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185 points gregsadetsky | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.208s | source
1. RIMR ◴[] No.44058681[source]
I was very miserable when my chronic tinnitus showed up, but my life improved greatly after my doctor got me in the right cognitive behavioral therapy to learn to ignore it. After plenty of practice, it's now hard for me to hear it without actively listening for it, even though it is quite loud.

My advice to anyone struggling with tinnitus is to avoid silence for a while. Focus on anything but the tinnitus. Never give yourself the chance to focus on it. Buy bone conductor headphones and listen to ambient music instead of sitting in silence. Buy a white noise machine for when you go to bed, or run a fan. Then spend a few minutes every waking hour of your day actively listening to the sounds around you

Eventually you'll have trained yourself to listen to something else. As long as there's something else to listen to, even if it is very quiet, you'll default to listening to that instead of your tinnitus until it becomes something you do passively.

I might as well not have tinnitus anymore. I can't speak for everyone, especially not in regards to hypersensitivity to noise like the author here has, but I went from mourning the loss of my daily comfort to completely forgetting about the problem in a couple of months.