The impact of emotional freedom techniques on Students’ anxiety reduction and psychological wellbeing increase

Emotional freedom is a new technique based on acupuncture and cognitive therapy that plays a significant role in mitigating energy disorders in body and helping to improve individual health. The present study aimed at determination of the effectiveness of the emotional freedom technique (EFT)   on decreased anxiety and increased psychological well-being of students.

In this research, a semi-experimental design with pretest-posttest and control group was used. For this purpose, a total of 30 out of 325 students was selected from Parsabad Moghan Branch, Islamic Azad University (Parsabad Moghan Town, Iran). The selected subjects who had a higher score in anxiety test were divided into experimental and control groups. The EFT was provided for experimental group for 8 sessions. Participants of these two groups completed the Catell’s anxiety questionnaire and Reef’s psychological well-being questionnaire in two steps (before and after therapy). For data analysis, multivariate covariance analysis was used.

The results showed that the EFT decreases anxiety and increases psychological well-being.

The EFT as a short, fast, and self-help practice with the re-enthusiastic flow of blocked energy in the body, the replacement of negative thoughts by positive thoughts, reduces anxiety and increases psychological well-being. Therefore, it is suggested that the EFT is used as an effective and very short term (2 minutes) method to reduce the anxiety and promote the psychological well-being of students.