Hi everyone,
My tinnitus started 16 months ago out of the blue while sitting and relaxing. It was really really bad but I will spare you the details.
It has now roughly 90% disappeared and I would like to document how I have done it, so that hopefully many people can benefit from my experiences. I hardly hear the tinnitus anymore (even in very quiet environments) and if I do, it is so minimal that I usually forget about it very quickly again. I am confident that I will recover from the last 10% slowly but surely, as well.
I have read (or skimmed) 17 books on tinnitus (mostly of individuals who have overcome their tinnitus), I have read numerous websites that explain how to get rid of tinnitus and I have studied and extensively used every approach or method that claims to be helpful with tinnitus: Traditional Chinese medicine, Tinnitus Retraining Therapy, osteopathy, Julian Cowan Hill, mindfulness for tinnitus, Maria Holl, Glenn Schweitzer and Bruce Hubbard to name the most important ones.
Nothing worked in isolation and in all of these approaches and books I found confusion mixed up with valuable truths. I do not claim that I myself have the full picture now. I just offer what I have gleaned from my extensive experiments and studies and hope you can pick and choose the bits that will bring you a step further on your journey and maybe even complete recovery.
As you can imagine, my journey was convoluted and confused, just like all the tinnitus information on the web and in various books. So, I am writing this post in the way that I would have wished to have received the information myself. I believe that if I had followed all the steps outlined below, I would have never had a proper tinnitus crisis but would have been able to snuff it out right in the beginning.
Ideally, the following 4 steps should all be practised simultaneously. In practice, they will probably happen a bit one after the other.
1. Developing faith
In order to recover we need faith and faith we get from proper information. Here are a few bits of information that I would have wished to have understood from the beginning:
"Having tinnitus" does not mean "having tinnitus distress". Many people "have tinnitus" (e.g. my husband) but very rarely do people "have tinnitus distress" for longer than a year or two. Studies have shown (check the lancet study) that the vast majority of people naturally habituate between a year or two after the onset of this condition. Loud intrusive tinnitus for many years is extremely rare and therefore extremely unlikely. This is important to know because fear will exacerbate our tinnitus.
The term "habituation to your tinnitus" does not mean "getting used to your tinnitus" or – as if through a miracle – "not minding" to be exposed to screeching screaming sounds in your head. Habituation feels in one`s personal experience like healing. It means that the tinnitus is now so minor that it does not bother you anymore or that it has completely disappeared. Studies have shown that being able to hear the tinnitus when concentrating on it, is a natural, healthy condition that everybody has. So, recovery (or habituation) means to be free of intrusive distressing sounds that enter and stay in our mind uninvited.
If you find it hard to have faith in your recovery (as I did), it is a good idea to daily visualise your recovery vividly. In your mind, see yourself completely free from your "tinnitus problem" and maybe telling everyone how happy you are now. Your mind cannot distinguish between real and imagined scenarios and the more faith we have the more easily we will recover. It`s the placebo effect.
2. Eliminating the cause of your tinnitus
According to science, there are over 400 causes of tinnitus and even noise-induced tinnitus has usually more than one reason. After all, if you have been to a concert with 1000 people and you are the only one with ongoing tinnitus afterwards, then it is likely that more factors were at play than the noise-trauma alone.
In order to find and eliminate the cause of the tinnitus, I found it extremely helpful to write an hourly diary to check what made my tinnitus spike and calm down. I tried to check for correlations between stress, emotions, diet, exercise, sleeping patterns and anything else I could think of. I found that my spikes always occurred with a time lag and only appeared on the next day.
I believe in this phase, it is important that we do all can we can to improve every aspect of our life: diet, stress levels, health, exercise etc. It might also be helpful (and was certainly for me) to have acupuncture, osteopathy and everything else that makes our body healthier and our mind calmer.
