Small Move, Big Change

[Sound Wave]

I recently bought this book and today realized this approach could also help with T habituation. It's about making small 'microresolutions' in your daily life in order to achieve a larger change you are looking for.

For example, a goal to reduce weight is very hard to achieve for many. The task of reducing weight has a lot of smaller tasks inside it, like eat less and exercise more. Both of those have also a lot of smaller tasks inside them, like reduce excess carbon eating and walk more. The idea is to come up with very simple and concrete, achievable tasks, like in this example:

- Switch potatoes in your everyday meals to vegetables
- Walk one extra bus stop every morning to work

You probably get the idea. Now, with T we could try to attempt the same approach. A large task / goal could be 'habituate to T', which we know is VERY hard. We can break down this goal in many many different subjective ways which have to do with health improvement in general, stress reduction, protection from noise and so on. Good exercise probably for many. But there's one element of T and microresolution approach, that is probably the most useful -> our reaction to T distress. When we hear our T and feel distress, again a high level goal / task could be 'don't feel that way'. Not very helpful, right. What if we would break this task down to smaller tasks like this:

- When I hear my T and feel distress, close my eyes, breath in slowly, breath our slow and long and say to myself: "I know this is just a perception of sound in my brain, which does not try to hurt me in any way".

Or something else. Maybe do 20 pushups. Everyone will be different when it comes to designing own microresolutions. Maybe we can share T microresolution ideas in this thread if people like this idea?

 

[Stina]

Thank you for the post So logical and simple and yet we forget.

 

[billie48]

Way back I used to have panic attacks when I heard my ultra high pitch loud T. I thought the sound was so hard to live with. Then I did 2 micro steps to help myself - 1) played blind when I woke up with blasting T thinking it was so hard to live with it, by groping in the dark feeling around with my eyes closed and trying to get around to the bathroom to find the tooth brush to brush my teeth and then finding the toilet etc... well, it felt so helpless and lost & disoriented to do the simplest of things even around my most familiar home. After much frustration and helplessness, 10-20 minutes or so, I opened my eyes to look out the window, and truly appreciate the beauty of the visible world. I learned to put my fear of T ringing in its perspective. I realized I needed to count my blessing and have the patience to learn to peacefully co-exist with T.
2) When the ringing sound got really loud, I would also watched video clips of really loud job environment like those of the drillers, mine workers, flight attendants. My computer is hooked to a sound system so I could turn the volume up to reflect real site loudness. You just sit there to soak in the loudness (if you can bear it), then imagine you are among the million of people in the 3rd world who have to work for wages (which they are happy to have a job) for life without much ear protection such as this video. I would suggest to myself that at least I don't have to work like them, and I am not 1000 ft underground like the mine drillers risking mine collapse & poisonous gases. I am not sure if this approach will help you but it sure helped calmed my nerve to moderate my negative reaction to the T sound.

Watch these guys (no ear protection) with amplified speakers and you will count your blessings that you don't work like them: