From Insomnia to Sound Sleep: How Your Brain Can Learn to Sleep Through Tapping

I recently received this wonderful message from a woman named Kim that I wanted to share with you:

“I’ve used tapping for a couple years at least, with sleep and anxiety being the most prevalent concerns. I have struggled with sleep since I was a child and have found little relief. I was even prescribed Ambien and Xanax in conjunction with one another, but that quit working after a little while. Out of desperation, I tried your app…. I tapped one of the sleep sessions and felt better, but still not ready to sleep. So I immediately picked another sleep session to try. I fell asleep while I was tapping! That has happened to me multiple times since. I have done the sleep sessions so many times that I can just listen to them and they help me sleep. (I’m not sure if that’s doing the same as tapping, but it works!! It’s like my body knows what is going on without the actual tapping taking place.) I have an extremely stressful life, which unfortunately most of it is out of my control. I have used the anxiety tapping to help me reset when I’m having an anxiety attack or when I feel my body responding to the stressors around me. I tap through the points when I can, but will also just tap the side of my hand when I’m in public or not able to hit all the points.”

First of all, Kim, thank you so much for sharing your experience! What you’ve described is both fascinating and incredibly common among long-term Tapping users. That moment when you first fell asleep during a Tapping session marks a profound turning point — one that many people with chronic sleep issues dream of experiencing. It represents your nervous system finally receiving the right signals to allow deep, restorative rest.

What’s particularly interesting is how your body has now learned to respond to just hearing the Tapping sessions without physically tapping. This is actually a remarkable example of something called “pattern recognition” — and it reveals some amazing things about how our brains can be retrained for deep, restful sleep.

Sleep as a Nervous System Safety Issue

For anyone who’s struggled with sleep since childhood, as you have, there’s often a deeper story at play. Sleep isn’t just about being physically tired — it’s about whether your nervous system feels safe enough to enter a vulnerable state of unconsciousness.

When we look at sleep through this lens, we can understand why even powerful medications like Ambien and Xanax eventually stopped working for you. These medications can temporarily override your nervous system’s alertness, but they don’t address the underlying pattern of nervous system activation that’s keeping you awake.

Here’s what happens when we struggle with chronic sleep issues:

• Your brain associates bedtime with struggle, creating a self-reinforcing cycle
• Your nervous system remains in a subtle fight-or-flight state, constantly scanning for threats
• Your stress hormones operate on the wrong schedule, spiking when they should be naturally declining
• Your body loses its natural rhythm for transitioning from wakefulness to sleep

Tapping works differently because it directly addresses this underlying nervous system activation. Rather than forcing sleep, it helps your body remember how to allow sleep.

Why Tapping Works When Other Sleep Solutions Fail

The reason Tapping can succeed where medications, traditional relaxation techniques, and sleep hygiene practices often fail comes down to how it works with your nervous system rather than against it.

Unlike medications that attempt to chemically override your wakefulness, Tapping helps your nervous system shift out of its hypervigilant state by:

1. Sending Safety Signals Directly to the Brain

The physical act of tapping on specific acupressure points sends calming signals through the body’s meridian system to the amygdala—your brain’s alarm center.

2. Breaking the “Trying to Sleep” Paradox

One of the cruel ironies of insomnia is that the harder you try to sleep, the more elusive sleep becomes. Tapping disrupts this counterproductive cycle by giving your mind and body something specific to focus on besides “Am I asleep yet?”

3. Processing Unresolved Emotions Through the Body

Sleep difficulties often persist because emotional stress is stored in the body, keeping your nervous system on alert even when you’re exhausted. Tapping provides a somatic (body-based) way to process these emotions, allowing complete relaxation.

4. Creating New Neural Pathways for Sleep

With repeated practice, Tapping establishes new neural connections between the verbal cues, the physical sensation of Tapping, and the experience of falling asleep. This is neuroplasticity in action—your brain literally rewiring itself for better sleep.

What makes Kim’s experience particularly fascinating is how quickly her system responded. After years of sleep struggles, she fell asleep during just her second Tapping session. This rapid response demonstrates how ready her body was for the right approach.