I found many things wrong with myself during this phase and as a result I am much healthier now. Through doing this work and successfully eliminating all my spikes my tinnitus reduced by app 50 %. I very much doubt that without discovering and eliminating my triggers I would have not been successful in eliminating my tinnitus. Even now, if I work out too much or eat too much sugar my tinnitus becomes much louder again. (Obviously, I avoid it like the plague – lol)
3. Making your brain turn down the sound level
I really would have liked to have understood the following information earlier: our own negative reaction towards the tinnitus keeps it alive. I have heard this info many times but nobody could really explain it to me how this works until I found the website tinnitus dot org from the tinnitus and hyperacusis centre in London, UK. I really recommend that you find it and study it in depth. It says, in a nutshell, that according to tinnitus expert Prof Jastrebroff, the brain has special neurons that can amplify sounds according to our negative emotions. We can understand this when we think of a mother who wakes up when her new-born stirs (fear) but sleeps through a thunder storm. In other words, the more we dislike or fear the tinnitus the louder it becomes. This is vicious, I know, but the good news is that if we let go of these negative feelings, the amplifier neurons will become unresponsive and the ear noises will revert to their healthy state, where we can only hear them when we concentrate but where they rarely or never intrude into our consciousness uninvited. But how to get there?
Use a support sound: First of all, Jastrebroff recommends that we should not expose ourselves to total silence while being in the acute phase of having intrusive tinnitus because (as explained earlier) virtually everybody can hear sounds in the head in total silence. Instead, we should use something like a "support sound" – a sound we find pleasant but does not completely mask the tinnitus. (I personally used bird chirping and white noise from apps on my smart phone. I found it most effective to listen to this sound through a bluetooth speaker that sits like a collar on my shoulders. We need to hear the tinnitus because otherwise we cannot practise to let go of our negative emotions and thus give our brain the information that it is unimportant. On the other hand, we need to be careful to never flood and overwhelm ourselves with too much of the tinnitus and associated negative feelings because that would encourage the amplifier neurons to increase the sound even more. As we get better, we can switch our support sound lower and lower until we genuinely do not need it anymore.
Relax the body part where you tense up against the tinnitus: In order to break my fear and dislike of the tinnitus I checked, where in my body I would tense up when I heard the horrible sound. (Anger and fear are always associated with subtle tensions in the body.) In my case, this was in the shoulders, upper chest and jaw. I daily took lots of time to sit or lie down and relax these body parts. This brought slow but clear and ongoing improvement of another 25% and by now I was altogether 75% improved. I should have done this relaxation with a support sound on, which unfortunately, I did not do for a long time and therefore delayed my recovery. It should have also been done in combination with the following step, which, unfortunately, I only understood a few months later.
Program yourself to react to the tinnitus always in the same way: The most important factor in turning down the amplifier neurons in our brain is to have a neutral "doesn`t matter" reaction to our tinnitus. Now, I truly understand how difficult that is when you have a circular saw screaming away in your brain. I found that the best way to change my habitual negative response is by using a single pre-programmed response that I repeated many times each day.
When I looked into the stories of all the people who had successfully overcome their tinnitus-problem I found that they fell into two camps. Group number one developed a standard response of acceptance and group number two used a standard response of disinterest. Both strategies work equally well and you can decide which one to use depending on what is easier for you.
In practice it works like this: Every time you hear your tinnitus or you think of it, you respond to it by using one word or phrase, e.g. "allow", "accept" "okay" or "not interested". My favourite word was "serene". After you have said the word you go immediately to the part of your body where you habitually tense up (or feel your negative emotions) and do a quick mini-relaxation (e.g. consciously drop your shoulders). Gradually, you will learn to associate the sound of your tinnitus with relaxation rather than with distress. As soon your brain gets that message it will start to switch the amplifier neurons lower and eventually off.
4. Having patience
There is no doubt about it - getting rid of distressing tinnitus is a patience test. Improvement is usually measured by months while there is often little or no improvement apparent on a day-to-day basis. So, be ready to repeat your standard response many times each day. Use you support sound to never experience real distress and carefully look out for triggers that make your tinnitus spike in order to eliminate them. In addition, strengthen your faith by internalising the right information and visualising your recovery.
From what I have seen in the studies, 80 to 90% of people are successful in greatly reducing and eliminating their tinnitus distress within 18 months, even if they have no help at all. So, I would hope that if you use the above strategies it will go even faster or at least easier.
Once I had figured all these steps out, my tinnitus dropped to a very minimal level and my distress disappeared almost completely. I would describe this phase as a "relaxed gliding into complete recovery".
------------------------------
Early on in my recovery process I promised myself to help other people in their tinnitus recovery once I feel better. Please ask your question but remember that I am not a certified tinnitus expert.
