In your imagination, you can be anyone, do anything and go anywhere. In the real world, life is not that easy.

There isn't a magic switch to cure the tinnitus you experience, but you can manage how you respond to the sound. Visualisations are key in this. They are imaginative exercises where you can externalise the tinnitus sound you perceive and then manipulate it, so you understand it better and feel more in control when you hear it.

Visualisations are a bit like when you picture memories you have, of a holiday, for example. Your body responds to the image of the memory and you can even find yourself smiling at something happy you remember. The brain has anchored an emotional response to that image or memory. So when it comes back to mind, you experience that emotion again.

This is why you might become stressed or anxious thinking about a spike in your tinnitus noise even when you aren't actually perceiving one. You remember the tinnitus sound and then experience the accompanying anchored emotion of the time when you did actually hear the spike.

With visualisations, it works the other way around. You can learn to imagine more control and more positive responses to your tinnitus sound, so that when you actually hear it day to day, you feel more in control and it bothers you far less.