The Emotional Filing Cabinet: Why Sleep Struggles Persist From Childhood

You mentioned that you’ve struggled with sleep since childhood, which is actually quite common. As a child, sleep difficulties often begin as a response to stress, uncertainty, or simply an active mind. But over time, those difficulties can become their own self-reinforcing pattern.

I think of our brains as having an “emotional filing cabinet” where we store experiences and the feelings associated with them. For many people with long-term sleep issues, there’s often a file labeled “sleep” that contains a mixture of anxiety, frustration, helplessness, and worry.

Every night, as bedtime approaches, your brain automatically pulls out this file and begins reviewing its contents. Before you’re even aware of it, your body is responding to these stored emotions with tension, alertness, and resistance to sleep.

What Tapping does is help you reorganize this filing cabinet. It creates new associations with sleep — ones built around safety, permission to rest, and the ability to let go. When you tap while focusing on sleep, you’re essentially creating a new file with new contents.

And the beautiful thing about your experience is that now just hearing the Tapping sessions automatically opens this newer, more helpful file instead of the old problematic one.

The Power of Learned Association: When Just Listening Works

What’s particularly interesting about your experience, Kim, is how your body now responds to just listening to the Tapping sessions. This demonstrates the power of neurological conditioning — your nervous system has created such a strong association between the Tapping sessions and sleep that just the verbal cues alone can trigger your relaxation response.

Think of it like this: your brain has built a strong neural pathway connecting the Tapping sessions with the state of relaxation that leads to sleep. Now, when you simply hear those familiar words and phrases, your brain activates that entire pathway, producing the same calming effect even without the physical act of tapping on the points.

This is actually a testimony to how effectively your brain has integrated the Tapping pattern. Your nervous system has internalized the process so thoroughly that it can now take a shortcut to the same result. It’s like your body saying, “I know where this road leads, and I’m happy to go there more quickly now!”

A Tapping Sequence for Deep, Restorative Sleep

For those nights when sleep feels particularly elusive, here’s a specialized Tapping sequence that addresses multiple layers of sleep difficulty. Feel free to use this as a starting point and adapt it to your specific experience:

When Your Life Stressors Are “Out of Your Control”

You mentioned having an extremely stressful life, with much of it being out of your control. This is such an important point that deserves special attention.

When we feel we can’t control the sources of our stress, the stress itself often intensifies. It’s a natural response — our brains are wired to seek certainty and control as a survival mechanism. When we can’t find it, our nervous systems stay on high alert.

Here’s a perspective shift that might help: While you can’t control many of the stressors themselves, you can fundamentally change how your nervous system responds to them.

Think of it like this: The stressors are like weather events happening outside your window. You can’t stop the storm, but you can completely renovate how your internal “house” handles the weather. You can install better “emotional insulation,” create “stress-diversion channels,” and build a more resilient internal structure.

Tapping is one of the most effective ways to renovate this internal response system. Each time you tap — whether it’s the full protocol or just a few taps on the side of your hand — you’re reinforcing your nervous system’s ability to process stress differently.

Over time, this consistent practice creates what neuroscientists call “stress resilience” — your capacity to experience stressors without becoming physiologically or psychologically overwhelmed by them.

Minimum Effective Dose: Why Tapping Just the Side of Your Hand Works

I loved that you mentioned how you sometimes just tap on the side of your hand when you’re in public or unable to do the full sequence. This is a perfect example of finding what I call the “minimum effective dose” for nervous system regulation.

The side of the hand point is particularly powerful because:

• It’s easily accessible in any situation
• It’s socially inconspicuous (looks like you’re just fidgeting)
• It connects to meridians that help regulate the body’s stress response

While tapping on all the points provides the most comprehensive benefit, having this simplified option means you never have to be without a tool for anxiety management, no matter where you are or what you’re doing.

This approach is consistent with the research on “micro-interventions” — brief practices that can interrupt anxiety spirals before they gain momentum. Even 30 seconds of tapping on just one point while focusing on your breathing can help prevent an anxiety response from escalating into a full-blown anxiety attack.

The Little-Known Link Between Sleep and Anxiety

Your experience of using Tapping for both sleep and anxiety highlights an important connection that many people miss: sleep problems and anxiety are often two sides of the same coin.

