Recent content by Off-Kilter

I think it might be a loss of perspective to wonder why God allows specific terrible things to happen. After all, every single one of us will be obliterated from the material world. All of us! It doesn't get more terrible than that. That's a much stronger challenge to God being loving. This can...

You're right, I would. And that made me cautious about saying this stuff for a while. It really is the strangest feeling when your thinking lines up perfectly with what you would like to be true, and you spend a lot of time checking whether you're just fooling yourself. I'm usually a cynic and...

Well, of course I have to say that this forum mostly functions as a group of people pulling themselves deeper and deeper into despair and losing perspective. With a lot of exceptions. I've noticed that even a lot of positive stories on this forum contain within them ways of thinking that will...

It doesn't need to be "fear". "Aversion" is a good word for it. And as I said, I believe studies back me up. Or at least Dr Nagler does. Sometimes you need to consider what an alien would think of your predicament. Imagine trying to explain to the alien what your problem is. "One of my sensory...

Tinnitus led me to start believing in God. Or rather, after seeking out and being convinced by arguments for God's existence and properties, I remembered that I always knew that God is real, and I was just pretending to not know. My reaction to tinnitus is the worst thing that has ever happened...

I can't understand that. If that is true, then my theory is just wrong. In fact I believe that studies support my idea that there is no correlation between the mental fate of a person with tinnitus, and how loud their tinnitus is.

There is only one type of reason. It's possible to come up with something that looks like reason to support a false statement, but in the end, there will be a problem with either the reasoning or the premises. I don't think reason totally rules our lives. But when we remind ourselves of a...

I'm really iffy about ideas related to the loudness of such an unmeasurable sound. I can hear it over the top of an action movie in the cinema. It's a high-pitched squeal in my right ear. But the one time I can never hear it is in the shower (probably because the sound of a shower is so...

I think this contains two false ideas about how to solve tinnitus aversion. In fact I think these are the two ideas that get people stuck. They certainly got me stuck. The first is the idea suddenly. People who suffer from tinnitus aversion sometimes get greedy. They can think that if a person...

I never worry about who I might be giving ammunition to. It always struck me as pointless to worry about, you can never track your intellectual influence. I would say that everyone is irrational sometimes. But you're never going to fix tinnitus aversion (or any phobia) without clear thinking...

Actually it's because it would make me think about tinnitus more, and I still have a mild phobia of my tinnitus sometimes. In other words, I wouldn't do it because I know that I am often irrational. I'm counting on it. But noticing I am irrational is a method that slowly fixes me.

Are you saying that tinnitus objectively makes it harder to concentrate and think? Because if that were true, then it would indeed destroy my argument. Now this is what I used to believe as well. And it's what drove me to despair, because thinking is key to my life and career prospects. So I...

But even if we look at it that way, doesn't it seem very odd? Why would you define an aberrant noise in your head as "bad"? Are you saying that you chose to be unhappy instead of happy? Or are you saying that this definition was somehow chosen for you? Who chose it?

I'm sorry, but it is. I'm not saying it will be easy, or even possible, for a particular person to stop being averse to their tinnitus. But it is irrational to be averse to it, after you know what it is. Tinnitus is pretty well understood in general terms, even though the specifics are open...

I would imagine that the main reason this works is framing, and the selection of sounds that are culturally noxious to the victim. On both counts, it actually works because of the intentional creation of an irrational aversion to the sound. The trouble is that the objective loudness of...