Tuning your tinnitus?

Discussion in 'Support' started by Steve123, Apr 28, 2014.

    1. Steve123

      Steve123 Member

      Tinnitus Since:
      04/2014
      Hi!
      I've had tinnitus for a few days now, it's persistant, high-pitched, and in my right ear only. I'm pretty sure it's the result of listening to a lot of really loud music last week. I'm a musician and have been exposed to extremely loud noises for several hours a day (120db+), but I've always been pretty fortunate and the ringing usually went away the following day. Over the last couple of years I've tried to use hearing protection as often as possible.
      Anyway, when it started the ringing was about an 'A' in the sixth octave. I tried to match the sound in my left ear to confirm the frequency, and noticed that if I increased the tone in my left ear, the tinnitus in my right would eventually compensate. It takes an hour or two, but in the last four days I've brought the pitch of my tinnitus up to a double high C (about 350 Hz higher)... I'm kind of wondering if I can just tune it up to a frequency that my brain is no longer able to process. Has anyone tried anything like that, or knows of any similar research I could check out?
      My tinnitus fortunately is pretty quiet, probably 30-40db, and I'm only aware of it if it's reasonably quiet. It's irritating at night. I've also been pretty sick this last week (still have a bad head cold) and have been kind of stressed out about things (I'm almost never under any stress so this is new) lately, so I'm wondering if those are contributing. I'll post more if I'm able to continue to 'tune' my tinnitus, or if I stumble across anything that helps.
      I've done some cursory research on tinnitus over the last few days, and it seems that the best thing I can do to 'habituate' subjective sound is to basically train my brain to acknowledge that this particular noise is meaningless, neither positive nor negative, and then naturally let my brain categorize it as 'unimportant' and start to involuntarily drown it out.
      If it's no better in a few weeks I'll probably do some hearing tests and talk to an ENT, but I'll definitely try a lot of the suggestions made on this website! I'm really glad I'm not alone in all of this!
       
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