Tinnitus

This section is dedicated to Tinnitus with the clear message that there is something you can do about it! Julian Cowan Hill explains how to let go of tinnitus, having relieved his own symptoms and those of many of his clients.

To see Julian talking about his approach to Tinnitus please click here

Tinnitus commonly appears after an intense or long-term period of exertion, excitement, stress, challenge or change. Consequently most people start noticing symptoms after a period of stress, losing a loved one, an operation, working overseas, taking drugs, a long legal battle, etc. (download the paper on tinnitus for more details at the end of the section).

Challenges like these cause your nervous system to go into an adrenal state of red-alert, known as “fight or flight.” This makes your nervous system hypersensitive and causes dramatic changes throughout your body. The way you hear changes radically too. Whether it is skiing, stress, anger, casual sex, exhaustion, or emotional upset, adrenal situations make your ears ultrasensitive giving rise to tinnitus.

To demonstrate this shift in auditory perception, do you remember the last time you woke up in the middle of the night, after a nightmare? There you are breaking out in a sweat with your heart thumping away. You think you can hear someone outside your door. You’re frightened. Suddenly there is a creak on the landing. You jump out of your skin.

In this fearful state the tiniest sound like a creak doesn't sound tiny at all, and causes a big reaction. Even though the noise is feint, you perceive it as loud, and it causes your system to jump, breathing to quicken, mind to start racing, etc. This vital survival mechanism can literally save your life. Imagine if it had been a murderer with a knife out on the landing, being able to hear him/her meant you could prepare to fight or take off at top speed in the opposite direction. Your nervous system was doing what it has evolved to do, keep you alive. If there is any danger you need to know about it. That's why in certain situations your hearing needs to become ultra-sensitive, and can be a vital life-saver.

However, everyday things can cause a stress response to occur, such as having a depressing bank balance, or worrying about your next door neighbour. Unlike the noise in the night, these stressors can last months and years, and can eventually lock you into an oversensitive state for much longer.

In this state, ears not only pick up external noise, but now, because they are registering more than normal, they start hearing the nervous impulses along the auditory nerve inside your head. In most cases, tinnitus is nothing more than hearing the noises of your nervous system. It results from hypersensitivity listening in to the inner world of the nervous system. You have become so reactive that you have begun to monitor the background nervous impulses that normally are ignored. People with tinnitus often spend months or years in a heightened state of nervous arousal, so that eventually their hearing becomes so sensitive they end up listening to nervous impulses all the time.

So how do you help tinnitus?

Your nervous system needs to come out of "fight or flight mode" and switch off. It needs to feel that there is no danger in the outside or inner world and that there is nothing to worry about. In a nutshell, your system needs to feel safe and secure, without too much stimulation and able to manage what comes its way. When you achieve this, your hypersensitivity will to return to normal so you will stop picking up impulses inside your head.

As people let go of tinnitus, what usually happens is that, first you will stop reacting negatively to the tinnitus, ie it will stop getting to you so much. Then you will start forgetting about it, and eventually it will start to subside. It will become easier and easier to pay less attention to it, which is what will allow it to fade into insignificance.

The way to do this depends on what put your nervous system into an overamped state in the first place. The most common culprit is unresolved shock and trauma in your system from an operation, crash, upheaval etc. which will need to be addressed directly with treatment. For more details go to the shock and trauma section. Unfortunately, many people don't recognise that they are in a traumatised state, and stay locked in it for decades. This creates perfect conditions for tinnitus to appear.

Whatever the cause, it will be important to teach yourself to feel your body again, and become aware of where the stress and tension is holding on. You probably cannot relax properly at the moment because you only have a limited sense of what is going on below the neck. If you don't know what's going on in your body, how can you let go of it? Craniosacral Therapy helps you get in touch much more thoroughly so that you can let go and release subconscious tension. It teaches you how to divert the focus away from thinking and into feeling. This is not about generating thoughts in your head, its about lying back and letting the information come from your body back to your head. See the awareness building exercise download below and try it out. Its also quite interesting to try this technique out after you have had a session and notice how things feel different.

Most tinnitus people need a few sessions of Craniosacral Therapy just to start being able to feel again. Chronic stress and overwhelming situations are very good at shutting down the nervous system so that you cannot feel much at all. Part of treating tinnitus comes with opening up your nervous system again so numb areas in your body are replaced with feeling.

Craniosacral therapy is one of the best treatments for easing you out of this heightened state of red-alert, and helping you reconnect with your body. As you start to let go of all the years of built-up overwhelm in your system, you start to feel lighter, carry less baggage and as a result your level of hypersensitivity gradually reverts back to normal. This sends tinnitus on its voyage back to oblivion.

Julian Cowan Hill had tinnitus for 16 years himsself before it became severe. He knows what it is like to live through the nightmare state of hyperarousal. A course of regular Craniosacral Therapy gradually transformed his own tinnitus to the state it is today _ almost imperceptible. It is there but he has to really concentrate in a quiet place to notice it.

He has worked on over 250 people with tinnitus and has gained a lot of experience patterns of behaviour that accompany tinnitus. People in a state of red-alert generally feel a bit driven and unsettled, and as a result are often impatient and unable to follow things through properly. For this reason Julian asks tinnitus people to commit to at least 6 treatments. This allows time for you to actually start feeling the benefit. One session is rarely enough to cause any long-lasting changes.

Please note Craniosacral Therapy tends to work gradually. This is not a quick fix. Most importantly, if you are a person who likes pushing yourself to the limits drinking a lot of alcohol, coffee, driving 150 miles for a game of golf, running two businesses in your spare time, worrying about and looking after everyone else except yourself, then your nervous system is unlikely to let go. Julian can help you each time you see him but he cannot change the way you treat your nervous system in between sessions! If you really want to let go of your tinnitus do follow some of the guidelines on how to manage your tinnitus at the end of the paper on tinnitus, below.

See case studies/testimonials in our case histories section

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Download article on What is tinnitus
Download article Awareness building excercise

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