The Tinnitus in Your Mind

*Artwork by Toosakforyou

Foreword

Tinnitus is when you experience ringing or other noises in one or both of your ears. The noise you hear when you have tinnitus isn't caused by an external sound, and other people usually can't hear it. This seems like kind of a headache, and it is also prevalent with 15%-20% of adults, shocking right?

It starts here

No worries, I do not have tinnitus, and I hope you don’t either. Regardless, I still do have instances when my head is just filled with constant noise. Exclamation marks to question marks, being thrown across the room. Cuss words and gibberish sentences and rude and mean and not very nice sentences on high volume at the same time. Ideologies and assumptions and more. Like multiple bookshelves in a library all toppling, with pages flying everywhere and words being thrown around. Taking a situation 2 weeks down the lane, analyzing and deducing a situation that would never arise, is something that is of prime quality for me apparently. Getting into a tough situation when all the odds stacked are against you and everything is tumbling internally and externally, can trigger situations like this. Maybe you had a falling out, maybe you fought with someone, maybe something happened.. you get the drift, right?

If your mind is sometimes attacked by the noise, and not the tinnitus kind of noise, hats off to you soldier! We live in quite a vast world with a whole lot of people, like a whole lot. We are hellbent on getting into messy and tough situations, oftentimes more than none where the noise kicks in; making it hard to think, reason and remain rational. 

What comes to my mind these days is something my mentor shared with me a couple of months ago, he called this a state of catastrophizing. That’s something some of us do as second nature, which is usually a cause of overthinking. (hoping for you to see another entry related to overthinking in the near future)

It’s taxing, tiring, exhausting and all the synonyms possible. However, let me try to enlighten you with a little tip my mentor passed through; put the facts on the table and shift your perspective. 

The next time you catch yourself in a difficult scenario, and you’ve been pondering over it with all pathways leading to disaster. Stop yourself for a minute and put the facts on the table. In fact, here are a couple of tried and tested methods -

1. Everytime you feel nervous in a situation, tell yourself “This is a symptom of my anxiety. This is how my body responds to stress. This will pass”

2. Regarding intrusive and negative thoughts, what you could do  is to allow yourself to have those thoughts, but say them in a silly voice, thus taking their power away. It challenges the legitimacy of them.

3. Take the fattest biggest breath ever, repeat it a couple of times. Every time you breathe out, sigh away all the pain.

4. Be guided by the evidence you have of the situation, not the worries you have about it.

5. Accept the consequences that your brain is hyperfocusing onto you until you run out of possibilities.

In conclusion, catastrophising and overthinking are engrained into our thinking. However, if you are able to stay conscious and get into the control room of your brain. You will be good.

I promise!

"There’s nothing serious going on around here." - Abraham Hicks

How often do you catch yourself overthinking/catastrophising?

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• 0%Kinda often
• 0%Not very often