It strikes me that a basic requirement of anything calling itself a self-help technique - as opposed to, say, a scam - is that you ought to be able to do it yourself. If you have to pay someone a large sum of money before they'll reveal their secret methods, this is called something different, such as "being an idiot". (Although I accept that one can take this emphasis on independence too far. "I went to a bookstore," says the great deadpan comedian Steven Wright, "and I asked the saleswoman, 'Where's the self-help section?' She said if she told me it would defeat the purpose.")

That's one of the things that's so intriguing about Emotional Freedom Techniques, or EFT, a crazy-sounding system from California that's gaining ground here: it's all there, at no cost, on the website of its founder, Gary Craig (emofree.com). Which is just as well, since it involves tapping yourself repeatedly on your face and chest while reciting slogans - thus earning it the accolade of being the only thing I've felt embarrassed to do alone in a room. "It is an emotional version of acupuncture, except needles aren't necessary," Craig says. "This common-sense approach draws its power from time-honoured eastern discoveries."

You certainly can pay money for advanced EFT if you choose, but the charming, uncharlatanlike thing about Craig is that he makes extraordinarily ambitious claims for his method and implies you can achieve results in minutes - and for free. It can, he says, cure phobias, ease physical pain, eliminate negative emotions, improve your ability at maths and even transform your golf game. You don't even need to believe that it will work for it to do so.

Naturally, I set about testing it, tapping myself in an effort to a) stop procrastinating, b) get better at mental arithmetic, having first timed myself doing a set of basic multiplication sums, and c) eliminate a persistent pain in my right knee. ("Even though I have this pain in my knee," Craig required me to say as I tapped my eyebrows, chin and collarbone, "I deeply and completely accept myself.")

Which brings me to a recurring popular psychology dilemma. If I'm honest, I think EFT is probably nonsense: though it's available on the NHS, only one peer-reviewed study has offered any support. Its success probably relies on the placebo effect, or, more likely when it comes to emotions, through distraction, since the tapping is so complicated that it interrupts any stream of depressing thoughts. The sceptic in me is supposed to be outraged by this, and if EFT promoted itself as an alternative to conventional treatment for serious illness, I would be. But if what it's mainly doing is making people feel that they're better at golf, or happier at work, or a little less achy, well, I'm disinclined to start getting all Richard Dawkins about it.

Personally, I found myself procrastinating less, very slightly faster at maths, and exactly as pained as before in my knee. I've never played golf, but for all I know I'm brilliant at it now.

oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com