I’m sitting in my office, trying to answer some emails, and I am very distracted by one particularly annoying sound.
No, it’s not my tinnitus, which is emitting its usual gentle roar. It’s my dog who is removing the contents of my waste bin, one-by-one, and shredding them. I know when I turn round there will be chaos behind me. So I’m not turning round!
Ziva is doing that because I am doing this – staring at the screen and tapping on the keyboard. Instead, she wants me to sit on the sofa with her and give her belly rubs.
When she first started to do this I would try to carry on with my work regardless, hoping that if I kept ignoring her she would get bored and go play with her toys, or monitor the garden for squirrels. It was all pretence, of course. The more I tried not to listen to her destruction, the more aware of it I was.
Butter wouldn’t melt!
And the more I listened, the more frustrated I would become. Maybe Ziva could see my shoulders tensing up round my ears, or the twitch in my jaw. Or maybe it was the fact that my tippy-taps on the keyboard became more and more fierce as she continued with her game that gave it away. But I swear the noise of her ripping apart whatever she found in the bin became louder and louder in direct correlation to my level of annoyance.
It’s very similar with tinnitus.
In the early days of our tinnitus journey, or when we have a spike, we can become hypervigilant about our tinnitus. It’s the first thing we listen out for when we wake up, and the last thing we hear as we fall asleep. And we check in with it multiple times during the day. Has the sound changed? Has the volume changed? Is it better or worse than five minutes ago?
Tinnitus becomes the noise we don’t want to hear, but can’t help listening to. After days, weeks or even months of exhaustion we realise that the key to moving forward is to reduce how much time we spend thinking about our tinnitus.
If only it were that simple!
We need to REFOCUS.
Refocussing ≠ distraction.
Distraction has its uses as a very temporary fix. We can spend hours trying to distract ourselves from tinnitus by scrolling through social media, or getting lost in a sea of desperate busy-ness.
But when we stop we find the tinnitus is just as loud as it was before we started. It offers nothing more than a temporary lull, rather than a real solution. Plus, all that relentless activity is exhausting.
Refocussing = proactive tinnitus management.
Refocussing on the other hand is a proactive way of managing both the sound in our head, and the impact it has on our life.
It allows us to get on with all the things we need and want to do in life. It empowers us to work on a complex report, and also read a novel in silence. It enables us to have a conversation aware our tinnitus exists, but not distressed by it.
Sounds good right?
How refocussing works.
It would be wishful thinking for most of us with intrusive tinnitus to pick up a book and magically ignore the distressing sound in our head. That’s why we start small and work our way towards that goal, or the goal of focusing better at work, or the goal of being in a quiet space without wanting to rip our head off!
In each session together we learn refocussing exercises—some based around everyday activities, and some around guided meditations. Then we spend the time between sessions practising holding our attention where we want (rather than where tinnitus wants).
It’s challenging. We can be distracted by so many things— the ping of a notification on our phone, a sound from another room, a thought, a worry, or our tinnitus.
Initially we might have to refocus our attention a gazillion times over the space of just 10 minutes, and that can feel like failure. But it’s actually success. Because each time we notice our attention has wandered and bring it back to the exercise that means we have flexed our attention muscle and trained our brain a little more.
How refocussing helps.
It doesn’t take long before we start to notice that we are having to refocus our mind from both tinnitus and distractions less and less. And gradually we can see that, though we might briefly check in on our tinnitus, we are able to refocus immediately on the task at hand. We’re not worrying about the tinnitus. We’re not hyper-focusing on it. We’re simply acknowledging that it exists, and then turning our attention back where we choose, rather than where tinnitus dictates.
How you can refocus.
If you’d like to understand more about how refocussing can help you with your tinnitus take a look at the detail here