Using Noting Practice to enhance EMDR

What each one is actually for

Noting Practice

Noting practice is done in a single repeated motion: the instant something arises in awareness — a sound, an itch, a worry about tomorrow, a wave of sadness — you apply one soft, quiet word to it, usually silently in your head, and then let attention move on to whatever's next. 'Hearing.' 'Itching.' 'Worrying.' 'Sad.' The label isn't meant to explain or analyze anything; it's meant to create just enough distance that you're the one noticing the thought or sensation rather than being fully inside it, carried wherever its content wants to take you. Done for even ten minutes, most people notice the mental chatter doesn't stop, but its grip loosens slightly — you're standing a half-step back from it instead of standing in it.

EMDR

EMDR is a specific, structured protocol carried out with a trained clinician: after mapping out the target memory and any associated negative belief about yourself, you hold a brief image or moment from that memory in mind while your eyes track the therapist's hand, a light bar, or another moving stimulus back and forth, in short sets of perhaps thirty seconds at a time. Between sets, the therapist checks in on what came up, and the process repeats, often across several sessions, as the memory's emotional intensity is tracked and, for most people who complete it, drops. The mechanism isn't fully settled, but the leading account is that dividing attention between the recalled memory and the external side-to-side movement reduces how vivid and overwhelming the memory feels while it's being handled, which appears to let it get filed away as something that happened rather than something still happening.

What you get out of pairing them

What noting buys you is the ability to stay present with something intense — anger, restlessness, a jolt of fear — without immediately being swept into its story, which for most people who practice it regularly shows up as more space between 'a feeling arrives' and 'I've already reacted to it.' What EMDR buys someone with a genuinely stuck traumatic memory is something noting alone cannot: a structured way to actually work with that specific memory directly, rather than just riding out whatever comes up around it, and for many people who complete a course of it, a real drop in how present-tense and overwhelming that one memory continues to feel years later. Noting is a general skill for staying with distressing content as it arises in daily life; EMDR is a targeted procedure for one particular memory that has stopped fading the way most memories eventually do.

What Noting Practice rests on

• Decentering from thought randomised trials
  Shifting attention from the content of a thought to observing it as a passing event in awareness creates distance from that content instead of fusion with it.
• Affect labeling reduces arousal randomised trials
  Putting an emotion into words reduces the physiological and psychological intensity it would otherwise carry while unexamined.
• Attention is trainable randomised trials
  Repeatedly practicing directing and redirecting attention strengthens the ability to control where it goes, making that control more available over time.

What EMDR rests on

• Graded exposure reduces avoidance randomised trials
  Repeatedly approaching a feared or avoided stimulus or action within a controlled, tolerable structure reduces the fear and avoidance response it triggers.
• Memory reconsolidation updates emotional learning randomised trials
  Retrieving a specific memory and reprocessing it under new conditions can update the emotional charge attached to that memory.
• Dual attention reduces vividness plausible mechanism
  Dividing attention between a recalled memory and an external rhythmic stimulus reduces the memory's felt vividness and emotional intensity.

Where they actually meet

Noting works by putting a single word between you and whatever just arose — the label itself creates a sliver of space where the content stops being the whole of your experience and becomes something you're looking at. EMDR's side-to-side eye tracking appears to work by a related but distinct mechanism sometimes called dual attention: your focus is divided between the recalled memory and the external moving target, which seems to leave less attention available for the memory to feel as vivid and consuming as it otherwise would. Both put something else in the foreground of attention, next to the distressing content, rather than trying to argue the content away or push through it by sheer will.

The principle underneath both

Distressing content, a passing feeling or a traumatic memory, tends to feel most overwhelming when it has the whole of your attention to itself. Placing something else there alongside it, a soft label naming what's happening, or an external target dividing your focus, doesn't erase the content, but it reliably turns down how much it can pull you in — a smaller share of attention seems to mean a smaller share of the charge.

What that makes the real goal

Stated plainly, the goal in both cases is building the capacity to be with something intense, a feeling right now or a specific memory from years ago, without being fully absorbed by it — so that it stops running the moment, or in the memory's case, stops running the years since, from somewhere just outside your awareness where you couldn't look at it directly.

Other practices that serve the same goal

Affect labeling more broadly — simply naming an emotion in a sentence, 'I notice I'm angry right now' rather than acting from inside the anger — pursues the identical objective for everyday feeling states and carries real experimental support for lowering the physiological intensity of a reaction the moment it's named. Somatic Experiencing, a body-based trauma approach developed by Peter Levine, works toward a related goal for stored traumatic material through pendulation, deliberately moving attention back and forth between a small piece of the distressing material and a place in the body that currently feels calm or neutral, with mechanistic and clinical support for reducing overwhelm during trauma processing. And Cognitive Processing Therapy, which has a person write out and examine the specific beliefs a traumatic memory left behind, aims at the same underlying goal of updating a memory's emotional charge through a different route — direct written reappraisal rather than attention-splitting — and carries strong randomized-trial support of its own.

