The Effects of Emotional Freedom Techniques Implemented During Early Pregnancy on Nausea-Vomiting Severity and Anxiety: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Randomized trial👥 131 participants⚖️ vs. no-treatment controlHigher rigor✓ Source-checked📍 Turkey

In plain English. Over 130 pregnant women in early pregnancy, some dealing with nausea and worry about the pregnancy, were randomly assigned to learn EFT or receive no extra support. The women who tapped saw their pregnancy-related anxiety drop substantially, while the untreated group's anxiety barely moved - and their nausea eased slightly more too. This is a solid randomized trial with a meaningful sample size for a population, pregnant women, that doesn't have many treatment options considered safe.

What they found

131

people took part

EFT significantly reduced total pregnancy-related anxiety (pretest 29.85 to post-test 20.67, p < 0.001) while the control group showed no change (p = 0.933); the EFT group also had significantly lower nausea intensity at the end of treatment (p = 0.02).

How the study worked

Who took partpregnant women, 6-16 weeks gestation, at an antenatal clinic (n=131)

What they didIn a randomized controlled trial, participants were randomly assigned to receive tapping or a comparison condition, then measured and compared.

Compared withno-treatment control

Measured withPregnancy-Related Anxiety Questionnaire, Pregnancy-Unique Quantification of Emesis

💡 Where this could help

Picture a woman in early pregnancy, nauseated and anxious, wary of taking any medication and unsure what's actually safe. If this finding holds up, it points toward tapping as a drug-free, self-taught option — learnable in minutes and free to use as often as needed — to ease both the worry and the physical misery of those first trimester weeks.

🔬 What to study next

Since nausea and anxiety improved together, it's worth testing whether tapping's calming effect on the autonomic system (HRV) partly explains the drop in nausea severity, given the known gut-brain link between stress hormones and emesis. Salivary cortisol sampled across the day, plus actigraphy for nausea-disrupted sleep, would clarify whether this is a real physiological cascade rather than just perceived relief — and tracking it across the full first trimester with dose-response data would show how much practice is actually needed.

The full record

Design	Randomized trial
Participants	131 people
Population	pregnant women, 6-16 weeks gestation, at an antenatal clinic
Comparison group	no-treatment control
Outcome measures	Pregnancy-Related Anxiety Questionnaire, Pregnancy-Unique Quantification of Emesis
Journal	Journal of Integrative and Complementary Medicine
Year	2024
Country	Turkey
Language	English
Method	EFT / tapping
Publication type	Study / trial
Verification	✓ Confirmed against the primary source

Read the original study →

Cite this study

APA

Güven Santur, S., & Özşahin, Z. (2024). The Effects of Emotional Freedom Techniques Implemented During Early Pregnancy on Nausea-Vomiting Severity and Anxiety: A Randomized Controlled Trial. Journal of Integrative and Complementary Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1089/jicm.2023.0586

This record is part of the Tapping Evidence Base — an openly-sourced, fully-referenced directory of the research on EFT/tapping. Explore more studies on Anxiety · Other Physical Conditions