My tinnitus started 16 months ago out of the blue while sitting and relaxing. It was really really bad but I will spare you the details.
It has now roughly 90% disappeared and I would like to document how I have done it, so that hopefully many people can benefit from my experiences. I hardly hear the tinnitus anymore (even in very quiet environments) and if I do, it is so minimal that I usually forget about it very quickly again. I am confident that I will recover from the last 10% slowly but surely, as well.
I have read (or skimmed) 17 books on tinnitus (mostly of individuals who have overcome their tinnitus), I have read numerous websites that explain how to get rid of tinnitus and I have studied and extensively used every approach or method that claims to be helpful with tinnitus: Traditional Chinese medicine, Tinnitus Retraining Therapy, osteopathy, Julian Cowan Hill, mindfulness for tinnitus, Maria Holl, Glenn Schweitzer and Bruce Hubbard to name the most important ones.
Nothing worked in isolation and in all of these approaches and books I found confusion mixed up with valuable truths. I do not claim that I myself have the full picture now. I just offer what I have gleaned from my extensive experiments and studies and hope you can pick and choose the bits that will bring you a step further on your journey and maybe even complete recovery.
As you can imagine, my journey was convoluted and confused, just like all the tinnitus information on the web and in various books. So, I am writing this post in the way that I would have wished to have received the information myself. I believe that if I had followed all the steps outlined below, I would have never had a proper tinnitus crisis but would have been able to snuff it out right in the beginning.
Ideally, the following 4 steps should all be practised simultaneously. In practice, they will probably happen a bit one after the other.
1. Developing faith
In order to recover we need faith and faith we get from proper information. Here are a few bits of information that I would have wished to have understood from the beginning:
"Having tinnitus" does not mean "having tinnitus distress". Many people "have tinnitus" (e.g. my husband) but very rarely do people "have tinnitus distress" for longer than a year or two. Studies have shown (check the lancet study) that the vast majority of people naturally habituate between a year or two after the onset of this condition. Loud intrusive tinnitus for many years is extremely rare and therefore extremely unlikely. This is important to know because fear will exacerbate our tinnitus.
The term "habituation to your tinnitus" does not mean "getting used to your tinnitus" or – as if through a miracle – "not minding" to be exposed to screeching screaming sounds in your head. Habituation feels in one`s personal experience like healing. It means that the tinnitus is now so minor that it does not bother you anymore or that it has completely disappeared. Studies have shown that being able to hear the tinnitus when concentrating on it, is a natural, healthy condition that everybody has. So, recovery (or habituation) means to be free of intrusive distressing sounds that enter and stay in our mind uninvited.
If you find it hard to have faith in your recovery (as I did), it is a good idea to daily visualise your recovery vividly. In your mind, see yourself completely free from your "tinnitus problem" and maybe telling everyone how happy you are now. Your mind cannot distinguish between real and imagined scenarios and the more faith we have the more easily we will recover. It`s the placebo effect.
2. Eliminating the cause of your tinnitus
According to science, there are over 400 causes of tinnitus and even noise-induced tinnitus has usually more than one reason. After all, if you have been to a concert with 1000 people and you are the only one with ongoing tinnitus afterwards, then it is likely that more factors were at play than the noise-trauma alone.
In order to find and eliminate the cause of the tinnitus, I found it extremely helpful to write an hourly diary to check what made my tinnitus spike and calm down. I tried to check for correlations between stress, emotions, diet, exercise, sleeping patterns and anything else I could think of. I found that my spikes always occurred with a time lag and only appeared on the next day.
I believe in this phase, it is important that we do all can we can to improve every aspect of our life: diet, stress levels, health, exercise etc. It might also be helpful (and was certainly for me) to have acupuncture, osteopathy and everything else that makes our body healthier and our mind calmer.
