Mindfulness Based Tinnitus Stress Reduction
Mindfulness Based Tinnitus Stress Reduction
Welcome to this Mindfulness-Based Tinnitus Stress Reduction (MBTSR) program, an online website course teaching the core of the mindfulness practice you will be cultivating during the next eight weeks in relation to bothersome tinnitus.
This course is designed to be taken at convenient times for you in a location of your choosing. Because the course is not live, you have the freedom to choose when you complete the Weekly Lessons and each daily practice on the following days of the week. At the end of each Weekly Lesson, you simply mark the ‘completion’ tab and you will be able to begin the next Weekly Lesson in 7 days.”
This 8-week course teaches participants to bring conscious attention to whatever happens to be in their field of awareness at any given moment. Why? Simply because it is already here – we might as well experience it.
The present moment is where life actually happens. The past is already behind us, and we can only make our best guess about what might or might not happen in the future. Therefore, it is only in the present moment where we have the freedom to choose to respond in new, different, and more adaptive ways.
People living with tinnitus often experience many layers of difficulty related to their condition. The sounds themselves can be loud, persistent, and very unpleasant. These sounds can contribute to irritability, sleeplessness, depression and many other disruptive experiences. Some people can get to the point where they feel like their whole lives are defined and limited by having tinnitus.
The MBTSR course can help participants learn to free themselves from the endless internal monologue about how living with tinnitus has created hardships in the past, or may cause bad things to happen in the future. It provides a way out of this endless cycle of regret and anxiety that can actually be as upsetting as the sounds themselves.
The course encourages participants to bring awareness to their present experience with tinnitus, approaching it with acceptance, compassion, openness, and even curiosity. With this special awareness, even the most unpleasant experience of tinnitus can be met with an attitude of, "So this is my experience with tinnitus in this moment: let me feel it."
When a person brings awareness to whatever the moment brings – be it pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral (something that is neither pleasant nor unpleasant) – one finds that one can live through it. As author and mindfulness teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn says, "You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf."
Kabat-Zinn describes mindfulness as "paying attention in a particular way: On purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally." Practicing mindfulness is not as easy as it may seem, especially for people with tinnitus whose symptoms are often accompanied by fears that their condition may worsen, that their tinnitus may be a sign of a larger illness, or may indicate impending or progressive hearing loss. A struggle may develop between the person and the tinnitus, which often leads to fatigue, depression, anxiety, difficulty sleeping, and interpersonal problems.
Mindfulness-based therapies teach you how to change your relationship to tinnitus in an effort to lessen or eliminate this struggle. Mindfulness provides a simple but powerful route for getting ourselves "unstuck." It can help us accept things that we cannot control, provide courage to change what we can, and reconnect us with our own wisdom and vitality. It is a way to take charge of the direction and quality of our own lives. The key is appreciating and cultivating an intimate relationship with the present by bringing awareness and care to each moment.
Absolutely. Here at MindfulTinnitusRelief.com, we believe that any treatment that works to successfully relieve tinnitus is a treatment worth continuing. While taking this course, you do not need to discontinue other tinnitus treatments that you feel are helpful to you.
For example, if you use sound generators, Behind the Ear (BTE) Hearing Aids, doctor-prescribed medications, supplements, herbs, acupuncture, other forms of meditation and relaxation, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Cognitive Habituation Tinnitus Therapy (CHaTT), Tinnitus Retraining Therapy (TRT), Progressive Tinnitus Management (PTM), biofeedback, and the like, we encourage you to continue. The MBTSR course is designed as a complementary management tool that may enhance or be enhanced by other tinnitus treatments.
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