Butterfly Hug: How Many Taps and How Long?

The original butterfly hug protocol, documented by EMDRIA, uses short rounds of 6 to 8 alternating taps at a slow pace, about one per second. Pause after each round to notice how you feel, then repeat. Most people find 1 to 2 minutes enough, longer if it’s still helping.

Maybe a therapist showed you the motion once and the exact numbers never stuck. Maybe a video demonstrated it without saying how long to keep going. Either way, here’s the actual protocol, plus what changes if you do more or less than that.

How many taps make up one round?

The technique’s originator, EMDR clinician Lucina Artigas, built it around short bursts: 6 to 8 alternating taps, roughly 3 to 4 on each side, documented by EMDRIA. That’s one round. You’re not counting toward some larger total, just this short unit, repeated as many times as you need.

You’ll see the exact number shift a little from source to source online, since nobody has run a trial pitting 6 taps against 10. Starting at 6 to 8, the count closest to where the technique began, is a reasonable default. For the fuller origin story, see the butterfly hug: definition, origin, and method.

How fast should you tap?

Slow. About one tap per second is the common pace, closer to a slow heartbeat than a drumroll. Bilateral stimulation, the alternating left-right input EMDR is built around, is what the tapping delivers here, through touch instead of eye movements or tones.

Speeding up doesn’t make it work faster. A 2015 study in Frontiers in Psychiatry found faster eye movements produced a bigger drop in emotional intensity than slower ones. That faster pace belongs to the reprocessing phases of therapist-led EMDR, where a clinician is watching how you respond in real time. Nobody’s monitoring you at your kitchen table, so slow and steady is the safer choice for tapping on your own.

How long should you keep tapping?

After one round of 6 to 8 taps, pause. Notice what shifted: a slower breath, looser shoulders, a quieter thought. Rating your distress from 0 to 10 before and after gives you something concrete to track; the SUDS scale explains how that works.

If you’re not steadier yet, do another round. Most people need 3 to 5 rounds, which commonly adds up to about a minute or two. There’s no fixed cutoff: keep going longer if it’s still helping, or stop after one round if that’s already enough. The full step-by-step guide walks through the same rhythm measured in seconds instead of taps, if counting feels like one more task.

Does a longer session work better than a short one?

Not necessarily. A 2021 randomized trial in Comprehensive Psychoneuroendocrinology found that even a brief round of self-soothing touch lowered cortisol, the body’s main stress hormone, about as much as being hugged by another person. A short round genuinely does something measurable.

What seems to matter more than any single session’s length is repetition over time. A 2023 trial in the Basic and Applied Nursing Research Journal had nursing students practice the butterfly hug across six days and found a bigger drop in anxiety than a music-therapy comparison group got. Consistency, not one long round, looks like the bigger lever.

What if a few rounds don’t calm you down?

That’s useful information, not failure. If tapping brings up a specific memory that gets more intense the longer you sit with it, stop and switch to plain grounding instead, like naming five things you can see. Does tapping actually work for anxiety? covers what tapping can and can’t be expected to do. If that pattern keeps repeating, it’s worth bringing to a trained professional.

For a version where the pace is set for you, EmEase, a self-guided EMDR app, offers the same left-right rhythm as guided visual and audio bilateral stimulation at app.emease.com, useful on days when even counting to 8 feels like one more thing.