Have you ever felt tired or hungry even though you just ate and had plenty of sleep? Well this is because of a trick that our body sometimes plays on us. This is called FakeHungry and FakeTired.

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 wondered whether I had slept well the previous night. I went to the toilet, grabbed some fresh air outside and had a drink of water. That would temporarily wake me up. But I would feel tired again only a couple of minutes after sitting down.

This was odd… and it made me start to think. Having done a lot of Tapping, I tend to try and apply it to everything. So I started Tapping the tiredness! It would have been odd to tap away in the seminar room, so I did it in my head - this tends to work just as well, as long as you clearly imagine saying the words, and precisely visualise Tapping the right 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.

So that’s how I first realised there is such a thing as FakeTired = Tiredness You Can Tap . I’ll tell you about FakeHungry before I explain how they both arise.

I was giving a talk during one of my weekend seminars. During these we do a lot of tapping and we don’t hold back on working on deep issues. This sometimes brings up bad feeling in people so I often have to check how everyone is feeling. People sometimes describe cloudy or foggy feelings, but this time someone said he felt a bit hungry.

A few others said they felt hungry as well and we all laughed when I suggested using EFT on it. But we started to become curious when those people actually stopped feeling hungry. When it was lunch time the first person still didn’t feel hungry and he later told me he didn’t eat as much as usual as his appetite was smaller.

What’s going on?

The different signals that our body gives us such as being tired or hungry are interpreted as negative feelings. They are useful in this way because they prevent of from passing out or starving.

Sometimes though, we associate, say, tiredness, with say, sitting in a lecture theatre. This particularly happens when we spend three years at University sitting in lecture theatres tired, hung over, bored, and confused. So as soon as I entered the seminar room EIGHT years later, my well-meaning sub-conscious mind said “aha, a lecture theatre, I know what to do here… time to get some kip!”, and set about replaying all the genuine tired feelings it had learned to associate with lecture theatres all those years ago.

It’s possible that you have many unconscious associations and patters that are influencing you without you being aware of them. Feeling hungry could be linked to the fact that there is still food on the table even when you are already full. Your mind is a great learning machine, but sometimes it generalizes a bit too eagerly.

When those associations are triggered we might feel FakeTired or FakeHungry, our body can not tell the difference between either of those and the real feelings of being hungry or tired.

It can get confusing when you do manage to get rid of FakeTired and Fakehungry by sleeping or eating. When you start eating your body gets feelings associated with digesting food which can mask the FakeHungry feelings. Those FakeHungry feelings might be a constant presence, but are only noticed when the first stages of digestion have passed. All of this happens before you’ve even become really hungry.

Sleeping switches off emotions that have been switched on due to associations. This is how powernaps work. It’s less about a physical process of rest, and more about switching off the emotional processes that are going on. It doesn’t take long to switch them off when we relax and close our eyes, but it also doesn’t take long to switch them on when we go back to what we were doing.

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.

Another way to tell the difference between FakeTired and RealTired, or FakeHungry and RealHungry, is to see if you can feel them at will. See if you can focus and make yourself feel more tired or more hungry right now, just by thinking of times when you felt very very tired or hungry.

As I find myself saying so often these days - you might want to tap that.