com/julieschiffman)

00:00 Introduction to Sleep Issues and Tapping

01:31 Meet the Expert: Julie Schiffman

03:15 Understanding Tapping: What and How

07:03 Julie Schiffman's Journey with Tapping

13:28 The Science Behind Tapping and Sleep

20:56 Practical Tips for Better Sleep

22:11 Using Tapping to Overcome Sleep Resistance

22:44 Preparing for a Tapping Session

23:09 Guided Tapping for Relaxation

29:54 Addressing Anxiety About Sleep

36:06 Exploring Tapping Programs and Resources

39:15 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Episode Transcript

Martha Lewis:

While addressing the root causes of your sleep issues requires investigating the imbalances in your body. There's a powerful technique that can help you sleep better tonight while you work on those deeper solutions. This simple method has helped thousands, including myself, calm their racing minds and nervous system in just minutes. In today's episode, you'll discover how tapping or EFT can be an effective tool In your sleep Detective toolkit, you'll learn how this technique helps lower cortisol and calm your nervous system when you're trying to fall asleep or lying awake at 3:00 AM with racing thoughts. By the end of our conversation, you'll have two complete tapping sequences you can use tonight to compliment your work addressing the underlying physical imbalances. Plus, you'll understand why this body mind approach works alongside the functional testing that always emphasize is the foundation for truly solving sleep issues permanently. You're listening to the Sleep Detective Podcast where you will learn why you can't sleep and how to fix it naturally.

I'm Martha Lewis. I've been a functional health and life coach for the past five years, and I've helped over 200 clients find and fix the root causes of their health issues so they can consistently sleep seven to nine hours without drugs by also helping calm the nervous system with techniques such as tapping. Today I have Julie Schiffman on the podcast to lead us through an explanation of tapping and two different tapping exercises. Julie is a therapist and certified EFT practitioner who has helped thousands overcome sleep issues through tapping techniques over her 25 year career. After overcoming her own debilitating panic attacks and insomnia through energy work, Julie trained extensively with Dr. Joe Mercola and developed her tap into sleep mode program, which addresses the emotional components of sleep struggles that conventional approaches often miss. Today I am so excited to welcome Julie Schiffman to the podcast to tell us all about tapping or EFT and how it can help with sleep. So thanks so much for being here, Julie.

Julie Schiffman:

Oh, I'm so happy to be here today. We're talking about such an important topic and I'm thrilled to share what I know about it.

Martha Lewis:

Yay. Yeah, I'm really excited and appreciative and I was just telling you that I have personally used tapping as well, especially for sleep, and I even used it last night. My mind started spinning about everything that I have to do today. And so I got out of bed and I came out and did a little bit of tapping and I just like to just speak everything out and then say I'm letting it go. And then I went back to bed and went to sleep. So

Julie Schiffman:

Amazing.

Martha Lewis:

So I know that this can help so many people

Julie Schiffman:

And it can really be that easy and we'll talk about more of it and how it works and everything, but it really can be that easy instead of being up for three hours during the night. Right. I've been there too. Yeah. Okay, great. Yeah.

Martha Lewis:

So yeah, first of all, can you briefly explain just what tapping is to someone who hasn't heard of this before?

Julie Schiffman:

Of course. So I love to share about tapping. I've been doing it for over 25 years. It's getting more and more widely known now, but tapping is an amazing stress management tool that literally anyone can use at any time. It is simple, it's effective, and it is a very quick and easy way to ease pain, ease emotions that might be creating any sort of challenge regardless of what it is. It doesn't just work for sleep, it works for just about everything you could imagine. So tapping is a combination of ancient Chinese acupressure and modern psychology that works to physically alter your brain, your energy system, and your body all at once. So it's like a win-win win, and it can consist of tapping, literally tapping, and so it looks like this. It's just very gentle tapping. And what we're doing is we're tapping on particular meridian points while talking through a pain, a problem, an emotion, inability to sleep.

And this process can help not only physical symptoms. If you have a headache, you've got back ache, you've got brain fog, whatever it is, but it also has emotions with anxiety. If you're feeling really angry, if you're feeling really sad or dealing with grief, it works for that as well. And when we're feeling stress, some of the stuff that we're talking about here, and this is important for what we're talking about today, our cortisol levels shoot up. We know this is something that is, it's a fact. And when our cortisol is high, it is hard in the moment to be, it sort of hijacks our brain. It hijacks our nervous system, the amygdala, and it makes it hard to think. It makes it hard to make decisions. Our nervous system can become dysregulated very quickly, and not only that, but then our immune system becomes strained.

