How Can You Habituate to HIGH FREQUENCY Tinnitus?

This is intended to be a variation on the How Can You Habituate To LOUD Tinnitus? thread.

In my case, one of my tinnitus tones is very high frequency. I don't think this tone is especially loud, as it can be fully masked by a barely-running faucet. However, the sound is *not* masked when driving a car at highway speeds. It is also not masked when shopping at a busy supermarket (which I measured at 60 dBA today). Basically, if the background sound isn't high frequency, then this tone just stands right out. And in truth, very little background sound is high frequency, which you'd see if you open a spectrum analyzer app in your typical habitat.

Has anyone had success getting used to this kind of tone? If so, any tips? It's been 14 months for me since onset, and this is the tone I've habituated to the least.

 

For me, low running water does not mask my tinnitus as my tinnitus is very high frequency, and the running water sound is a much lower frequency. Hardly any day to day sounds mask my tinnitus, only certain high frequency sounds that I play on my laptop (cricket sound, violet noise, etc.). Even though my tinnitus is loud, I don't pay attention to when I'm involved in a certain activities like shopping, watching a show, talking with people, playing with the cat, etc. The tinnitus is still bothersome when I'm in a quiet environment (primarily sleep and at my quiet work space). I'm planning to get maskers for work.

Have your new maskers/hearing aids helped with the high frequency sound?

 

If you can mask it at all, count yourself lucky? I have had ultra high sharp tinnitus, nailbiting high frequency tinnitus, mid tone tinnitus, loud pulsatile high pitched tinnitus, and low droning & rumbling tinnitus. The super sharp high tinnitus 18 kHz I could use earplugs and it would fade into the background, it's what I started my mess with... and I thought that was bad... hahahaha.

Trust me, the low rumbling and droning is 5 x worse than maskable high frequency tinnitus (even if you need earplugs), having to have pink or violet noise or running water on yet not hearing it is huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge. Any tinnitus is bad, but I'd suffer with that at industrial fan volume compared to what I have now.

Plus high frequency tinnitus imo had the largest response to benzos, pretty much vaporized it to dust. Low droning wavering tinnitus has very little if any effect.

You hear it more in low frequency environments, like supermarkets and road noise, because of the contrast (that noise is centered on 500 Hz, not 16+ kHz!) and an effect which I can't recall, but when masking with noise outside your tinnitus range the effect will cause an amplification of the thresholds in those frequencies (even in normal people but moreso in tinnitus sufferers, there's even some tests which can use it to determine discrimination hearing loss).

The tinnitus isn't actually above 60 dB, it's the environment you're in.

Hangout around some PC RAM or something with electrical whine (or set your phone to emit a 15 kHz tone) even barely audible and you'll suddenly hear the tinnitus vanish as its noise range pretty much hits it right on. Faucets also are high-er frequency noise around 6 kHz, which is why it masks and produces distortion in some tinnitus / hyperacusis sufferers.

 

I have this right now. My tone seems to cycle every few days, and about every second or third day I get an ultra high frequency glass shattering sound with an ultra high pitch solid ring on top. Loudness is 5/10 but intrusiveness is 10/10+. The days I have this (like right now) I am in a very dark place. The pitch is so high I get headache and dizzy (I don't get dizzy on my other tinnitus days, just these ultra high pitch days).

No idea how to habituate. The sound is so far outside the spectrum of our normal hearing it isn't funny.

 

It may depend on the exact faucet For my faucet, if I measure the sound with a spectrum analyzer, there is substantial volume all the way up to 20 kHz, which is essentially the highest audible frequency for any human. I don't think it's possible for T to be even higher than this (though I could be wrong about that).

I would say the wearable maskers have been extremely helpful at masking my mid-frequency tones, and less helpful (but still somewhat helpful) for the highest frequency tone. In my experience, there are two reasons why it's less helpful for high frequency tones:

1. In order to mask a very high frequency tone, the masking sound also has to be very high frequency - and frankly a very high frequency masking sound is annoying to hear all day. Basically there is a balance between "a sound that masks your T well" and "a sound that doesn't annoy you to hear all day." I'm still trying to find the right balance.

