Hi,
I thought I'd just let you know about an interesting discovery I have recently
made about my tiredness and anxiety.
I'm 47 and when I was 35 I suffered for about a year with major episodes of
panic attacks. I tried lots of different meditation approaches to help relax etc
but they did not worked what worked discovering a method similar to what I later
found out was the DR Claire Weekes approach of facing and accepting the intense
fears and not trying to change them or run away from them. The phrase that
actually worked for me was "what you resist persists". It took about a year for
the panic attacks to finally go.
Even though I no longer suffer from panic attacks I still get anxious very
easily and feel tired a lot. I also suffer from sound sensitivity - I live
opposite a school and the sound of the kids playing basketball and football gets
on my nerves. Also in my flat I get annoyed when the squirrels run on the roof
and the tenants leave the fan on in the bathroom. I was seriously thinking of
moving to a new place to reduce the noise but I decided to just check the
internet for some possible cures for hyperacusis. By some luck the very first
page of google came up with Jastreboff method for curing sound intolerance
called TRT (Tinnitus retraining therapy) . I don't have tinnitus but TRT works
for patients with noise intolerance as well.
Anyway when you actually look at his model of how sound intolerance develops it
actually explains why I still suffer from anxiety and tiredness. It all provides
a lot of support for Claire Weekes idea of nervous sensitisation as being the
cause of panic attacks. Jastreboff explains that when the auditory centres in
the brain get sensitised (he calls it auditory gain ) sounds which for most
people are ignored seems excessively loud to you . Then, because there is close
link between the sound centres and the emotional centres in the brain, distress
and annoyance is created ,which then triggers the adrenal response which then
unfortunately makes the signals stronger. The more you get annoyed by the noise
in your head the more adrenal is produced and the more stronger the gain become
- thus you get a vicious cycle to hell !
His method of curing the patient is very interesting. He says the worst thing a
patient can do is to start to avoid sounds by using ear plugs (which I am still
trying to stop using) and making the background environment too quiet.
Scientific experiments have proved that our hearing becomes even more sensitive
to sounds the more we try to avoid them ! He also advises the use of ear sound
generators for a certain subtype of sound intolerance. Another thing he says is
critical for recovery is our REACTION to normal sounds needs to change otherwise
the aversive conditional reflex cant be changed and we will always experience
some annoyance and stress when we hear the sounds. He is not a supporter of
flooding the ear with negative sounds but does support gradual exposure to
sounds - both positive and negative.
I don't want to spend too much time explaining the model - you can find lots of
information on the web. The really interesting thing is that the model explains
why I'm still feeling stressed,tired and anxious even though I have tried to
reduce my work load by working part-time and I also now work from home but I
still feel stressed - you can't get away from sounds !
I have not got round to actually seeing a trained TRT therapist - as I am hoping
my symptoms will improve with self- treatment but for the last month I have
tried to increase the sound background in my flat - I play a nature sound tape
24hrs and I am also trying to just stay relaxed as I can when I hear the football
noise (again as Claire Weekes says I need to stop fighting /struggling with the amplified sounds I am hearing). There are some small changes - my periods of depression/sleepyness in the
moring when I'm working are getting less and I don't seem to need to have a long nap in the afternoon. The research studies show that TRT (even with a trained TRT
therapist takes between a year and 2 years to be cure about 70% of people ) so a
lot of patience is required. I have to keep telling myself that retraining
these conditoned nervous reflexes takes a lot of time. I also may need to see a therapist to get
the ear-sound generators as I have heard they can speed up recovery times. But I do believe the theraphy model is very SOUND !
Anyway this is just to give you something to think about. For me understanding why I overreact so much and why I get so tired so easily has been really important and the Jastreboff model explains a lot !
One site I have found very useful is :
http://www.tinnitus.org/home/frame/THC1.htm
see the Hyeracusis section and the self-help exercises section.
I'll post a follow up in a month.
Mervyn
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