Tinnitus Coping Tip #5-Habituation

Tinnitus Help NJ

Let me start with a story...

A number of years ago I used to have a social services job where one of my duties was to visit adult psychiatric patients who had been recently discharged from the state hospital to see if they keeping up with their aftercare arrangements.

Many of these individuals lived in the impoverished neighborhoods that border Newark airport. If you've even been there you would know that 24/7, 365 days a year there are jetliners continually landing and taking off. Not only is it loud, sometimes the planes fly so low overhead the windows and walls in their homes would actually shake!

Yet one thing I noticed soon was that for most part, the local residents barely responded to the endless cacophony.  It was just "there."

You can see the same thing going on in the outer boroughs of NYC where some parts of the subway line are elevated over the street. The screeching and rattling overhead quite often startles visitors, but the locals pay it scant attention, it's just "there."

This is all due to a natural process known as habituation-where repetitive stimuli eventually does not register as much in the conscious mind. The sounds from the airport or the subway haven't decreased, but the level of attention paid to them has.

People who successfully cope with tinnitus appear to go through the same process habituation even though the stimulus originates within the nervous system and not the external environment like an actual sound does. For these people, the sound is just "there" but not given much attention even though the neural signal that is perceived as a sound is still present.

There are a couple of factors that can interfere with habituation. These include:

• When the stimuli has a negative emotional attachment to it such as fear or anger as this can keep your attention focused on it.
• When a person is under considerable stress as this can lead to a phenomena known as Central Sensitivity Syndrome or C.S.S. where the mind's ability to filter out unpleasant sensations becomes impaired. (You can read more about C.S.S. here)

This is why stress relief practices in the form of hypnosis, mindfulness meditation, yoga and acupuncture can be helpful to people learning to cope with tinnitus.

Once you get out of constantly being in the fight or flight stress mode, your natural coping mechanism of habituation will improve.

A free, confidential phone consultation is available if you have any questions, call (732) 714-7040.