How to do the butterfly hug: a step-by-step guide

To do the butterfly hug, cross your arms over your chest, place each hand near your opposite shoulder, and tap them alternately, left, right, left, right, at a slow, even pace for 30 to 60 seconds while breathing slowly. This alternating touch is bilateral stimulation, the mechanism behind EMDR therapy, and most people feel calmer within a minute.

Maybe you saw someone do this in a video, or a therapist mentioned it once and the details didn’t stick. Either way, you’re here for the mechanics: exactly where your hands go, how fast to tap, and how to tell whether you’re doing it right.

What is the butterfly hug?

The butterfly hug is a way to calm your body using touch instead of words. You cross your arms over your chest and tap each side alternately, left and right, like a butterfly’s wings.

EMDR clinician Lucina Artigas created it in 1997 while working with children after Hurricane Pauline flooded Acapulco, Mexico. She needed a way to calm frightened groups of kids without touching them herself, so she had them cross their own arms and pat their own shoulders instead. She later built the technique into a formal group protocol with fellow clinician Ignacio Jarero, now documented by EMDRIA.

The alternating tap is bilateral stimulation, the same left-right mechanism used in EMDR therapy. For the fuller history, see the butterfly hug: definition, origin, and method; for real-life moments when it helps most, see the butterfly hug: a self-calming technique from EMDR. This guide sticks to the mechanics.

What do you need before you start?

Nothing, really. No equipment, no app, and no quiet room required, though a quiet room doesn’t hurt. You can do this seated at your desk, standing in line, or lying in bed.

There are two ways to use it. The first is a general reset: nothing specific in mind, just settling your body when it feels wound up. The second is more targeted: you hold a mild stressor loosely in mind, like pre-meeting nerves or a nagging worry, and tap alongside it. For the second, rating your distress from 0 to 10 before and after gives you a simple way to see if it’s helping; the SUDS scale explains how that rating works.

How do you do the butterfly hug, step by step?

1. Sit or stand comfortably, wherever you happen to be.
2. Cross your arms over your chest, right over left or left over right, whichever feels natural. Your arms should form a loose X.
3. Rest your hands near your collarbones or opposite shoulders. Some people interlock their thumbs so their hands look like a pair of wings; that part is optional.
4. Let your eyes close, or soften your gaze downward. Either works. Keep them open if closing your eyes feels uncomfortable.
5. Take one slow breath in and out, and let your shoulders drop.
6. Tap your hands alternately: left, right, left, right. Keep the pace slow and even, roughly one tap per second, like a gentle heartbeat.
7. Keep breathing slowly while you tap. If a thought, image, or feeling shows up, let it move through without chasing it or pushing it away.
8. Tap for 30 to 60 seconds, then pause. Notice what shifted: looser shoulders, a slower breath, a quieter mind.
9. Repeat for 3 to 5 rounds, or stop sooner if you already feel steadier.

That’s the whole technique. It doesn’t change much once you’ve done it a few times; the goal is just to make the rhythm automatic enough that you stop thinking about it.

Where should your hands go?

The collarbone placement is the most common, but it isn’t the only option. Some people prefer their upper arms or shoulders instead, wherever crossing your arms naturally lands their hands.

If crossing your arms over your chest feels tight, uncomfortable, or brings up a memory you’d rather not sit with, you don’t have to do it that way. Tapping your opposite knees or thighs uses the same left-right rhythm and works just as well. What matters is the alternating touch, not the exact position of your arms.

How fast and how long should you tap?

Keep the pace slow and steady, about one tap per second. This isn’t a race, and speeding up doesn’t make it work faster. If anything, a slower pace suits what you’re using it for.

A single round is 30 to 60 seconds. Pause after each one, take a breath, and notice how you feel before starting the next. Three to five rounds, roughly one to five minutes total, is enough for most everyday moments.

A 2015 study in Frontiers in Psychiatry found faster eye movements produced a bigger drop in emotional intensity than slower ones. That faster, more intense pace belongs to the reprocessing phases of therapist-led EMDR, where a clinician is watching how you respond, and it isn’t something to chase on your own.

