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185 points gregsadetsky | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.211s | source
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plaidfuji ◴[] No.44058336[source]
I “got over” mine after many months of “tinnitus meditation” (there’s a short book on this written by a guy who has some crazy disease that causes extra-bad tinnitus). Basically, you meditate by purposefully focusing on your tinnitus. It starts to flip your brain’s response from one of fear to one of relaxation. Even within the first session, you’ll find that when you try to focus on the noise for as long as you can (use a timer and start with 5 mins), you eventually get distracted and think about something else, even if just for a moment. Then you realize that your brain isn’t “forced” to notice it - and the more you practice this, the better you’ll get at noticing it and gently pivoting your attention back to.. the rest of the world. The noise never goes away, your ability to ignore it just improves over time.

The book is a quick read and helpful: https://a.co/d/ckOzbSq

I no longer meditate as often, but when I do, it’s actually still quite effective. I now see it more as a “retreat” of sorts - I can just kind of dissociate and let the ringing take over. Reading this article brought it back, incidentally.. but I’m ok with it. Once you fully surrender to the noise, you can start to let go of it. It’s the mental resistance that makes it hard to deal with.

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sepositus ◴[] No.44058395[source]
I've recently developed tinnitus within the last few months, so I'm still early in my researching. However, I've found a lot of people that discount this approach and swear it only makes things worse. That's why I've been hesitant to try it.

Do you think a lot of it has to do with having the right mindset?

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1. plaidfuji ◴[] No.44058571[source]
It honestly may depend on how bad it is and how you react to it. For me, it was causing almost a constant panic-level reaction for weeks. I couldn’t sleep without heavy drugs, and I would wake up sweating and on edge. Just non-stop. I took a fair bit of time off work because of how hard it was to focus. So suffice to say I was willing to try anything.. and the meditation aspect was necessary for me beyond just reducing tinnitus. But I can’t see how it would make things worse, at least not in a permanent way.