2. There are limits to how high frequency the maskers can play without encountering distortion, which is extremely irritating. The maskers have tiny speakers which, in this regard, are not as good as the speaker on your smart phone for example.

 

Does anyone know the scientific name for this phenomenon?

 

The upward spread of masking:

The Distortional Aspect of Sensorineural Hearing Loss: What Can Be Done

 

Habituating to piercing high frequency tinnitus? Time, patience, luck and (if you're me) a slightly alarming medication stack

If you read hard enough you'll find people who are much more bothered by their low frequency tinnitus because it's "so bassy", or people who are more bothered by mid-frequencies because "it cuts right through everything including speech".

High frequency seems to be the most annoying (and I say this with a constant 14.5 kHz klaxon in my head, which is just one part of the silly cacophony of noises I hear if I stop to think about it) -- but this doesn't matter, because your tinnitus is the only one you have, and therefore the only one you have to deal with, and whether it is "easier" or "harder" to deal with than some other person's is about as important as the question of "does my neighbor's car go faster than mine?" when I'm about to take my own car out on a shopping trip.

 

I don't think it really is possible to habituate completely with it.

The shower provides brief relief and the summer months offer the air conditioner which is kind of barely enough. Outdoors when crickets are around is soothing. The fridge in the kitchen kind of helps but my desktop PC is no longer noisy enough because it's on SSDs. Failing these I'd have to resort to dedicated noise generators which I've really avoided like the plague. The only way I am able to kind of cope is to think of what I'm experiencing is living through the world as if I'm listening to an old cassette without Dolby noise reduction. I used to be quite accustomed to the sound of tape hiss in a way that didn't really detract much from listening to music. If I were younger then I would not have had this formative experience and would not be able to play this mental game with myself. Even then I spend most of my time feeding my ears with SOMETHING even it doesn't mask just to divert my mental attention, usually podcast/talk-radio style content. It helps lull me to sleep at night and often causes hallucinatory dreams because of the half-wake state I'm usually in despite taking Sleep3 pills. Funny how the Sleep3 seems to be the most powerful stuff based on the box description outside of Ambien but even that doesn't seem to have much effect on me.) Luckily when I really DO enter full-on REM sleep, I really do mentally cut the cord with the tinnitus, but it's damn hard to actually get there.

 

Hi,

So I have super high-pitched tinnitus that’s a hiss mostly unless I plug my ears. Then it sounds a little different, which I cannot really describe. It’s sort of sounds like that noise you get when you have a hearing threshold shift after you leave a rock concert, but without the deafness. You know before we knew to wear earplugs. It comes and goes.

Benzos do nothing for it.

It started last May and then it actually went away during the fall/winter months and then came back last week so I’m wondering if it’s seasonal and allergy related. It fluctuates from hour to hour, day by day, minute to minute and is sometimes quiet. Sometimes it is so loud that it’s hard to hear the TV. And though I can get it in both ears, I experience it mostly in my right ear. That is ear that is most affected where I have no hearing loss. My hearing is perfect in that ear. I hear this tinnitus over everything except for the shower.

Does that describe your high pitched tinnitus?

And can I just ask you how your earplugs helped? I would’ve thought that it would’ve gotten worse when you had your earplugs in.

Thanks.

 

You can't.

 

Today I went to the mall with my wife, and the high frequency tinnitus stood out prominently among all other sounds. It was clearly audible even in background mall noise of 65 dBA.

It's amazing that a sound which probably constitutes 2% of everything I hear, can remove 75% of the enjoyment from leisurely activities.

 

FWIW, I am going to try using sound enrichment from bone conducting headphones, as an alternative to using my hearing aids.

The reason being that my hearing aids struggle to play above 9000 Hz or so, but bone conducting headphones can play all the way up to 20000 Hz. I’m hoping this extended range will do something for me.