They operate in a bidirectional relationship:

• Anxiety makes it harder to sleep
• Poor sleep increases daytime anxiety
• This creates a self-reinforcing cycle that’s difficult to break

What makes Tapping such an effective intervention is that it addresses the common denominator between both issues: nervous system dysregulation. By helping your nervous system find balance, you’re simultaneously addressing both the sleep difficulties and the anxiety.

This is why you might notice that on days when you’ve used Tapping for anxiety, your sleep improves that night — even if you don’t do a specific sleep-focused session. And conversely, when you’ve slept better after a Tapping session, your anxiety levels the next day are likely lower.

The Beautiful Progression of Your Tapping Journey

Kim, what you’ve described in your message illustrates a beautiful progression that many people experience with Tapping:

1. Initial relief — You felt better after your first session, though not fully ready for sleep
2. Breakthrough moment — You fell asleep during your second session
3. Pattern recognition — Your body began to associate the sessions with sleep
4. Internalization — Now just listening works, showing the pattern is deeply established
5. Integration — You’ve adapted Tapping to work in different contexts

This progression shows something remarkable about your nervous system’s capacity for positive change. After years of sleep struggles that even powerful medications couldn’t resolve, your brain has now developed new, health-promoting patterns.

This isn’t just about sleep — it reveals your innate capacity for neuroplasticity, your ability to create new neural pathways that support your wellbeing rather than undermine it.

The Ripple Effect: How Better Sleep Transforms Everything Else

As you continue to experience improvements in your sleep through Tapping, you might begin to notice positive changes in areas of your life that seem unrelated to sleep. This is what I call the “ripple effect” of improved sleep quality.

Research has shown that better sleep enhances:

• Emotional regulation and resilience
• Cognitive function and decision-making
• Immune system functioning
• Metabolism and weight management
• Cardiovascular health

In other words, by addressing your sleep through Tapping, you’re creating a foundation for comprehensive wellbeing that extends far beyond just feeling rested.

A Final Thought: You’re Not Alone in This Journey

Kim, your story of struggling with sleep since childhood, trying medications without lasting success, and finally finding relief through Tapping resonates with so many people. Sleep difficulties are incredibly common — affecting an estimated 50-70 million Americans — yet they’re often minimized or treated as simply a matter of “you just need to relax.”

What your experience demonstrates is that lasting change comes not from forcing sleep, but from helping your nervous system remember its natural, innate capacity for rest and renewal.

Your success with Tapping for sleep when nothing else worked shows the power of addressing sleep issues at their true source — the nervous system. And that offers hope to others who may be struggling with similar challenges.

Looking for more support with sleep and anxiety?

• The Tapping Solution App — Features numerous sleep and anxiety meditations if you’d like to expand beyond the ones that have been working for you. Here are some options you might not have tried yet:

• Deep Sleep Patterning with Binaural Beats — One of our most popular sleep sessions, with users reporting an average 56% reduction in sleep stress, now mixed with binaural beats and frequencies designed to help you sleep even deeper!
• Fall Asleep Faster Tonight — Great for those nights when you need to fall asleep quickly.
• Fall Asleep Faster Quick Tap — this 2 min video session is just one round of tapping, and can be great when you need just a little support.
• Sleep Journeys Category — Sleep Journeys combine the best of meditation and bedtime stories to create a unique experience that will help you drift off to sleep, or relax deeply during the day. These guided Sleep Journeys don’t include any Tapping, and you are invited to simply relax, listen, and let the beautiful images and ideas soothe your body and mind. Great for signaling to your system that you are safe to relax.

For anxiety support:

• Settle Your Body — A powerful session for quickly regulating your nervous system.
• Emotional Balance and Ease: Vagus Nerve Toning — Helps tone the vagus nerve for improved stress resilience. People love this one!

Note: You can access these meditations by clicking the links above using your mobile device, or type the name of the meditation into The Tapping Solution App’s search function.

I’d love to hear from other readers — have you struggled with sleep issues that finally responded to Tapping? Or have you found creative ways to use Tapping for sleep or anxiety? Share your experiences in the comments below!

Until next time… Keep Tapping!
Nick Ortner