We're more likely to become sick or have inflammation. And overall this just puts stress and strain on our health and wellbeing. So when we're feeling triggered in some way cortisol shoots up, we can start ruminating. We get into fight or flight, we get into freeze response, and we have a hard time balancing out. We have a hard time balancing out our thoughts. We have a hard time balancing out our body. And of course this can make it difficult to sleep. And so when we tap, what we're doing is research has shown that tapping can bring the cortisol levels down, it can regulate our nervous system, we can relax, we can be in the moment, we can make more sound decisions and feel safe in our body and allow ourselves to feel grounded and feel rooted. So we feel like we're anchored and back in our body instead of wherever else our mind may be. So tapping research has shown that tapping can reduce stress, it can reduce anxiety, cortisol levels, it can regulate your nervous system, can help you to sleep. It can help with really just about anything that's going on in your life that's creating stress for you.

Martha Lewis:

Yes, I totally agree. And I talk a lot about cortisol because that's a lot of times the reason why people can't sleep. I talk a lot about the nervous system because different imbalances in the body can actually make the body kind of stuck in fight or flight or that sympathetic stress state. So yeah, and I love even how you said we can make better decisions because we can't make good decisions when we are in fight or flight.

Julie Schiffman:

Totally.

Martha Lewis:

Our mind isn't thinking rationally. And so tapping to help calm those emotions and be able to think clearly and make a more rational decision, I think is so important. And of course, helping us relax before bed. So yeah, so I love all of that. So great. How did you get into this? What's your story?

Julie Schiffman:

I love to tell my story because I think it can help so many other people. As you know, I know you have your own story. So I'm a therapist and I am really passionate about helping others to heal on their journey, whatever that is, mental, emotional, physical, whatever that might be. So I went to school to be a therapist. Actually, I got my master's degree in social work and I was working with teenagers in a school system in a high school, and I loved it, but this was my mid twenties and I started getting panic attacks, really hardcore, debilitating panic attacks. I'd be in a session with a student and I'm trying to help them with depression and anxiety, and I'm like, oh my God, I just wanted to jump out of my skin. And so I went to therapy, which was helpful. I started doing talk therapy.

I had recently lost my dad and I hadn't really dealt with that. And so it sort of helped me to work through a lot of that. But I was still getting these panic attacks and I wasn't sleeping, which we know is detrimental. I just could not get a good night's sleep. I was panicking, I was ruminating. I couldn't help myself to save my life basically. And so I saw actually a good friend of mine who was doing energy work at the time, he was like, come and see me. And he was a chiropractor, and at the time he was doing chiropractic, but he was also getting into energy medicine. And I was like, that sounds sort of woo woo. I am not sure about that. He was like, trust me, come and see me. I'm like, okay. So I went in to see him and he did energy work.

It wasn't tapping, it was other things, and he's amazing at what he does, and within a few minutes it was like boom. It was just gone. I mean, it went hardcore to the roots of whatever I was dealing with at the time. And I was like, oh my God. I was like, this is something that was so healing and so freeing. Suddenly I was really feeling at peace and I was feeling better in my body. I was sleeping a baby and I was like, I have to learn about this. I have to do this. I feel like this is my calling. This is revolutionary, and I know that I am meant to help others with this. Cognitive therapy is great, and I mean I really did love what I was doing, but it can also retraumatize people at times when you're talking about traumas or even memories.

It doesn't have to be trauma, but memories. And sometimes it can put you into a state of retraumatization and jack up the nervous system again. And then I would leave therapy and I'd be like, that was helpful to talk about, but I'm still sort of, I can't figure out a way to get calm. So fast forward a few years later, I left my job at the high school I was working at, and I began working for Dr. Joe Mercola, who at the time had the largest natural healthcare website in the world. This was years ago. This was in the late 1990s if you're familiar with him. And he was working with people, he's a doctor and he was working with people on looking for the roots of what was going on, but he said, the one thing most doctors are missing is that they're not getting to the emotional component of what's going on with illness.

And he was like, this is what I want you to do. So he sent me to train EFT, emotional freedom technique is another term for tapping. And he sent me to all the trainings, God bless him, and I learned it. I got certified in it and I started using it with his patients. And over and over we were just seeing like boom, boom, boom. People were just getting better and better and better. And I was like, oh my God, this is amazing. It was just astounding to me. So at this point, I've worked with thousands of people and I've seen so many amazing and brave people who have been challenged with so much on their journey, and whether it's with sleep or chronic illness or depression, anxiety, whatever it is, menopause so many things that go hand in hand with each other when you're struggling on a mental emotional level or physical level.

And so I've been using tapping ever since. I created a program called Tap to Sleep mode, which we could talk about more, but that's helping people to tap on just about anything you can think of related to sleep and physical issues that might be getting in the way. The healing that happens is just incredible. I mean, it's beautiful and I'm so just grateful to be able to do this work and share it with anyone and everyone who will listen. So again, I'm so grateful to you for bringing me here to share it with people who might've never heard about it before.