 

I have exactly the same. Every 4-5 days I get a high pitched circular saw spinning at ~14 kHz inside my head. I can mask it with pink noise (the Android app is called "Relief" from ReSound and is free). Funny thing is, when I mask it for 4-5 hours and remove the headphones, it is COMPLETELY GONE for like 1 hour. But then it ALWAYS comes back with FULL FORCE, hitting harder than a truck.

I am absolutely sure that you cannot habituate to that sound. I have had it for 13 months now, yeah I know it's not that long but it's also quite some time. Everytime I get one of "those" days, I tell myself "okay you can do this, it's just a sound, just don't listen to it" but I fail everytime. I can "ignore" it for like 2 hours but it is so goddamn intrusive, it's basically a saw cutting through your brain and after 2 hours, it's cracked through the hull.

Those days are very dark and I usually can only endure it with masking.

I can recommend the Samsung Galaxy Buds +, they have a very good battery lifetime of 10-12 hours, which is quite long.

 

My tinnitus is loud and incredibly high pitched. It's also in a band, not a single tone. It has a horrid electric quality. It can only be partly masked by some very special cricket sounds on headphones or loud white noise but this tends to irritate it and does not reach the highest frequencies.

Would bone conduction headphones be an improvement on normal headphones? Would they irritate less the ear and the auditory apparatus? I think normal headphones reach high frequencies too?

 

Mine is loud and at around 12.5 kHz which is only maskable in the shower or in places like restaurants and malls. It is insane torture but surprisingly enough I find myself not paying attention to it more often every other day.

Either way, we need a cure for this bullshit, something that could be used long term and doesn't cause more issues than what they actually solve.

 

For me that was exactly how I felt. Luckily in time, that 75% slowly started going down and now is close to 0%. I hope that happens for you too.

 

Is yours fully masked in most restaurants and malls? In my case, I can typically hear my high-frequency tinnitus in these environments, which is pretty annoying.

 

FWIW, I am still trying to figure out which of the best masking programs is best for my high-frequency tinnitus:

(1) No masking at all
(2) In-ear maskers
(3) Bone conduction headphones

At least anecdotally, I'm finding that in louder environments (e.g. outdoors, in a mall, etc.), (1) is actually better than (2). I think this is because the in-ear maskers partially occlude the ear canal (even "open fit" hearing aids will do this). As a result, the background sound is effectively reduced by the maskers. This is particularly true of the high frequencies (10 kHz and higher), because the maskers can't play up this high, and also because blocking the ear canal reduces the high frequencies more than the lows.

The jury is still out for me on (3).

 

Don’t put a speaker inside or onto your ear is my advice...

I’m Bill Bauer’s unborn baby

 

I'd say it's 100% masked if the place is crowded, 90% if empty or few people around.

 

The problem with masking high pitch tinnitus is that it can only be masked with something equally ugly. And also when tinnitus is high pitched, it is not only about the noise but the feeling of pain or fullness.

I have ultra high pitch oscillating tinnitus and it's an abomination.

 

I think I've determined the same. In my case, if I try to mask the high-frequency tinnitus with a high-frequency white noise, it seems like it just makes the tinnitus "angrier." Worse than not masking it at all. And the high-frequency white noise is very annoying to hear in its own right.

My high-frequency tinnitus is masked pretty well by running water however, which is a pleasant sound to hear. I wonder if I should get a little tabletop water fountain to run while I'm working. Has anyone tried this by any chance?

 

Is it possible to just listen to the tinnitus and habituate? Mine gets mad with noise.

 

If I was rich I would build a house under (behind?) a waterfall.

 

Damn I just tried a waterfall and my beast didn’t like it lol.

Beep... Beeep... Squeak. Squeeeeesk. Beeeeeeeeeeeeep. “Ok I get it man, I’m turning it off” lol.

 

Mine hates fans.

 

Maybe if it is soft enough. Mine is so loud and so bad when I am in complete silence I feel like it is choking me. Like literally I feel like I am going to be suffocated by my tinnitus.

 

Damn man, I’m sorry you’re suffering.

 

Sounds like a great idea and I think I have read about someone successfully applying this. Even if it does not mask enough, it is still calming which is also always a good thing.