This week I want to teach you the science behind the butterfly hug. This is not the same as the butterfly kiss, which is when you flutter your eyelashes against someone’s skin. The butterfly hug is something you give to yourself. It’s a therapeutic technique that involves crossing your arms against your chest and tapping yourself on the shoulders slowly or quickly in alternating taps.

Our Bright Line Community Loves This Self-Regulation Technique

The butterfly hug was developed by two Mexican therapists in 1998 to help people who were traumatized by Hurricane Pauline. They blended tapping, which was well-studied, with bilateral stimulation, another technique that had been extensively vetted. It’s now widely used in trauma work for all kinds of things including panic attacks and helping people bring down emotional arousal to feel more grounded and well-resourced.

This past week in a class called The Resourced Self, I taught all about the butterfly hug and explained what it was about. People loved it, and I thought I should share it here so you understand the science behind it.

What’s Happening in the Brain When You Tap

So why does it work? Great question. What’s happening in the brain when you cross your arms and do alternating taps is this: the right hemisphere of the brain controls the left hand, which is tapping the right shoulder, which is controlled by the left hemisphere. The right hand, which is controlled by the left hemisphere of the brain, is tapping the left shoulder, which is controlled by the right hemisphere.

All that coordination is being sent across the corpus callosum, which is the big bundle of nerve fibers that connects the left and right hemispheres. It’s a rapid fire of inter-hemispheric communication the likes of which the brain and body don’t normally experience.

Meanwhile, the sensory motor cortex, which is behind the central sulcus, and the motor cortex, in front of the central sulcus, are firing away to do all that moving and feeling, while the parietal cortex is integrating it all, and the cerebellum is helping with the smooth muscle movements. The prefrontal cortex is also activating just so you can plan and manage doing it all, and there’s even some auditory cortex involved with the tapping sound.

Then what happens is that the parts of the brain that deal with emotional regulation—the limbic system, specifically the amygdala, (as well as other areas like the nucleus accumbens and basal ganglia)—get online because this massive burst of hemispheric integration lets the brain know there is something big and potentially emotional going on.

All this extra activation gets integrated and processed. It’s all a remarkable feat of coordination by your brain, giving it the message that it’s time to regulate, come online, and calm down.

Choose Your Speed of Tapping For the Desired Result

There’s one more piece: the speed of your tapping matters. If you tap quickly, it signals one of two things to the brain. It’s either a call to wake up and come online, which is useful for someone who is numb, catatonic, or so traumatized that they can’t get present in the moment. Or, it can help someone who is actively trying to process a memory or trauma.

If you are anxious, panicky, emotional, or wanting to calm yourself and activate the parasympathetic nervous system, then you need slow tapping, with deep breaths. That will help you come into the present moment and get yourself grounded.

That’s the butterfly hug. It’s fun, easy, portable, loving, self-caring, quick and effective—how can you not fall in love with this technique?