Which Tapping category in our app shows the single biggest drop per session?

Pop Quiz Results

The question was…

Which Tapping category in our app shows the single biggest drop per session?

If you took our quiz, you probably guessed anxiety. Or stress. Or sleep. Most people do — they’re the categories we talk about most.

But when we looked at the actual before-and-after data from more than 18 million Tapping sessions in the app, one category stood out above all the others for the size of its single-session drop.

It’s cravings.

We didn’t expect it either. So we went back and checked the numbers carefully — and the result held up across every kind of craving we measured.

What the data actually shows

Every Tapping session in the app can ask you two simple questions: how intense is the feeling before you start (on a 0–10 scale), and how intense is it after. Over the years, those two numbers have added up to one of the largest real-world datasets in mental health.

Here’s what the numbers from the craving sessions look like:

In other words: people open the app in the grip of a craving, tap along for about seven minutes, and the craving drops by roughly half — and that pattern repeats across tens of thousands of sessions.

Every kind of craving — not just sugar

What makes the finding interesting is how consistent it is. It isn’t one lucky session carrying the average. The drop shows up across the whole Cravings Busters Collection, voiced by my sister Jessica Ortner:

Sweets, salty foods, alcohol, caffeine, cigarettes… the target changes, but the size of the relief stays relatively the same. That tells us something important about what Tapping is actually working on.

Why cravings are so hard in the first place

A craving feels like a pull — urgent, physical, almost outside your control. That’s because cravings live in the older, more automatic parts of the brain. When you’re stressed, tired, bored, or anxious, your body learns to reach for a fast source of relief: the cookie, the glass of wine, the cigarette. The relief you feel is real, which is exactly why the loop is so hard to break.

Most willpower-based approaches try to fight that pull head-on. Just say no. But white-knuckling a craving keeps your attention locked on the very thing you’re trying to resist, and the stress of resisting often makes the urge stronger.

That’s the trap. And it’s why a craving can feel impossible to out-think.

Why Tapping works so well on cravings

Tapping (also called EFT — Emotional Freedom Techniques) takes a different route. Instead of fighting the craving, you gently tap on a series of acupressure points while you bring the craving fully to mind.

Two things seem to happen at once:

It calms the stress response. Tapping on these points appears to signal the body’s alarm system — the fight-or-flight response — to stand down. As the underlying stress settles, the craving loses its fuel. You’re not resisting the urge; you’re removing the pressure that was driving it.

It creates a pause. A craving thrives on automatic, reach-for-it speed. Seven minutes of Tapping interrupts that automatic loop and hands the choice back to you. As Jessica describes it in the Sugar session, the goal isn’t to white-knuckle your way through — it’s to put you back in control, so you can make the choice that’s best for you, instead of falling victim to the craving.

This also explains the consistency in the data. Tapping doesn’t appear to work on “sugar” or “nicotine” specifically — it works on the momentary craving state itself. That’s why the relief looks nearly the same whether the trigger is chocolate or cigarettes.

What the outside research says

This isn’t only our data. Tapping for food cravings has been studied in controlled trials, much of it led by Dr. Peta Stapleton at Bond University in Australia:

• In a randomized controlled trial of overweight and obese adults, an 8-week Tapping program reduced food cravings compared with a waitlist group — with reductions in cravings and weight that were still measurable at follow-up a year and two years later.
• A later trial compared Tapping head-to-head with cognitive behavioral therapy (a gold-standard psychological approach) for food cravings, with both producing meaningful improvement.
• Notably, one of those studies used a self-directed, online Tapping program — much like using the app on your own — and still showed lasting results.

Our app data doesn’t replace those controlled trials. What it adds is scale and real life: tens of thousands of people, reaching for these sessions in the actual moment a craving hits, and reporting relief the vast majority of the time.

Try it yourself

The next time a craving shows up — sugar, a drink, a cigarette, the afternoon coffee you don’t really want — don’t fight it. Tap through it. It takes about seven minutes, and if you’re like most people who’ve used these session, you’ll come out the other side with the craving intensity cut roughly in half.