Comment by y1n0
13 hours ago
of course even reading a thread on tinnitus makes mine worse. The mere fact of paying attention to it makes it worse, so I have a hard time seeing how a drug is going to help much. I do wish there was something.
Ostensibly mine is from high frequency hearing loss, which I absolutely have, but I now wear hearing aids and it has no measurable impact from my point of view.
I take comfort in that I can go long periods of time without noticing it, and I know that even though I'm focused on it now and it's loud, it will slowly drift to the background and below conscious notice before too long.
I certainly don't befriend it, but I when I notice it, I acknowledge that I notice it and move on with whatever I'm doing. Eventually I'll notice again, days or weeks later and realize I hadn't noticed it at all in the intervening time. So I just relax and move on.
Very similar to my experience. I just woke up with it one day in my early 30s.
It drove me a bit mad at first, I wanted someone to 'cure' it and make it go away. Then I tried all sorts of things, I narrowed down the frequency (IIRC it's 13.5kHz) and tried masking by playing that in my right ear. I tried white noise. I tried 'notching' all my mp3s to remove that frequency band. I don't think any of it really helped.
But somewhere towards the end of all that I guess I started to accept it. It's here now because of this thread and sometimes it's present at night, especially if I drink too much, but most of the time I'm just not conscious of it any more. Occasionally I think it's actually gone-gone, but then if I 'look' for it then it usually returns.
The only way (for me) to proceed was to zen it out. Accept this is how it is and likely how it will be forever and suddenly it's just not very important.
Though I acknowledge that some folks likely have a harder time with that due to relative severity of the condition.