When you’re stressed or anxious, you have a physical response: you might hold your breath, hunch your shoulders, or clench your teeth and fists. Over time, these coping behaviours become habit, so whenever you experience anything unpleasant, your body's biochemistry changes in order to give you more energy to take action. This is known as the fight or flight response, where blood flow is restricted, oxygen intake is reduced, and you tense up, ready to run away or fight. Your brain then tries to make sense of the change and you experience anger, fear, or anxiety.

When you hear your tinnitus it is likely that your body is responding in this way. You can't completely override this automatic response, but you can learn to recognise the signals and then adapt to introduce more helpful habits.

Physical relaxation exercises help you to understand where you hold tension. Over time, tensing up when you hear your tinnitus sound can cause its own problems with the muscle structures. Research has shown that many people with tinnitus have issues with their teeth, jaw or neck muscles.

So this series of physical exercises will help you to: locate where you hold tension in your body; practice releasing it; and start noticing when you tense up in response to your tinnitus so you can respond by relaxing those muscles.

These are simple exercises that can be done at any point in your day with little preparation or effort. They're here to help you interrupt any unhelpful patterns that are making your tinnitus worse and start to put in place more helpful ways of responding to your tinnitus.