Comment by Barrin92
14 hours ago
>tinitus sure as hell isn't my friend.
what the author is advocating for "befriending tinnitus" is a well established form of therapy (Acceptance and Commitment/ACT), it's generally very effective because avoidance or compensatory behavior ("trying to make the tinnitus go away / distract myself") is teaching the brain that tinnitus is a problem and is only going to increase the kind of alertness that leads people to focus on their tinnitus. It's the same way with insomnia, people who try to produce sleep efforts tend to worsen their insomnia, you need to befriend being awake.
There's a big psychological component to tinnitus that sustains itself because people view tinnitus as a problem, that's often larger than the physical impairment.
It's not even clear that for most sufferers that there is a physical impairment at all. I went to a Tinnitus clinic in Berlin and was surprised at how little is known about it even now and how much is likely psychological (or more inside the brain than the ear).
some tinnitis sufferers actually emit sounds from their ear - they picked it up with microphones.