Martha Lewis:

Yes. Well, thank you so much for sharing. And it's funny because I've had the same realization that Dr. Cola did of at least half of my clients. If there is this emotional component and nervous system component, then everything we do for the physical imbalances isn't enough if there's this other side of it going on. So that's something that I've realized too, and it's one of the first things I address with my clients who need this is like, okay, we need to figure out your nervous system. We need to help you deal with past stress and trauma. And yes, and tapping is such a simple way to do it. So I love to hear all the success that you've seen from helping people in this way. It's really awesome.

Julie Schiffman:

It really is. I mean, I just feel so blessed that where it used to feel frustrating to just have clients come in and talk about the same things over and over again where I might've been able to give them strategies and tools to work through things. Again, there's definitely a place for cognitive therapy. I'm not bashing it in any way, nor am I bashing the medical system or anything like that. But when you combine them both, when you combine looking at the mental emotional, the energy in your body and what's going on physically, it's just all connected. There's no other way to look at it. It's not just the physical or just the emotional. It's like everything is together, it's structural, it's biochemical, it's emotional. Those are the three things that we're always looking at and when we tap or other sorts of energy work also, you're really getting into the roots and scooping it out and just being able to thrive.

Martha Lewis:

Yes, and I totally agree. I love that. I definitely believe we've got to look at both the body and the mind at the same time if we ignore either one of those. Yeah, it's really hard to get better.

Julie Schiffman:

It really is. I totally agree.

Martha Lewis:

Yeah. Awesome. So I know we talked about tapping helps lower cortisol, it helps with sleep. Is there anything else you want to add about how tapping specifically helps with sleep?

Julie Schiffman:

So there's been a lot of research that has proven again and again that tapping helps to calm the nervous system. So we're just going to talk about this for a little bit, right? Because when the nervous system is jacked up, you can do whatever you want to try to override it and say, it's okay, I'm calm, I'm calm, I'm calm, now I'm calm. We could try to overthink it and be like, it's fine, I'm fine, I'm fine. But you can't really override it. Your subconscious is always trying to protect you. That's its job is to protect us. And so we say thank you for that. That means that it is doing its job when there are parts of us that get all revved up and our nervous system is off the rails or whatever. And so tapping can really help to put the body back into a parasympathetic state, which can obviously help to induce relaxation and help us to sleep.

And so when we have higher levels of cortisol, which I'm sure you talk about all the time, this can keep us awake at night. All of you who wake up, it's 3:00 AM part of the 3:00 AM club. I have been there again, especially people going through menopause or anything else. It doesn't have to be just women. It happens to men too. The cortisol levels rise and it can be harder to, for some people, not only to fall asleep, some people have that state of hypervigilance even before trying to wind down, but sometimes when you get into bed, maybe you would fall asleep right away and then that three, four o'clock hits and you're like eyes wide open and you're staring at the ceiling or staring at the clock. Though tapping can break the cycle of the racing thoughts. It can break the cycle of rumination, which is what you did last night.

You got up, you tapped, and then you were like, okay, ready to go. And that often happens in the middle of the night. How often do you wake up in the middle of the night and you have these thoughts that are completely irrational and they're completely different than the thoughts that you have during the day. Then you wake up and you're like, wow, I was really off in this place of doom and the world is ending and all of that. And so tapping again can really help to get your nervous system back online. And you might be up worrying about your job, your kids, your finances or anything else, and your thoughts are just racing. And so tapping can help you to allow those thoughts to run its course.

Sometimes if I wake up in the middle of the night, and what I've even told my clients to do is get out of bed, which is what you did get out of bed and your thoughts, they're going to run out of themselves eventually. You can keep on the worry track for a while. And I even suggest doing a brain dump, which is like to sit down with a pen and paper, literally not on your phone or your iPad, but the research has shown that actually having a pen in your hand and writing it down can be enough to get that energy from your brain literally out. And so it's like you sort of let it run its course. And so you write all the things you're worried about, all the things you're stressing about, and you can go back and tap on those things if you want to.

You can go back and even tap and read your notes and go through it that way. And it can just help to get to a place of, okay, I don't really need to worry about that right now. I don't need to worry about that anymore. I can save my to-do list for tomorrow. Anything I didn't finish today, I can do another time. I certainly am not getting it done at three in the morning I think. Right? So sitting and thinking about it doesn't help, but consciously we might know that, but there's that engine in the back that protector part of us is like, don't go to sleep. You've got to stay awake. You've got to stay aware. You've got to remember all the things you have to do. And so tapping really, when you're physically tapping on these points, you are moving energy. People are probably like, well, I don't understand…