There’s a story I heard a while back that I still think about all the time. It comes from a classroom, and it starts with a little boy who couldn’t speak.
It’s in our latest book, REWIRED, and I want to tell it to you here, start to finish.
The boy who read the whole room
Her name is Kathleen. She’s an early childhood educator, and she uses Tapping in her classroom regularly. One of her students was a nonverbal autistic boy who seemed to respond to it especially well.
During the loud, scattered moments, the kind every classroom has, when the energy is high and nobody can focus, he would quietly come over to her and start tapping on his own body. That was how he told her he wanted to tap.
At first, Kathleen figured he was asking for himself, a way to settle his own nervous system. But when she didn’t catch his signal right away, he would gently take her hand and start tapping on it. Impossible to miss.
“I thought he just needed to calm himself down. But then I started noticing a pattern. He wasn’t asking to tap when he was dysregulated. He was asking to tap when the classroom was dysregulated.”
This child, who had no words, had become the nervous system barometer for the entire room. He could feel the difference between a space full of chaotic energy and one full of calm, focused kids. And he knew exactly what would shift it.
Individual regulation creates collective regulation.
Calm is contagious
That’s the part that stopped me. A kid who experiences the world differently than most had figured out something it takes a lot of us years to learn. When one nervous system settles, the ones around it can settle too. Calm is contagious in the same way panic is.
You start to see it everywhere once you look for it. When a teacher learns to regulate her own nervous system, her classroom gets calmer. When a parent can stay steady in the chaos, their kids feel safer. When a first responder has a way to process what they carry, they’re more present for the people they serve.
Here’s what I keep coming back to. You can’t think your way calm in a moment like that, because your body reacts first. That’s what Tapping does; it speaks to the nervous system and the body directly. In one study, a single hour of Tapping dropped cortisol, the body’s main stress hormone, by 43 percent (Stapleton et al., 2020).
And as your body settles, the people in your range feel it, too.
So this is the future we’re working toward. One where calming your nervous system is treated as care we offer each other, as ordinary as washing your hands. Where emotional first aid gets taught right alongside physical first aid. Where every workplace has someone who knows how to help a colleague move through stress before it hardens into burnout.
It’s already happening, in pockets, all over the world. And every person who learns to tap, and shares it, and shows the people around them what steady looks like, makes that future a little more real. 🙂
For all the incredible teachers out there
If you’re a teacher, or you love one, these Tapping sessions in The Tapping Solution App are for you. They’re completely FREE—always have been and always will be.
Free Sessions for Teachers
- Releasing Overwhelm — for when the week is already piling up
- Setting the Intention for Your Day — two minutes to steady yourself before the bell
And if you want to feel what Kathleen’s students felt, that shift in the room, you can start with a single session. That’s all it takes to give your own nervous system somewhere to land.
Until next time… Keep Tapping!
Nick Ortner
Nick Ortner is the founder of The Tapping Solution and a New York Times bestselling author. He’s spent 20 years studying why Tapping works—and helping people use it to find relief.