The reaction absolutely can and does change for many people. If you have no negative reaction to tinnitus, it really makes all the difference. Who cares if it's "deflecting" the actual problem, if they don't feel their tinnitus is a problem to them, that the sound has no meaning to them, good for them. They surely aren't thinking to themselves that they're deflecting the real problem. That kind of thinking would serve no purpose in their situation - to the contrary, it would only serve them to possibly make them worse, attaching meaning and giving attention to the sound again. They're going about their lives and that's great. It's good news the reaction can change when the situation with tinnitus treatments is what it is.
And I strongly believe many people can live a happy life when their reaction changes. Sometimes that reaction is very hard to get under control though. I'm an example of a guy who has severe tinnitus, the shower being my daily respite, and it's extremely difficult to habituate to this cacophony of two annoying high-pitched noises. They overtake everything and anything, it's like an implanted 24/7 torture chamber. Some people claim it doesn't matter how loud tinnitus is, anything can be habituated to. I wonder how anyone can make such bold claims, in my mind there's always going to be intractable cases unless someone can prove this beyond reasonable doubt - which is impossible, this being a subjective condition and there's always outliers in the statistics.
In one end of the spectrum, we've seen more people here than I can count who were suicidal in the beginning, but after a few months (sometimes a bit longer) they completely "neutralized" the negative reactions tinnitus caused them. From what I've gathered, it's usually the tincture of time that facilitates this process (but things like CBT may be the necessary boost in some cases). As a rule of thumb, it's at this point (if not earlier) when people stop visiting tinnitus sites. This is also why the sample on this site is HIGHLY skewed, it doesn't represent tinnitus in the real world. People who live with their tinnitus no problem, aren't bothered by it, they don't look for resources like this.
One story that always comes to my mind is that of
@caffclifton's who also is half deaf in addition to having tinnitus. And has reached the stage where she's doing awesome regardless. There are many, many more stories of overcoming this adversity, even if the tinnitus signal remains. Their daily experience of life returns to very much normal where they can be genuinely happy.
There's also lots of people whose tinnitus is mild (maskability wise), but they find it extremely bothersome.
Personality types may play a role here.
One in five find their tinnitus bothersome. I'm unsure what the patient demographic for that stat was though. Because obviously there can be a difference in how bothered one is by their tinnitus depending on, e.g., how long they've had it.
But this cannot be repeated enough: of course we have to attack the root causes and find real treatments that put a stop to this madness. Eradicate it.
I'm starting to digress here, but one thing that I've always personally found, well, counterintuitive to raising awareness, is that too often the hard cases are swept under the rug. A step further, while we naturally don't know about all of them, there have been some suicide cases here on the forums. One somewhat recent example was where a member took their life solely because their tinnitus was too much to deal with and they had tried quite a lot of things to alleviate it, but their family member wanted to keep it a secret.
A loved one taking their life, that's understandably one of the saddest things that can happen and there are reasons anyone can sympathize with why the family may not want to publish such news - just imagine your loved one doing that, it may not really be something you want to share with the world.
However, keeping these things hidden, it probably doesn't help make the public realize that for a sub-group of patients tinnitus can be impossible to cope with.
Furthermore, acts of self-harm are often grouped under "depression", while tinnitus as a cause may not get the deserved attention - even if it was the major trigger. I guess it is the chicken or egg thing, no doubt depression can follow tinnitus, but as a root cause of that depression, tinnitus needs to be highlighted.
Thankfully there are some exceptions, e.g., recently how the family of Craig Gill (Inspiral Carpets drummer) have made it their mission to raise awareness of tinnitus after Craig's suicide.
Wow, I started going off on a tangent here, when initially my aim was just to comment that for so many people tinnitus become a non issue, it's not as if they have to continuously "fight" to remain habituated. The noise just literally is there and their brain doesn't react to it. Isn't that cool? I surely would love to reach that stage as effective treatments are not here yet.
From
our recent Facebook update... Which shows that there indeed are a variation of experiences - but here too it's good to remember that most people who engage in tinnitus online are in the group who are looking for relief, or who are not yet habituated (plus, when you count the member and visitor numbers of all the major tinnitus resources, you'll see that it's the absolute minority who are bothered enough to join organizations or become members or visit sites - as far as I know, American Tinnitus Association has fewer than 20,000 members, and British Tinnitus Association fewer than 6,000 - this, too, probably is representative of the fact that tinnitus is not much of an issue for most people). It really is hard to raise awareness, find volunteers for projects, etc. when the online pool of people is small to begin with, and then when the debilitated cases tend to have their hands full with trying to get through the day, so getting hands dirty with tinnitus projects is not on many people's minds...
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