How TED Talks Cured My Insomnia

Because insomnia is much worse when you have tinnitus

I was a chronic insomniac. I tried everything imaginable to get better sleep. I would sometimes go to work not having slept at all the previous night. To make things worse, I’d chug coffee like it was water just to get things done. It eventually took a toll on my mind. Often times I felt very detached to my body, like I’m some kind of tiny person inside my head controlling a human-sized meat robot. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that this lifestyle isn’t healthy at all.

Sleep is important, nearly all animals have their own way of sleeping, or something remotely similar. Even great white sharks find a slow moving current at night and become catatonic — a sort of sleep-swimming if you will. Your brain flushes out toxic byproducts of brain function while you sleep. The information you get in the day gets better sorted out in your brain while you sleep.

But when you’re an insomniac, the mechanisms that allow one to get a good night’s sleep gets hijacked. Stress is one of the more common culprits. Worrying about things before going to bed activates stress hormones that get sent to your brain. Instead of conserving energy thus creating less toxic byproducts, the brain gets hyper aroused making it work more. This hyperarousal continues even after you’ve fallen asleep essentially starving your brain of energy as soon as you wake up. This decreases your mental capacity the next day, making you less productive. As night falls, you recall and worry about today’s events as well as tomorrow’s, repeating the cycle again. As your body gets used to the pattern, it starts to associate this as normal, and if these behavior repeats itself for months, or even years, you are now what’s called a Chronic insomniac.

Try everything first

As I mentioned, before I arrived at my own solution, I tried everything, and you should too.

These are some of the scientifically proven ways to fall asleep (caution: mini listicle ahead )

• Darkness —Make sure your room is dark. Getting a pitch-black curtain for your room is a good investment. Try to resist using mobile devices. As best possible, try to associate your bed with just one activity and that’s sleeping. Sleep masks also work, but personally, I don’t like the constricting sensation.
• Cold — Open the windows, or turn on the air conditioner or fan. Lowering your body temperature by 1–2 degrees gives your body the message that it’s getting ready for bed. It doesn’t have to be icy cool, stick to a temperature that you are comfortable with. Taking a shower beforehand also yields similar results.
• Silence —Noise stimulus keeps your brain active. Even as you sleep, your brain continues to register and process sounds making your body respond and wake you up. Good ole sleeping earplugs or earmuffs can do the trick.
• Tire yourself mentally— Before staying in bed, try to do some relaxing activities like reading, writing, or my personal best solution: listening to boring TED talk videos — which I will get to shortly.

Other methods, but prone to backfiring:

• Sleep in another area — If you are sleep-deprived, your brain starts to associate your usual room with the same anxiety that’s keeping you awake. Sleeping in the couch, or another room might help with these. This might backfire though, sleeping in an unfamiliar environment leaves half of your brain to be on guard duty for potential threats making you hypersensitive to stimuli.
• Sleeping pills — Over the counter medications like sleeping pills can be highly addictive, leading to withdrawals that worsen the symptoms. Other drugs also work in the same way.
• Tire yourself physically— Exhaustion eventually catches up on us, your body will start to rest once it gets tired. However, strenuous workouts in the late evening or right before bed can be counter-intuitive because it increases your body temperature stimulating you more than it relaxes you. Romantic physical activities elicit the same response, but they also release oxytocin that negates them.

TED Talks and Tinnitus

So how exactly did TED talks cure my insomnia? The first few tips I mentioned had something to do with a lack of sensory input, aka no light, and no noise — and I guess temperature to some degree.

But what if a lack of sensory input isn’t the problem, you see, I tried those first few steps, but when it got to the silence part, that’s when it became difficult. Even when there was virtually no sound in a room, I would still hear something. I’d hear a constant ringing sound that is reminiscent of frogs, crickets, and cicadas — or an amalgamation of all three.

This is sensation is called Tinnitus. Today, 1 in 7 people experience this auditory sensation. Tinnitus is often caused by broken or damaged auditory hair cells also known as cochlear cells. The more damage your cochlear cells have, the less signal the brain receives. This can manifest in poorer quality of sounds and fainter environmental background sounds.

This loss of signal forces your brain, and the rest of your central nervous system, to spend more energy in trying to tune in to your ear. The brain then modifies the neural connections until it finds a better reception. By the time your brain finds better sound, the neural network has already been modified to a degree while increased in activity, giving you the sensation of tinnitus. The sound of silence is now the sound of your own static — forever.

So yeah —maybe I never should’ve went to all those rock concerts.

In few cases, tinnitus episodes can trigger traumatic memories and other negative emotions such as sadness.

But if you do happen to have tinnitus, it’s nothing to be afraid of. Majority of tinnitus cases don't seem to have any inherent negative consequences. Tinnitus is just your mind hearing the sound of your own central nervous system. It’s your body’s baseline frequency for silence. This is the sound you hear when your central nervous system is talking with itself and you are just there eavesdropping.

Tinnitus doesn’t go away. However, once tinnitus becomes too bothersome, there are some methods that you can try to dampen or mask the sound, making it less stressful.

• Listening to the right “white noise” that counteracts the sound can make it sound more pleasing.
• Other methods involve the input of a sound that is similar to the patient’s tinnitus to try to “trick” your nervous system that it doesn’t need to transmit these signals anymore
• Listening to pre-recorded complex background ambient noise, like ocean waves, rain or public places. Real ocean sounds, and actual rain also works.

There are countless playlists online that offer these sounds, just make sure these sounds don’t have any short-term patterns. As for me, a simple fan can work, or the house’s ventilation system. Honestly, even in the daytime, the sound of ventilation kinda soothes me, sometimes beyond the effects of tinnitus. This is why I don’t feel too much stress whenever I go on long 13-hour flights over the pacific, even as the engines roar.

Getting back to my point, boring background noises seem to do the trick, this is precisely why I tried to look for the most boring Youtube videos I can find. My search led me to TED talk videos. To be fair, majority of TED talk speakers are very good, but then again there are some that are just plain old boring. Speakers with their smug faces sharing ideas that don’t adhere to anything anymore are my sweetspots. It’s sort of like those boring calculus lesson in university that get erased from memory after a school year. The audio in these monotonous presentations worked in the same way to me as white noise does. Bottomline, listening to boring ideas as background noise makes you sleepy.

It doesn’t have to be TED-talks, speakers with passive soothing voices can work in the same way. It could also be some ASMR, it could be podcasts, or youtubers who have natural non-aggressive voices teaching you tips on how to submit to publications. Experiment and stick to whatever works.

All these masking methods can be very effective, however, once you no longer associate “the sound” as a source of stress, you can start trying to sleep without them. In my case, I began to accept that the sound is part of myself. Sometimes I’d try to tune into it more, and listen to this seemingly separate organism of a brain that’s constantly trying to make sense of its own feedback signals.

Tinnitus reveals that your brain is constantly analyzing the world around you, even as it fails to filter its own internal noise. In a sense, experiencing tinnitus is like eavesdropping on your brain talking to itself — though it may not be a conversation you want to hear.

— Marc Fagelson (What’s That Ringing in Your Ears?. TED-ed. 2020)

Thanks for reading