I recently attended a weekend of lectures here in London, it's something I'd been looking forward to for a while even though I remember it was sometimes hard to concentrate in lectures at Cambridge. I made sure I went to bed early the night before and had also read about the subject before hand.

After a great night's sleep and a light breakfast I arrived at the venue feeling great. But for some reason about ten minutes into the lecture I started to feel really tired. I felt confused and drowsy and could hardly keep my eyes open.

I started to doubt whether I had slept well the night before. I decided to drink some water to help me wake up, went to the toilet, grabbed some fresh air and slapped myself in the face. Leaving the seminar room to run down the stairs I felt awake. But a couple of minutes into sitting down I felt tired again.

This puzzled me and led me to experiment with EFT as I now do with almost every situation. I tried tapping the tiredness, but did it in my mind. This is just as effective provided you can clearly visualise or imagine yourself saying the phrases and tapping the correct points.

I stopped feeling tired, and woke up to the point where I could easily pay attention to the lecture. I tapped some more in the break and a bit more that evening before I went out for a friend's birthday. Despite drinking alcohol and getting to bed later than I had intended, the next day during the lectures I was wide awake and thinking clearly.

This was when I realised there is such a thing as FakeTired - Tirednes You Can Tap Before I tell you how it arises I'll tell you about FakeHungry.

This time it was me giving the lecture, during one of my weekend seminars. We do a lot of Tapping during these weekends, and don't shy away from intense stuff. This often brings up some bad feelings for people, so I frequently ask "how does everyone feel now? does anyone feel less than great?". Sometimes there are cloudy or foggy feelings, but this time a guy said he felt a bit hungry. It was an hour or so before lunch, and maybe he hadn't eaten that much for breakfast.

A few other people said they felt hungry too... and I laughed along with everyone else when I suggested Tapping it. But the humour turned to curiosity and intrigue when they stopped feeling hungry. The guy who had said he felt hungry remarked that he still didn't feel hungry when we left for lunch, and after lunch he told me he didn't eat nearly as much as he usually did because he didn't have so much of an appetite.

What's going on?

Our body gives us signals to tell us that we need sleep or food. But these are interpreted as negative feelings. This is so that we are properly forewarned to take action to remedy the situation.

Sometimes however, it can happen that we associate these signals of tiredness or hunger with particular locations, activities or people. In my case I spent three years at University attending lectures while being hung over, tired and confused. A strong association had been created in my mind that was still strong many years later.

Similarly, who knows what our minds associate with being hungry, it could be as simple as "I don't have an empty plate in front of me". We can certainly associate it with sitting in a seminar room. Our minds are wonderfully powerful learning machines, and all it takes is one time when you were really hungry and sat in a chair, to associate sitting down with hunger.

When that association is triggered we feel FakeHungry or FakeTired, and the system is designed so that you can't tell the difference between that and the real thing.

Things get confusing when you can get rid FakeHungy and FakeTired by eating and sleeping. When you eat your body gets the feelings associated with digesting food and these feelings mask the FakeHungry feelings. The FakeHungry feelings might always be present, but we only notice them when the first stages of digestions are over. And this has all happened before you've really become hungry.

You can take a break from negative feelings by sleeping, which is why taking a power nap is less about resting your body and more about taking a break mentally. You don't need long to recuperate from emotional stresses yet it's quick to come back when we need to get back into action.

Because our survival mechanism has generated it, FakeTired is fear-based. This creates that strange situation where you are so tired you can't sleep. The fear feelings contained within FakeTired keep you awake to deal with possible danger.

You can also tell the difference between FakeTired and RealTired, or FakeHungry and RealHungry by checking whether you can increase their intensity deliberately. You can do this by just thinking of times when you were very hungry or tired.

You might want to Tap that.