Languaging Around Tinnitus

 

Hi. Today we're going to be talking about languaging around tinnitus and how to really use your brain to change your brain in order to shift tinnitus from the bothersome category to the non-bothersome category.

So when I'm working with patients, I'm listening very closely to the dialogue that they're using to describe tinnitus.

And we spoke before about how, when somebody notices tinnitus, all of a sudden their mind's eye, their lens, gets locked and loaded around it, and it sees tinnitus or hears tinnitus with great clarity, but to the exclusion of everything else around it.

Now, if you can open up the lens, open up the aperture, you might very well still experience or be able to see tinnitus in the landscape, but it's within the context of everything else around it.

And so that is ultimately the goal that we're trying to achieve with a person with bothersome tinnitus: simply to shift them from the bothersome category to the non-bothersome category.

And so here we have this brain that has misunderstood this benign body sensation.

And so how is a person supposed to connect with their subconscious brain that is kind of on fire?

We talked about the amygdala overfiring and getting very, very anxious around tinnitus, and, you know, the fight-or-flight response keeps getting tripped—the autonomic nervous system.

And so how do we use our prefrontal cortex, right here, to change this amygdala, which is overfiring?

Well, how we do that is through how we language. That's how we can make tinnitus boring for the brain, because that's really what we want.

The brain is not going to stay locked and loaded on something that's boring or uninteresting.

And so by making tinnitus boring to the brain, it's going to open up the aperture and not have to hyperfocus on it.

So one way that we do that is by paying attention to our internal dialogue.

So now we're going to do a quick experiment, and I want to show you how this internal dialogue is so important in how we—and how our body—functions.

So everybody who's watching, let's close our eyes for a moment.

We're going to do a short exercise where I'm going to say just two words, two words in isolation. And I want you, after I say each word, to pause for a moment and pay attention to how your body feels.

All right, so let's try this exercise now.

Closing your eyes gently.

And now I'm going to start with the first word:

No.

No.

No.

No.

No.

No.

No.

And so just pay attention to how your body feels at this moment.

Maybe you notice an emotion coming up. Maybe a body sensation that comes up after you were hearing that first word.

And so now let's switch over to the second word:

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

And so just checking in with your body, noticing anything that comes up for you.

And when you're ready, just gently opening your eyes.

And so I'm going to make an assumption here that when you heard that first word, "no," that two-letter word, "no," your body might have felt a little bit more tense.

You might have felt this desire to push away. Maybe you felt a tightening, maybe in your stomach or just kind of in your chest area.

So this word "no" can have a very big effect on the chemistry of your body.

And then when you heard the word "yes," I'm going to make an assumption, but I'm guessing you kind of felt maybe more calm, a little bit more open, a little bit more prepared to take in whatever's about to come.

And so what's really happening there is we've taken two words out of context.

I mean, "no" in relation to what? I mean, "yes" in relation to what?

And you've taken "no" and you've attached it to every other "no" that you've ever heard before in your life.

And so when you're hearing "no" in the present, out of context, it's getting attached to every experience with "no" you've ever had.

Same with "yes." You take that word "yes," a three-letter word, and you've connected it now to every other "yes" that you've heard in your life.

But "no" out of context of what?

For example, you know, gosh, if I go to a doctor and he says, "No, you don't have cancer," well, that's a "no" that I want to hear.

Right?

Or, God forbid, "Yes, you do have cancer." That's a "yes" that I definitely don't want to hear.

So it's interesting how the brain kind of just generalizes and connects the word to what it typically experiences when it hears the word "no" throughout your lifetime.

So the reason we did that experiment is to really show you how influenced we are by words that we use.

And these words can also be used internally.

So what is happening to the person with tinnitus who, all of a sudden, in their mind—they, let's say, wake up and they check for tinnitus, and boom, there it is.

You might say to yourself, "Oh God, this is terrible."

And then all of a sudden, that word "terrible" is getting connected to every other "terrible" that you've ever experienced in your life.

And all of a sudden the brain is saying, "Wait a minute. What's terrible? There must be something terrible here. I better pay attention. I better look for it."

And so the mind stays locked and loaded on something terrible.

And so, you know, I don't want to insult here, because I understand full well that somebody with bothersome tinnitus is really, really struggling. And, I mean, it's changed the lives of millions of people in many ways.

But for the purpose that we have of shifting tinnitus from bothersome to non-bothersome, I don't want your brain to know that it's so terrible.

Okay?

So we're going to try to trick our brain. We're going to use our prefrontal cortex to chill out the amygdala by the way we talk to ourselves, by the way we choose to talk to ourselves.

So when tinnitus feels bothersome, instead of saying, "Oh God, this is going to be a horrible day," and all of a sudden the brain connects back to everything horrible and, you know, the lens gets locked and loaded, instead maybe we can choose other ways of responding to tinnitus.

That is not so much a reaction, but more of a response.

For example:

"Tinnitus is there. You can say, 'Oh wow. All right. It's bothersome in this moment, but it's not an indication that the next moment is going to be bothersome. So I can stay with what is in this moment, and I can make it through this moment, even if something is very, very unpleasant, like tinnitus can be.'"

Or you can say something like:

"All right. You know, tinnitus is here right now. Maybe I need to push back from my desk and maybe go for a walk outside."

Or maybe call tinnitus what it is: a paper tiger.

You know, if, for those who don't know what a paper tiger is, it really is just that. It looks like a tiger, so it's scary, but it's made of paper.

So when we start calming ourselves down with words that change our chemistry from being on fire to being more relaxed, we see that the lens can loosen around tinnitus and maybe even get bored with tinnitus.

Now, I never would tell somebody to say, "Oh, I love my tinnitus," because that doesn't—that just doesn't feel like it fits.

In fact, I don't know anybody that says, "I love tinnitus."

But we can go vanilla on it. Make it boring to the brain so that it has other things to pay attention to.

And you can get out of that loop of checking, that loop of worrying, that loop of anxiety that gets wrapped around this otherwise benign body sensation and can keep a person stuck.

And so how does the person get unstuck with tinnitus?

By making tinnitus boring to the brain.

Right now, it's fascinating. The amygdala is really going to town. It's on fire.

You know, all it wants to do is check for it and pay attention to it and create stories around it.

But we can use our prefrontal cortex, our conscious mind, to chill out the amygdala by just talking to ourselves in a way that doesn't inflame the amygdala, but rather kind of encourages it to let go of whatever it's paying attention to and maybe create some new neural pathways where tinnitus is seen as just another benign body sensation that can very safely go into the background.

And so what we're really talking about today, and something that I find has been very helpful with people with bothersome tinnitus, is to mind your words.

Mind the way you speak to yourself and talk to yourself about tinnitus.

And through that, we can, over time—it might not be overnight, but over time—we can kind of loosen our grip on tinnitus.

And instead of feeling wrapped around it, we can start to hold it in a new way using our words.

So that we can—you know, tinnitus might very well still be there, but when we release our grip on it, we can allow it to also go.

And so that is what I mean by working on the languaging around tinnitus.