I found many things wrong with myself during this phase and as a result I am much healthier now. Through doing this work and successfully eliminating all my spikes my tinnitus reduced by app 50 %. I very much doubt that without discovering and eliminating my triggers I would have not been successful in eliminating my tinnitus. Even now, if I work out too much or eat too much sugar my tinnitus becomes much louder again. (Obviously, I avoid it like the plague – lol)
3. Making your brain turn down the sound level
I really would have liked to have understood the following information earlier: our own negative reaction towards the tinnitus keeps it alive. I have heard this info many times but nobody could really explain it to me how this works until I found the website tinnitus dot org from the tinnitus and hyperacusis centre in London, UK. I really recommend that you find it and study it in depth. It says, in a nutshell, that according to tinnitus expert Prof Jastrebroff, the brain has special neurons that can amplify sounds according to our negative emotions. We can understand this when we think of a mother who wakes up when her new-born stirs (fear) but sleeps through a thunder storm. In other words, the more we dislike or fear the tinnitus the louder it becomes. This is vicious, I know, but the good news is that if we let go of these negative feelings, the amplifier neurons will become unresponsive and the ear noises will revert to their healthy state, where we can only hear them when we concentrate but where they rarely or never intrude into our consciousness uninvited. But how to get there?
Use a support sound: First of all, Jastrebroff recommends that we should not expose ourselves to total silence while being in the acute phase of having intrusive tinnitus because (as explained earlier) virtually everybody can hear sounds in the head in total silence. Instead, we should use something like a "support sound" – a sound we find pleasant but does not completely mask the tinnitus. (I personally used bird chirping and white noise from apps on my smart phone. I found it most effective to listen to this sound through a bluetooth speaker that sits like a collar on my shoulders. We need to hear the tinnitus because otherwise we cannot practise to let go of our negative emotions and thus give our brain the information that it is unimportant. On the other hand, we need to be careful to never flood and overwhelm ourselves with too much of the tinnitus and associated negative feelings because that would encourage the amplifier neurons to increase the sound even more. As we get better, we can switch our support sound lower and lower until we genuinely do not need it anymore.
Relax the body part where you tense up against the tinnitus: In order to break my fear and dislike of the tinnitus I checked, where in my body I would tense up when I heard the horrible sound. (Anger and fear are always associated with subtle tensions in the body.) In my case, this was in the shoulders, upper chest and jaw. I daily took lots of time to sit or lie down and relax these body parts. This brought slow but clear and ongoing improvement of another 25% and by now I was altogether 75% improved. I should have done this relaxation with a support sound on, which unfortunately, I did not do for a long time and therefore delayed my recovery. It should have also been done in combination with the following step, which, unfortunately, I only understood a few months later.
Program yourself to react to the tinnitus always in the same way: The most important factor in turning down the amplifier neurons in our brain is to have a neutral "doesn`t matter" reaction to our tinnitus. Now, I truly understand how difficult that is when you have a circular saw screaming away in your brain. I found that the best way to change my habitual negative response is by using a single pre-programmed response that I repeated many times each day.
When I looked into the stories of all the people who had successfully overcome their tinnitus-problem I found that they fell into two camps. Group number one developed a standard response of acceptance and group number two used a standard response of disinterest. Both strategies work equally well and you can decide which one to use depending on what is easier for you.
In practice it works like this: Every time you hear your tinnitus or you think of it, you respond to it by using one word or phrase, e.g. "allow", "accept" "okay" or "not interested". My favourite word was "serene". After you have said the word you go immediately to the part of your body where you habitually tense up (or feel your negative emotions) and do a quick mini-relaxation (e.g. consciously drop your shoulders). Gradually, you will learn to associate the sound of your tinnitus with relaxation rather than with distress. As soon your brain gets that message it will start to switch the amplifier neurons lower and eventually off.
4. Having patience
There is no doubt about it - getting rid of distressing tinnitus is a patience test. Improvement is usually measured by months while there is often little or no improvement apparent on a day-to-day basis. So, be ready to repeat your standard response many times each day. Use you support sound to never experience real distress and carefully look out for triggers that make your tinnitus spike in order to eliminate them. In addition, strengthen your faith by internalising the right information and visualising your recovery.
From what I have seen in the studies, 80 to 90% of people are successful in greatly reducing and eliminating their tinnitus distress within 18 months, even if they have no help at all. So, I would hope that if you use the above strategies it will go even faster or at least easier.
Once I had figured all these steps out, my tinnitus dropped to a very minimal level and my distress disappeared almost completely. I would describe this phase as a "relaxed gliding into complete recovery".
------------------------------
Early on in my recovery process I promised myself to help other people in their tinnitus recovery once I feel better. Please ask your question but remember that I am not a certified tinnitus expert.
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