Tapping into a stress buster turns into a pointless distraction

Be Stress Free Fast US$0.99 Rating 1/10

Your 'Stress Free' experience starts with a free app - the test - which comprises 25 multiple choice questions to calculate your stress level. I clicked through it, answering 'usually true' to questions like 'I feel good about my life', and 'seldom true' to questions like 'I have physical pain'.

Despite my general joyousness, at the end of the quiz, I was informed that I was very stressed and could benefit from the Be Stress Free Fast full version, for 99 US cents. How unexpected.

I was still not convinced so downloaded Be Stress Free Fast Lite for free. Expecting meditation techniques with sea sounds, I instead found a picture of a man with crosshairs on his face.

These target points turned out to be meridian points according to traditional Chinese medicine. After giving my stress level a score from zero to 10, I worked through a routine, tapping on these points with my index and middle fingers. While tapping, I repeated the phrase 'releasing this stress' out loud. At the end of the exercise, I re-evaluated my stress level, but as it was low to start with, I couldn't say the exercise had done much for me.

The instructions suggested that if I was unable to lower my stress by repeating the routine, I would benefit from the full version of Be Stress Free Fast. So I paid my money only to learn that the full version offered little extra except that, in the last line of the Help section, I learned that the tapping was based on the emotional freedom technique, EFT.