Julie when people first get tinnitus horn they want to do is sit and listen to it in a dark
room monitor it it's hard not to especially with intrusive survey to meters and now I know that
in talking to you you have talked about distract yourself with things that you love to do can you
talk a little bit about that yeah it's it's Inc I think one of the worst things we can do is sit
with our tinnitus and stewing it and activate ourselves even further so it's really important
to get therapeutic help and to get into a body based practice I think those things are crucial
for forgetting better I remember when I was really really struggling with bad tinnitus I
started swimming I was climbing up the wall to very severe tinnitus at the time like I
was insomniac for a long time and I remember just dumping into the pool and the immediate experience
of the water the sound of the water it's very body based swimming so immediately some of the
attention went down into the body the bubble kind of expanded I developed a longer fuse by
being in the water and it gave me some relief and I got kind of addicted to something so I ended up
swimming a little bit everyday thank God because that helped me massively so finding activities
that you love singing walking meeting up with positive nourishing friends not needy clingy
draining friends I'm watching beautiful films that are part opening you need to stay away
from the doom and gloom death and destruction no news nothing a dream of safe lovely activities are
really good for you so for me was a very important turning point when I started really looking after
myself and showing tender loving care toward toward myself I would have Bard's but candle
beautiful music and a create was kind of like spa-like experience in my own home every evening
which I'd end up looking forward to every day and just doing really really gentle peaceful things it
really did add up to a lot it doesn't seem like very much at the time but if you really look at
what you're doing how you're living your life how you're driving yourself how you're freaking
yourself out do you really want to be hanging out with very negative messages with tinnitus or very
stressful people you nervous system is going to feel much much better when you feel safe loving
in relationship with things that a trustworthy predictable nourishing so think very carefully
about the activities that you do I will be so bold as to say that if you get regular body
based therapy if you learn a body based practice like yoga or Tai Chi and you really start looking
after yourself with your daily activities and you will get better it's just a matter of time and I
see this time and time again with my clients that the ones that get better have regular health take
on board that they need to start looking after their own bodies and nervous systems with a body
based practice and they they maybe make some changes in their normal habits that are much
healthier or more nourishing so in your book you do talk about these body based exercises
and give specific information and can you talk a bit about that and also a specific exercise yes
or if you look on other YouTube videos there's one called cleansing and relaxing which is a
really great one for just plodding through each bit of the body focusing in on it feeling what
you can feel in glorious Technicolor so feeding the weight the temperature the position that the
the actual quality inside that part of the body and then you cleanse and relax it and then having
moved it you'd notice if there's any reaction afterwards so you start off with your feet and
you work through the body and with each bit of the body feeling moving and then noticing any reaction
do you look at the clenching and relaxing video for more specific details this practice will just
focus you on your body experience that that's an incredibly useful one there's another one
my favorite is a running commentary technique where you sit back or you lie back and you just
describe out loud what you're feeling in the body you don't know what you're going to feel
next maybe it's a tickle here or a twinge there or a slight ache there but you just stay with
whatever comes up in the body it of a headache here then you can feel this like ache down your
foot and you actually vocalize yeah saying it out loud you don't have to you but it's much better
because focusing on speech speech takes a lot of attention a lot of focus and we're very good at
speaking most of us and to actually say out loud what your being in the body can cut through this
mental theater of rubbish that we carry around in our heads which is totally unhelpful the head is
not going to help you tinnitus yes of course the hyperactivity that drives tinnitus it's also the
source that drag it comes from the same place yes running thoughts yeah all this Twitter yeah is is
really not helping so to have a practice where you can cut through that and actually hear your own
voice saying ah I can feel an itch on my lower right leg you can hear that so that's already
cutting through the tinnitus and the practice is to feel what's in the body and what's brilliant
about saying it out loud as if you go off on one if you go for the daydream you'll stop talking so
