How to do bilateral stimulation

To do bilateral stimulation, give your body a slow, steady left-right rhythm, alternating hand taps, side-to-side eye movements, or tones that pan between your ears, while loosely holding a stressful thought in mind. Do 30-to-60-second sets, pause to notice what shifts, and repeat a few times.

Maybe a therapist mentioned it. Maybe you found it in an app, or a friend swears the “tapping thing” helps them wind down. Either way you’re here because you want the actual how, not another page explaining what the letters E-M-D-R stand for. This is that page: three methods you can do right now, how fast to go, how long to stay, and where the honest limits are.

What bilateral stimulation is doing in your body

Bilateral stimulation, or BLS, means rhythmic input that alternates from one side of your body to the other. It’s the core technique inside EMDR, the therapy the World Health Organization lists alongside CBT for post-traumatic stress. The technique itself, though, is simple and portable.

The leading explanation for why it settles you is working memory. Your working memory has limited room. When you hold a stressful thought in mind and add a second demanding task, like tracking a left-right rhythm, the two compete for the same mental space.

The thought has fewer resources to run on, so it tends to lose some of its vividness and emotional charge. That’s the account laid out by van den Hout and Engelhard (2012) in the Journal of Experimental Psychopathology.

An honest note on the evidence: a 2013 meta-analysis by Lee and Cuijpers in the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry found that adding eye movements produced a large, significant reduction in the vividness and emotionality of negative memories in lab studies (d = 0.74, strongest for vividness at d = 0.91). Inside full EMDR therapy, where eye movements are added on top of an already-active treatment, the extra benefit was more moderate (d = 0.41).

Researchers think the effect comes from taxing working memory rather than from anything magic about left-right motion. Other absorbing tasks can do it too. Bilateral formats simply make the rhythm steady and easy to keep.

Before you start: a 60-second setup

Two small things make a self-guided practice work better.

1. Pick everyday material, not your worst memory. Good targets: the meeting you keep replaying, pre-interview nerves, a mind that won’t power down at night. Not: trauma, grief, or anything that spikes hard the moment you touch it.
2. Rate the distress 0 to 10. Bring the thought to mind and notice where it lands. You’ll use this number to check whether the practice is helping and to know when to stop.

If you’d rather calm your body first, that’s a fine instinct; our grounding techniques library has quick options for settling before you begin.

Method 1: The butterfly hug (easiest to start)

The butterfly hug is the most beginner-friendly way to do bilateral stimulation because your own arms keep the rhythm. It was created by EMDR clinician Lucina Artigas in 1998 while working with survivors of Hurricane Pauline in Acapulco, Mexico, and later published with Ignacio Jarero in the Iberoamerican Journal of Psychotraumatology and Dissociation as a self-administered BLS method.

1. Cross your arms over your chest so each hand rests near the opposite collarbone. If you like, interlock your thumbs so your hands look like butterfly wings.
2. Let your eyes close or soften downward.
3. Bring the stressful thought to mind loosely. Don’t narrate it or push it away; just let it be there.
4. Tap left, right, left, right at a slow, steady pace, roughly one tap per second, like a gentle heartbeat.
5. Breathe slowly into your belly and simply notice whatever moves through, thoughts, images, feelings, sensations, without judging any of it.
6. After 30 to 60 seconds, stop. Take one slow breath. Re-rate your distress and notice what shifted.
7. Repeat for 3 to 5 rounds.

That’s a complete session. If the number is easing round to round, the practice is doing its job.

Method 2: Eye movements

Side-to-side eye movement is the modality Shapiro’s original 1989 study in the Journal of Traumatic Stress tested first. It asks a little more attention than tapping, so it’s a good second step once the butterfly hug feels natural.

1. Sit comfortably and hold your head still.
2. Hold one thumb up at arm’s length, or pick two fixed points a comfortable distance apart on the wall in front of you.
3. Keeping the stressful thought loosely in mind, move only your eyes back and forth between the two points at an easy, even pace.
4. Continue for a set of about 20 to 30 seconds. Stop if your eyes feel strained.
5. Rest, breathe, re-rate the distress, and repeat for a few sets.

If moving your eyes feels uncomfortable or gives you a headache, don’t push it. Tapping and audio work just as well; the rhythm matters more than the channel.

Method 3: Audio (tones or alternating sound)

Audio BLS uses sound that alternates between your left and right ears, which makes it the most hands-off option and easy to use lying down.

1. Put on headphones or earbuds.
2. Play alternating tones, or any steady sound that pans left to right at a slow, even tempo.
3. Settle in, hold the thought loosely, and let your attention ride the back-and-forth.
4. Stay with it for a minute or two, then pause and check in with yourself.

Because it needs the least effort to sustain, audio is a popular choice for winding down at night or quieting a busy mind. If that’s your goal, our guide to stopping racing thoughts in the moment pairs well with this method.

How fast and how long?

Pace is the setting people get wrong most often, so keep it simple.

Goal	Speed	Set length	Rounds
Calming, grounding, winding down	Slow and steady (~1/sec)	30-60 seconds	3-5
Everyday stress or a nagging thought	Slow to moderate	30-60 seconds	3-6

For self-guided calming, slower is better. Slow, steady rhythms suit grounding and self-soothing, which is exactly what the butterfly hug was built for. A 2015 study in Frontiers in Psychiatry found faster eye movements produced a significantly larger reduction in emotional intensity than slower ones, with a similar but not statistically significant trend for vividness.

Faster, longer sets belong to the reprocessing phases of therapist-led EMDR, where a clinician is watching how you respond. That’s not a solo activity, and chasing speed on your own tends to stir things up rather than settle them.

Keep total practice short, five to ten minutes is plenty, and stop as soon as you feel settled. More is not better here.

The guided version

If keeping your own rhythm pulls you out of the calm you’re trying to reach, that’s the trade-off of doing it manually. EmEase, a self-guided EMDR app, runs the same technique for you with a moving on-screen target or alternating tones at a pace you control, in the web app. Think of it as the guided version of what you just did with your hands, useful for everyday stress and difficult emotions, on your own time. It’s a wellness practice, not therapy.

When this isn’t enough

Self-guided bilateral stimulation is well suited to ordinary, contained stress. It has clear limits, and knowing them is part of doing it well.

Use a simple rule: everyday material feels unpleasant but workable. You can hold it in mind, tap through a few rounds, and feel it ease. If bringing something to mind sends your distress climbing past a 7 out of 10 and it won’t settle, pulls up old memories you didn’t choose, or leaves you foggy and detached, stop. Switch to plain grounding, notice your feet on the floor, name five things you can see, and let yourself come back to the present.

That reaction isn’t a failure of the technique. It usually means the material is heavier than a solo practice is built for, and it deserves a trained person beside you. Trauma, grief that isn’t softening, and any history of dissociation are firmly in professional territory; the WHO recommendation is for EMDR as a professional treatment, delivered by trained providers. Our honest take on whether self-guided EMDR is safe and on what you can and can’t do on your own both go deeper on where that line sits.

Practice the small stuff on your own. Bring company for the big stuff. That’s not a limitation of bilateral stimulation; it’s how you get the most out of it.