A tradition that already does this

Somatic Experiencing already builds something close to this exact combination into a single approach: it has a person track their own moment-to-moment bodily sensation, a close cousin of noting's soft labeling, while very cautiously and briefly approaching a piece of traumatic material at a time, rather than recalling the whole memory at once. It arrived at combining a noticing practice with careful, dosed contact with stuck material independently of EMDR, from body-based trauma work rather than eye movement research, which is some evidence the combination itself is a real and recurring pattern rather than a coincidence of these two specific practices.

Using Noting Practice to enhance EMDR

EMDR sessions are typically spaced a week or more apart, and what happens for a client in the days between sessions, when a piece of the target memory surfaces on its own outside the clinician's office, is usually left unaddressed by the protocol itself. A EMDR client who has also built a noting practice has something concrete to do in that gap: when a fragment of the memory or an associated feeling shows up unprompted — driving past a certain street, hearing a certain song — apply the soft label right then, 'remembering,' 'tightening,' 'afraid,' rather than either getting pulled fully into the memory or trying to shove it away. This doesn't do the reprocessing work EMDR does in session; it gives the client a way to stay a half-step back from an unscheduled activation until the next session, instead of the memory having the run of the week uncontested.

Using EMDR to enhance Noting Practice

Noting practice runs into a real limit with certain content: some thoughts and memories are sticky enough that a soft label barely dents them, and a person doing noting on their own may spend months quietly relabeling the same fragment of a difficult memory every time it surfaces, without it actually losing much charge. That's a signal, not a failure of the noting practice — it's the marker EMDR's own targeting step looks for directly: a memory that keeps returning with roughly the same intensity, rather than settling with repeated contact, is exactly the kind of stuck material EMDR was built to reprocess with a trained clinician. Someone who notices this pattern in their own noting practice has a concrete next step available, rather than assuming more labeling will eventually work on its own.

The intersection where the accident happened, four sessions into EMDR

You're four sessions into EMDR, working through the memory of a car accident at a specific intersection two years ago, and your heart rate still spikes every time you drive through it in real life, even on an ordinary Tuesday with nothing wrong. Your next session isn't for five more days. As you approach the intersection this time, you feel it start — chest tightening, breath going shallow, a flash of the moment right before impact. Instead of gripping the wheel and white-knuckling through it, or getting pulled fully into replaying the accident while you're driving, you apply the label the way noting practice trained you to: 'tightening.' 'Remembering.' 'Afraid.' You don't try to make it stop. You just name it as it passes through the intersection, and by the time you're two blocks past it, your breath has already started to even back out on its own. You mention it to your EMDR therapist at the next session — not as something you fixed, but as a specific, current example of how the memory is still showing up between sessions, which turns out to be useful information for where the reprocessing work goes next.

When this is worth reaching for

Between scheduled EMDR sessions, fragments of the target memory keep surfacing with nowhere structured to go, and noting gives that in-between time an actual practice instead of leaving it loose. The signal runs the other way too: a noting practitioner keeps meeting one specific memory that returns at close to full intensity no matter how many times it gets labeled, which is a cue to bring it to a trauma-trained clinician rather than keep working it alone.

Where this does not apply

Noting practice on its own is not a treatment for trauma and shouldn't be used as a substitute for it — applying a soft label to an intensely overwhelming memory outside of a structured, supported setting can leave someone alone with more than the technique is built to hold, and EMDR exists precisely because some memories need a trained clinician's structure and pacing rather than a self-directed labeling practice. And EMDR itself is not something to attempt informally by mimicking eye movements without a trained clinician; the protocol's safety and effectiveness depend on careful assessment, pacing, and containment that a self-administered version cannot reliably provide.

What the evidence does and does not support

EMDR has substantial randomized-trial support for reducing PTSD symptoms and is listed as an effective trauma treatment by multiple clinical guidelines, though which specific ingredient does the work, the eye movements themselves, the structured recall, or both together, remains genuinely debated in the research; the dual-attention account given here is the leading mechanistic explanation, not a settled fact. Noting's core mechanisms, decentering from a thought's content and reducing arousal by labeling a feeling, both carry solid randomized-trial support from mindfulness and affect-labeling research generally. Neither literature has tested the specific combination described on this page, using noting between EMDR sessions to handle unscheduled activation of the target memory; that is a reasoned extension built from two separately evidenced mechanisms, not a finding reported by either field.