Mollazadeh, M., Gharayagh Zandi, H., Ghorbanzadeh, B. · Sports Medicine: Research and Practice · 2025
After ten EFT sessions, the intervention group showed reductions in cognitive and somatic competitive anxiety and salivary cortisol, and increased self-confidence, compared with the training-only control group.
Cortisol is the body's stress hormone, and it doesn't lie — you can't talk yourself into a lower reading on a saliva test the way you might talk yourself into feeling 'fine' before a match. Elite athletes who tapped before competition showed measurably lower cortisol than those who didn't, alongside less anxiety and more confidence, meaning something in their actual stress physiology shifted, not just their self-report.
If this pattern holds up in larger athlete samples, it points to tapping as a locker-room-ready tool — something a competitor could do alone in the ten minutes before stepping onto the mat, with no sports psychologist required. That same self-administered simplicity could extend beyond elite sport to anyone facing a high-stakes, adrenaline-soaked moment: a student before an exam, a performer before a stage entrance, a surgeon before an operation.
A next step would be to pair the cortisol swabs with a wearable HRV monitor worn through the whole competition day, to see whether a pre-match cortisol drop tracks with a calmer heart rhythm during the actual bout and faster physical recovery afterward. It would also be worth testing dose and timing — how many tapping sessions, how close to competition — to find the minimum effective 'dose' for elite performance settings.
| Design | Controlled trial |
|---|---|
| Participants | 29 people |
| Population | Elite male taekwondo athletes, Tehran province, Iran (13 intervention, 16 control) |
| Comparison group | physical training only |
| Effect size | Cohen's d = -0.84 — on salivary cortisol, EFT vs control (between-group), post-test in elite taekwondo athletes; computed from Table 3 post-test means/SDs (EFT 26.39±1.82 n=11 vs control 27.71±1.39 n=16). The paper's own ANCOVA reported partial eta-squared 0.67 (F=48.61, p<.0001) |
| Outcome measures | competitive anxiety scale, salivary cortisol |
| Journal | Sports Medicine: Research and Practice |
| Year | 2025 |
| Country | Iran |
| Language | English |
| Method | EFT / Tapping |
| Publication type | Study / trial |
| Verification | ✓ Confirmed against the primary source |
Mollazadeh, M., Gharayagh Zandi, H., & Ghorbanzadeh, B. (2025). Effectiveness of emotional freedom technique on competition anxiety and salivary cortisol of elite taekwondo athletes. Sports Medicine: Research and Practice.
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 Athletic Performance · Stress & Cortisol
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