you can catch yourself quite quickly suddenly if the room goes quiet is because you've lost your
thread don't worry about it but then just go back to sing out loud the next thing that you can feel
in the body and if you do this for half an hour the first five minutes might be quite difficult
because you'll be racing and buzzing in your head lots of millions of thoughts flying around after
about 10-15 minutes you may be slowing down and going - oh gosh I've just taken a sigh and feel
slightly tight across my right ribcage hmm gosh I can really feel my sitting bones pushing into the
chair and that's it become more connected with the body everything tends to slow down and you
start to feel more you start feeling your shape you start feeding your posture you start feeling
how you hold yourself and I think the amazing thing about this is once you get a handle on
it you can start to let go of it we can't let go of what we don't know so if you drop down
into the body and really experience it then you can start to let go directly or the tension and
the holding that is there so that that's the running commentary video you can see that on
YouTube one last one is a mental one really when when I have bad tinnitus I can remember had the
sound of crickets chirping crickets really loudly and so I I imagined in bed so I couldn't sleep I
I just went into this kind of I really used my imagination to imagine I was in Italy I was in
this beautiful mountainside lovely hot Summer Sun and the crickets were chirping all around me and I
imagined a hot sun shining on my body and I could hear my favorite Italian music I used to live in
Italy and I you know the certain things I really loved about it and and actually I dropped into a
sort of as an exhausted semi silly induced stupor oh this is like Italian dream where the crickets
of my tinnitus that he became a positive part of my dream and I fell asleep and had a lovely
dream about Italy and so we can play around with our auditory imagination we say that our minds
eye but we've got a mind's ear as well so now cause many people status is not just crickets
it can be horrible intrusive nasal noises that is a gamut of awful yeah I'm intrusive noises
so there is another audio game about hearing a singer yes I'm something I discovered quite by
accident I'm I was sort of thinking about how to help people with tinnitus while I still had
tinnitus and as imagining lovely sound as if we can bring in positive auditory sounds or
imagine positive we ordered positive auditory sounds this is incredibly helpful for tinnitus
which is quite a disturbing one and I commend her I was sitting just thinking about all the
lovely sounds one of them was of rainforests in a storm and in the rivers filling up and then this
waterfall cascading with water and I imagined the waterfall in front of me then but beside me and
then behind me and then the raindrops all around and I suddenly realized that with my imagination
I could at he really like imagine loudly this sound remembering it from my past experience
and that could kind of mask out the tinnitus and I had a lovely clear Lane experience I thought I
just remembered hearing a mountain Cleo Lena you know a lovely warm beautiful loving voice and I
imagined her when I was in bed too and singing me to sleep and she was singing this really beautiful
kind of like a lullaby sounding song an ant imagined her singing right into my ear and
I surprised by how much I was able to really imagine this if you think about we can really
visualize things but later B can also really hear things in your order to be imagination
very strongly and actually it was so so strong and clear in my imagination that it was soothing
and it really helped that he helped my is like she's cradling and rocking my auditory system
and I got her to go round to the other side in my imagination and singing through the other
year then I imagined her singing right behind my head and I imagined her singing straight in front
of my face and it was quite a strong experience that it was very helpful it's very nourishing a
lot of people might say to that well surely that's tuning in to your auditory sense and
making the tinnitus worse but in fact it does have an opposite effect doesn't it yeah it and
if it's something that you love and it's soothing is it's gonna make it better I mean you know it's
going to be a positive experience you know we want to bring in positive experiences we want
to get away from scary terrifying threatening experiences and create loving peaceful soothing
nourishing experiences so you find your most beautiful pieces of music and put them on in
the background and you know if you sing singing if you like humming hum you know it's it's a
play around to the imagination it's really quite extraordinarily powerful and turn your tinnitus
sounds into nice sounds or imagine them becoming beautiful singers or lovely natural sounds and
really get into the you know that kinesthetic that real physical imagination of standing by a
waterfall you can imagine the cool spray and you could feel thunderous roar and feel it
going all around you and feel the whole body being affected by it and it's really lovely thing to do