You won't believe how stress affects TINNITUS! Dr. Jennifer Gans explains

The Three Things Behind Bothersome Tinnitus
Now, whether or not you're bothered by it or not bothered by it has everything to do with three more things.

Okay, so let me share with you again. Three is just the magic number when it comes to tinnitus.

So, there are three things that every single person with bothersome tinnitus has in common.

Now, let me remind you, I've sat for thousands of hours with people with bothersome tinnitus. So, I'm going to say that I don't know a single thing about the people with non-bothersome tinnitus. Why? Because they don't come to see me.

But I know an awful lot about the people with bothersome tinnitus, and I feel that it's my occupational responsibility to share with you what I've learned.

So, what I have found is that every single person—not 83%, not 93%, not 99.999%, but 100% of people with bothersome tinnitus—have one, two, and three in common.

Okay, I'm going to share with you what those three are.

Number One: Hearing Loss
Number one, hearing loss.

Everybody with tinnitus—it’s the flint that starts the fire of tinnitus. You have to lose something in order to search for it, right?

So, everybody with tinnitus—bothersome tinnitus, or you could say anybody with tinnitus—has some form of hearing loss.

Now, many people will come and say, “Oh, no, you don't know what you're talking about. I went to my doctor. They said I have perfect hearing.”

Well, they measure you on an audiogram between 250 to 8 kHz, but humans hear out to 20,000 hertz.

So I always say, “You know, congratulations. You have awesome hearing, and that's something to go home and celebrate. But I'm afraid that in the highest of all high frequencies, everybody has hearing loss after a certain age.”

So, anyway, you have to lose something in order to search for it. Therefore, that is one of the necessary three parts of a person with bothersome tinnitus.

Number Two: Stress
Number two, stress.

Everybody with bothersome tinnitus is experiencing some form of stress.

And this is where the mindfulness meditation can be so helpful.

Number Three: An Amazing Personality
And then number three, every single person with bothersome tinnitus has an amazing personality.

[laughter]

And that's usually what happens when I mention number three. People start to laugh.

But I'm actually very serious about that, in that the personality that I'll describe to you in a moment is something that people love about themselves. It's what their employers certainly love about them. It's what has made them successful in their lives. It's what people care—you know, people love about them.

So, we are actually talking about an amazing personality, but that amazing personality has an underbelly that's pulling them down.

And so, my job is to help people recognize—because we're often unaware—but to recognize the underbelly that's pulling them down, remove it, so that they can go off with their amazing personality and keep, you know, keep making this world go around.

So, let me explain to you this amazing personality.

Vigilance and the Mind's Triage
One hundred percent of the people with bothersome tinnitus are the kind of people who are very alert, aware, alive, and they are vigilant.

And, for example, they might walk into a room and they scan the room, and if they spot a problem, they latch on and have trouble letting it go until they figure it out.

Okay?

So, this is not 93% of the time. It's 100% of the time.

People with bothersome tinnitus have this vigilance.

And why?

Because they're noticing something. They're noticing what probably should have gone unnoticed, to be honest, and they are placing it into the number-one slot of the mind's triage.