What’s happening in your body when you do this?

The leading explanation involves working memory, which only holds so much at once. When you hold a mild stressor in mind and also track a left-right tapping rhythm, the two compete for the same mental space, and the stressor tends to lose some of its intensity. That’s the account laid out by van den Hout and Engelhard (2012) in the Journal of Experimental Psychopathology.

Touch on its own may help too. A 2021 randomized trial in Comprehensive Psychoneuroendocrinology found that self-soothing touch, like a hand resting on your chest, lowered cortisol after a stressful task about as much as being hugged by another person. The butterfly hug layers a steady left-right rhythm on top of that same self-touch.

Researchers don’t fully agree on why bilateral stimulation works, and most of the strongest evidence covers eye movements tested in a lab, not tapping done solo at home. What’s well established is that it’s fast, free, and low-risk, which is part of why it ended up in disaster-response protocols in the first place.

Does the butterfly hug actually work?

For everyday stress, early evidence is encouraging but still thin. A 2023 trial in the Basic and Applied Nursing Research Journal gave 30 nursing students the butterfly hug over six days and compared them with 30 students who got music therapy instead. The butterfly hug group reported a bigger drop in anxiety, measured with the Zung Self-Rating Anxiety Scale.

A separate line of evidence comes from the formal group protocol that uses the butterfly hug during structured sessions. A 2017 study in Frontiers in Psychology tested that protocol with teenage survivors of a major earthquake in central Italy. Trauma symptoms eased across three group sessions, and the improvement held at follow-up.

Both are honest data points, not proof. The samples are small, the settings differ, and nobody has tested the butterfly hug against a true placebo. Consider it a low-cost, low-risk tool worth trying, not a guaranteed fix.

What mistakes should you avoid?

A few habits get in the way of the butterfly hug working well.

• Tapping too fast. Racing through it tends to keep your body activated instead of settling it. Slow down until it feels almost too slow.
• Holding your breath. It’s easy to forget to breathe while you focus on the rhythm. Keep it slow and let your belly move.
• Trying to force a feeling. The point isn’t to feel better on command. Let whatever comes up move through, then check in with yourself a minute later.
• Stopping after one round. A single 30-second round rarely does much on its own. Give it 3 to 5 rounds before deciding whether it’s helping.
• Tapping harder against a memory that keeps getting stronger. If a thought intensifies the more you tap, that’s a signal to stop and ground yourself instead of pushing through.

Is the butterfly hug the same as EMDR therapy?

No. The butterfly hug is the self-administered bilateral stimulation piece of EMDR, borrowed for everyday use on its own. Full EMDR therapy is a structured, eight-phase process led by a trained clinician, built around reprocessing one specific distressing memory from start to finish.

A couple of minutes of tapping doesn’t attempt that, and it isn’t meant to. It’s a self-soothing tool you can use on your own, not a stand-in for professional care.

Is there a guided version of the butterfly hug?

Yes, in a broader sense. EmEase, a self-guided EMDR app, offers the same left-right rhythm as guided visual and audio bilateral stimulation at app.emease.com. Think of it as the guided version of this technique, useful for days when even keeping your own tapping rhythm feels like one more thing to manage.

If you’d rather compare tapping with eye movements or audio bilateral stimulation, self-guided bilateral stimulation: a beginner’s guide walks through all three methods.

When does the butterfly hug help, and when should you get more support?

It’s well suited to ordinary, contained stress: pre-meeting nerves, a racing mind at night, a tight chest after a hard conversation. Calming anxious feelings with EMDR and bilateral stimulation goes deeper on how it fits into everyday anxious feelings specifically.

If tapping brings up something heavier than you expected, like a specific memory that gets more intense the more you sit with it, that’s worth paying attention to. Patterns like this often have roots in something earlier, and that isn’t a sign the technique failed you. Stop, try plain grounding instead (name five things you can see, feel your feet on the floor), and consider bringing it to a trained professional.

Most days, this takes less time than it took to read this guide. Cross your arms, find a slow rhythm, and give your body room to catch up.